The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
The Original BBC Radio Scripts
by Douglas Adams
The World-Wide Comedy Phenomenon Comes to Maplewood!
Friday and Saturday
April 16 & 17, 23 & 24 at 8 pm
Burgdorff Cultural Center, 10 Durand Road
But I thought it was a book?
It was. But before the books, before the TV show, before the movie, before the whole crazy thing, there was this 1978 BBC radio series.
What Exit? started in 1995 with a radio play, so we thought it would be great to combine these two enormous cultural phenomenons into one great evening of entertainment.
Douglas Adams on the intention behind the series.
“It seemed to me that in terms of radio comedy, we hadn’t progressed much past Door Slam A, Door Slam B, Footsteps on Gravel and the odd comic Boing. I wanted “Hitchhiker’s” to sound like a rock album. I wanted the voices and effects and the music to be so seamlessly orchestrated as to create a coherent sound picture of a whole other world....”
So what are you going to do?
We’re going to use one of Maplewood’s little-known treasures - it’s gaggles of working voice over actors - a few sound designers, 8 microphones, some ancient guitar pedals, and a heap-load of cables to recreate that original radio broadcast, live, on our stage!
From our Good Friends at Wikipedia, the handy online successor to the Hitchhiker’s Guide as the acknowledged repository of all human knowledge.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction comedy series created by English writer, dramatist and musician Douglas Adams. Originally a radio comedy broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1978, it was later adapted to other formats, and over several years it gradually became an international multi-media phenomenon. Adaptations have included stage shows, a series of five books first published between 1979 and 1992 (and a sixth by Eoin Colferpublished in 2009), a 1981 TV series, a 1984 computer game, and three series of three-part comic book adaptations of the first three novels published by DC Comics between 1993 and 1996. There were also two series of towels, produced by Beer-Davies, that are considered by some fans to be an "official version" of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as they include text from the first novel.[1][2] A Hollywood-funded film version, produced and filmed in the UK, was released in April 2005, and radio adaptations of the third, fourth and fifth novels were broadcast from 2004 to 2005. Many of these adaptations, including the novels, the TV series, the computer game, and the earliest drafts of the Hollywood film's screenplay, were done by Adams himself, and some of the stage shows introduced new material written by Adams.
The title is the name of a fictional eccentric electronic travel guide, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, prominently featured in the series.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy[3] is often abbreviated "HHGTTG" (as used on fan websites) or "H2G2" (first used by Neil Gaiman as a chapter title in Don't Panic and later by the online guide run by the BBC). The series is also often referred to as "The Hitchhiker's Guide", "Hitchhiker's", or simply "[The] Guide". This title can refer to any of the various incarnations of the story of which the books are the most widely distributed, having been translated into more than 30 languages by 2005.[4]
Just a little taste of what the HG2G is all about.
