The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: TABNQEUTME

[Adabisi]

Original film name: The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
New film name: The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: The Almost, But Not Quite, Entirely Unlike the Movie Edit
Original runtime: 109 mins
New runtime: 60 mins
Amount of time Cut/Added: 49 mins

The intention of this fanedit:
To create a version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that's as close to the book as possible.

Cuts removed/added/extended:
-Added some title cards at the beginning
-Moved the title sequence to the beginning, followed by Arthur at home
-So long and thanks, but no thanks for the cheesy musical number
-removed the flashback to Arthur and Trillian at the costume party and Arthur whining to Ford about her
-The Answer no longer gets revealed 42 minutes into the movie. You win some, you lose some.
-rearranged and cut scenes on the Heart of Gold to remove a lot of Zaphod's silliness and tone down the love triangle aspect
-removed the Vogons chasing the Heart of Gold
-removed the trips to Viltvodle VI and Vogsphere
-moved the Guide entry on dolphins to approximately where it is in the book
-removed Zaphod, Ford and Trillian's encounter with Deep Thought in Magrathea and the Point of View Gun bit. They go through the portal and we don't see them again until Arthur's coming home party
-removed Arthur's rant about whether Trillian was "the one" or not
-removed the standoff with the Vogons at the end, the recreation of the Earth and everything after Arthur kills the mice except a couple of lines of dialogue
-removed Marvin's lame joke at the very end. Marvin gets left on Magrathea
-the original Journey of the Sorcerer plays over the end credits


Did not remove/change, but also not in the book:
-Arthur and Ford's initial meeting (Ford's line about cars being the dominant life form is in the book. Close enough)
-Arthur tells Trillian that the Earth was destroyed (in the book she figures it out for herself)
-Trillian surprised by the mice in her bag (in the book she brought them with her. Again, close enough)
-the Deep Thought entry from the Magrathean archives takes place on the Heart of Gold, not Magrathea (no biggie)
-After they engage the Infinite Improbability Drive to travel to Magrathea, Zaphod's and Trillian's clothes change and Zaphod has an odd helmet on his head. Must've been a strange effect of engaging the Drive.
-Arthur killing the mice (not in the book, but you need some kind of end to the story)
Those are the major ones. There are various other minor elements that were not in the book, but retained in the edit.



Additional Comment:
I'm a huge Douglas Adams fan, read everything he's written many times over, and spent more money that I'd like to admit on the various incarnations of the Guide. I'm probably in the minority in that I actually liked the film, including most of the changes to it. With this edit, I wasn't too sad to see the Vogsphere and Viltvodle VI bits go, but the Point of View Gun was a great bit. It would've been nice to keep it, but if it's going to be faithful to the book, it had to go. This also means that the shootout at the end had to go as well, which in turn makes the ending to the edit feel somewhat abrupt. It is what it is.

And, believe it or not, I actually included menus and chapter stops. I felt it was "fitting" for this edit.

It's safe to say that Douglas Adams would've hated this edit. He always saw the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a constantly evolving story and almost all the changes to the movie were his. But this edit is intended to satisfy fans who weren't happy with the film. It's still not 100% faithful to the book, but it's as close as it's going to get.

Time needed for the edition: about a week

A 2.5GB NTSC DD 5.1 DVD with artwork is available at thepiratebay and RS on linktalk.

Share and enjoy.

Maybe downloadable from Fanedit.info

 

[nOmArch]

sounds good, as a huge DNA fan the movie was a terrible disappointment to me. dont be so sure that Doug would have hated your cut though, one of the things he said he always didnt like was the arthur trillian love story which he knew would have to be incorporated into a movie simply because thats what people expect from a film.

its such a shame that it would be impossible to incorporate bits from the original series to help flesh out the story as a lot of what Doug wrote ended up on screen.

i still cant forgive the director for ruining one of Dougs finest bits of writing to whit the bulldozer/prosser scene where Ford explains why its perfectly workable for him and Arthur to bugger off down the pub as long as there is someone lying infront of the dozer...

still gives me a chuckle, but to replace it with Ford simply turning up and giving everyone beer i felt was unforgivable.

looking forward to having a watch of this.

and well done on the chapter stops!

 

[Gaith]

What, no adding the entry on "God"? A great bit from the book that was too hot for TV... er, the cinema! :wink:

 

[Adabisi]

i still cant forgive the director for ruining one of Dougs finest bits of writing to whit the bulldozer/prosser scene where Ford explains why its perfectly workable for him and Arthur to bugger off down the pub as long as there is someone lying infront of the dozer...

still gives me a chuckle, but to replace it with Ford simply turning up and giving everyone beer i felt was unforgivable.

You're right, it pretty much ruins the whole setup to the gag if Prosser doesn't lie down in front of the bulldozer. Although, if you hadn't read the book, the scene works fine.

 

[Adabisi]

What, no adding the entry on "God"? A great bit from the book that was too hot for TV... er, the cinema! :wink:

I considered it, but the deleted scenes are in 4x3 and stereo. It wouldn't have looked good, and it's a shame too because that's one of my favourite parts of the book.

 

[nOmArch]

its a piece of cake to convert the scenes to 16x9 and you can always fake the 5.1 from the 2.0 mix of the deleted scenes. if you like i can give you a bit of help if you want to incorporate them.

 

[Adabisi]

its a piece of cake to convert the scenes to 16x9 and you can always fake the 5.1 from the 2.0 mix of the deleted scenes. if you like i can give you a bit of help if you want to incorporate them.

It's not so much the act of converting it, it's that the quality of the clip is so poor, especially compared Guide entry that it's supposed to accompany, that it looks out of place. With the conversion, doubly so.

It's the same with the clip of Arthur looking up the Guide entry for Earth. I tried to incorporate them and it just didn't look right. In the end, while it would've been nice to have them (heck it would've been nice to have a few dozen deleted scenes to fill in the gaps from the book) but it ruined the flow to have clips that were of such lower quality. And, I'm almost positive I'd get just as much criticism for including them with the quality they're in as I'd get for not including them.

Plus, man survives the next zebra crossing without it, so I guess that's a plus.

 

[Gaith]

I'm not at all sure people would mind - it's a fan edit, and of H2G2, surely it could be a wee bit scrappy - but I understand and respect your decision. (Maybe you could squeeze the end credits onto the right half of the frame, cable-tv style, and run the Guide clips to their left?)

Cutting about half the movie is certainly a significant change. Was there any tension between being faithful to the book and preserving a coherent narrative?

 

[Adabisi]

Cutting about half the movie is certainly a significant change. Was there any tension between being faithful to the book and preserving a coherent narrative?

Somewhat. The Vogsphere and Viltvodle VI bits were the biggest deviations from the books and they were simple enough to remove while keeping a coherent narrative: Arthur and Ford get on the Heart of Gold and they all travel straight to Magrathea. The toughest part was the ending. If you get rid of the Point of View Gun, there's no shootout at the end. But also, by getting rid of that you also don't have a Vogon CONSTRUCTOR fleet pursuing Zaphod across the galaxy. This is a good thing. But, it left me with the need to end it somehow. I had to leave in Arthur killing the mice. There was really no way to end it otherwise. That was the biggest deviation from the book. Every other difference was very minor/inconsequential and was no more serious than you'd see in any movie that tries to be faithful to the book.

 

[nOmArch]

its a piece of cake to convert the scenes to 16x9 and you can always fake the 5.1 from the 2.0 mix of the deleted scenes. if you like i can give you a bit of help if you want to incorporate them.

It's not so much the act of converting it, it's that the quality of the clip is so poor, especially compared Guide entry that it's supposed to accompany, that it looks out of place. With the conversion, doubly so.

It's the same with the clip of Arthur looking up the Guide entry for Earth. I tried to incorporate them and it just didn't look right. In the end, while it would've been nice to have them (heck it would've been nice to have a few dozen deleted scenes to fill in the gaps from the book) but it ruined the flow to have clips that were of such lower quality. And, I'm almost positive I'd get just as much criticism for including them with the quality they're in as I'd get for not including them.

I've just dug out my H2G2 dvd and the deleted scenes are absolutely fine quality wise in fact for deleted scenes they are in pretty good nick, and are in much better quality than the deleted scenes from my Jay & Silent Bob edit. you could easily convert to 16x9 and run a couple of cleanup filters on those scenes and they would look amazing.

obviously the really deleted scenes are not usable since they are missing post processing audio and have crew coming in and out of shot.

 

[Adabisi]

its a piece of cake to convert the scenes to 16x9 and you can always fake the 5.1 from the 2.0 mix of the deleted scenes. if you like i can give you a bit of help if you want to incorporate them.

It's not so much the act of converting it, it's that the quality of the clip is so poor, especially compared Guide entry that it's supposed to accompany, that it looks out of place. With the conversion, doubly so.

It's the same with the clip of Arthur looking up the Guide entry for Earth. I tried to incorporate them and it just didn't look right. In the end, while it would've been nice to have them (heck it would've been nice to have a few dozen deleted scenes to fill in the gaps from the book) but it ruined the flow to have clips that were of such lower quality. And, I'm almost positive I'd get just as much criticism for including them with the quality they're in as I'd get for not including them.

I've just dug out my H2G2 dvd and the deleted scenes are absolutely fine quality wise in fact for deleted scenes they are in pretty good nick, and are in much better quality than the deleted scenes from my Jay & Silent Bob edit. you could easily convert to 16x9 and run a couple of cleanup filters on those scenes and they would look amazing.

Really? Listen to the echo on Arthur's and Ford's voices in the Mostly Harmless bit. It's terrible. And the picture is really grainy. Stretching that to 16x9 made it much worse. I'm not familiar with cleanup filters, maybe you can point me to a tutorial?

And look at the motion of the fish and God in the God bit. The lines are all jagged around them when they move. It's not smooth at all compared to the motion in the rest of the guide entry. Would a filter fix that?

 

[nOmArch]

changing from LB4:3 to 16x9 is not a case of simply resizing theres a bit to it than that and really does very little to degrade the picture if done properly.

audio is pretty simple to clean up so that is not an issue.

a smoothing filter and maybe a choice few others would do a lot to clean up jagged lines.

honestly you'd be amazed at what can be done with VDub + Filters + a Little Patience.

basically i would do it like this.

Aspect Ratio Conversion.

Use Vdub 1.8.8 + Mpeg2 Plugin

Use this site -> http://www.haku.co.uk/ARCT.html to work out the new numbers for cropping out the black lines and correctly resizing to main AR. its a little fiddly first time but this tool is absolutely brilliant.

crop out the black lines in VDub using the Null Transform filter

and then use the resize filter and plug in the numbers you got from the ARCT and remember to use the Lanzcos3 resizing method.

and thats the aspedt ratio sorted out.

you'd then probably want to add a minor smooth to the image, i find VDubs internal smooth filter to be very good when used sparingly.

set about 5% smooth and make sure the pre noise filter is ticked.

there are many other smoothing filters around which are a lot more sophisticated but i like the results of the internal one.

you can then run other filters like '2dcleaner' or even the 'DFN VHS noise reduction' filter can produce some good results in cleaning images.

the audio echo can be fixed fairly easily with audition or cooledit or whatever audio processor you prefer. then you just need to run it through vegas fake 5.1 audio filter whatsit.

like i said if you need any help with any or the procedures just gimme a shout.

i only have the PAL version unfortunately but if you're interested in incorporating those scenes i can have a little play with them at my end and then advise on what filters you can use on your NTSC version.

 

[Adabisi]

Thanks nomarch. I'll give it a shot when I have some time. If I can get decent results, I'll incorporate those deleted scenes. I can't imagine people would be interested in downloading/watching it again just to see how it turned out, but it will be good for future reference at least.

 

[nOmArch]

no worries

 

[Gaith]

Does anyone know of any plans to RS this?

 

[stomachworm]

Done. Link talk (with boon's help.)

 

[Gaith]

Right on!

 

[Gaith]

Hm... I think I've got all 25 files (the lack of "part #" in the file names makes it tricky, as I generally forget/skip over one or two components), but WinRAR doesn't recognize them, and only says "no archives found in selected files or folders." Que pasa?

 

[elbarto1]

great tutorial nomarch. I'll have to try that sometime.

 

[Gaith]

Was anyone ever able to watch this one? I couldn't get it working after downloading, then had to delete it for hd space... :razz: