Oh Yeah…

During week four, while reading the first eleven chapters of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, I realized that it’s been much, much longer since the last time I went through it than I realized. Parts of the story are familiar to me, but there are large chunks that I forgot about. I forgot how much Zaphod looks down on Arthur, calling him “monkey man” with a tone of disgust that wasn’t as pronounced in the first book. I completely forgot about the seance to commune with Zaphod’s great-grandfather.

And, I forgot that the Vogons start mixing it up with the gang again. That was one of the reasons I came down so hard on the Hitchhiker movie from a few years back (that and some frustratingly less-than-stellar performances from actors that I know can do better). Sure, it was drastically different from the book, but that’s completely forgivable in the realm of these stories. The original BBC radio production is different from the television series based on it, and though they share common stories and lines of dialogue and characters with the books, they’re still their own versions of the same story.

But the amount of plot time dedicated to the Vogons in the movie irked me for some reason. That is, until I read the beginning of Restaurant and remembered that, yes, the movie version of that plotline actually came from the books. Of course, the movie version is wildly different, but it rests my mind a bit to know that it has threads with “original” series.

Maybe I’ll give the movie another try after all five books are fresh in my mind.