By Tom Thumb, Posted Dec 03, 2006
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One can only assume that Douglas Adams was a hitchhiker. How else could he have come by the bitter-sweet cynicism that rolls off of every page of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
In fact, in the first book, there’s very little hitchhiking apart from the initial lift on the Vogon space ship. Ford Prefect sticks out his electronic thumb and they avoid the destruction of the earth by moments. Worse, they fall out with their drivers, get thrown out and are saved from certain death by hitching a ride with the Heart of Gold’ Improbability Drive.
After that Douglas Adams only comes back to hitchhiking later in the ‘increasingly inacuurately named trilogy’. A series of rides gets him back to an alternate Earth and the descriptions of all the funny hand signals the drivers make confirm that Adams was a hitchhiker.
Douglas Adams died before he could see the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made into a movie. Which is just as well as, despite a talented cast, Hollywood chewed up the classic hitchhiking story and made it into mass media fodder for the average tv drone.
If nothing else, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy left it’s legacy to a new generation of hitchhikers by virtue of the fact that Ford Prefect was stuck waiting for a ride on Earth for decades (that’s a cheering thought when you’re next by the roadside). And that he always carried his towel with him.
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