Originally posted by eugenefl
Wow...that got me pretty good. If you're watching this trailer for the first time, be sure to maximize your media viewer to "fullscreen" and turn the volume to a comfortable or slightly louder volume. Looks like a good movie.
Any idea what genre? Comedy? Sci-Fi?
Yes. The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy is a trilogy of 5 books (you heard me) by the late Douglas Adams. He also wrote for Monty Python. It is some of the funniest material ever written and focuses on the quest for the question to life, the universe and everything, the answer to which is forty-two. Everything would have been fine if the computer running the 10 million year program to figure it all out hadn't been demolished 5 minutes before finishing the job, in order to make way for a hyperspace bypass. That computer was the Earth. The story centers on the only survivor, Arthur Dent, who was taken along by a friend of his who happened to be an alien on Earth doing research for Earth's entry in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which read "Mostly harmless"), when he managed to hitch a ride on the ships that destroyed the Earth. The ships "hung in the sky in exactly the same way that bricks don't." That's Adams writing for you. Confused? Just wait.....
They meet up with a friend of theirs, Zaphod Beeblebrox, president of the galaxy, who has just stolen the first ship ever to use the Infinite Improbability drive. A whale and a bowl of petunias suddenly materialize above the planet of the people who built the Earth, and promptly crash into it, but not before the bowl of petunias thinks "Oh, no. Not again," and if we knew why, very many other things would be made very clear. Supposedly. And someone bruises their arm. I'm not sure who, but Zaphod had the greatest chance, having three arms (and two heads; the extras installed for purely cosmetic reasons).
You will never look at white mice in quite the same way after seeing it. Or seeing the BBC TV version. Or hearing the BBC radio recordings. Or the other BBC radio recordings. Or reading the radio play scripts. Or hearing the recordings edited and pressed on records for US release. Or reading the other versions of the books, which were edited and much rewritten and bound into a single volume. It has stayed very popular for a long time. Probably beucase people are still trying to figure it out. The movie probably won't help along those lines, but it'll have great special effects.