It’s been … 42 years since the Hitchhiker’s Guide books answered the essential question of life, the universe and everything – in honor of the anniversary, our buddies at Weekend Edition Sunday talked to some superfans about what the books mean to them, and why, all these years later, y'all know exactly why we’re celebrating the 42nd anniversary and not the 40th or the 50th. Check it out here!
The best restraint tool in vet med is a towel, hands down. Do you know how many things I’ve restrained with a towel?
Angry cat? Burrito it.
Scared bunny? Burrito it.
Tiny squish faced dog that you cant get a muzzle on? Burrito it.
Screaming macaw? Burrito it.
Injured wildlife? Burrito it.
I burritoed an arctic fox today. Last week it was a cormorant. Before that it was a blue heron. When in doubt, burrito it.
“A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”
And, apparently, Burrito Goddamn Anything with hit.
You should always know where your Towel is.
I literally was telling an owner about Hitchhiker’s Guide and towels yesterday! I sprayed a towel with Adaptil pheromone and wrapped her sketchy little Chihuahua in it, and after the exam the dog seemed more comfortable but anytime I slightly moved forward to her, she would retreat back to Her Towel XD
Listen to podcasts - anchor fm, google podcasts, Spotify, breaker, PocketCasts, Apple Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, RadioPublic, Stitcher, and TuneIn are all great starting points! Personally, I like No Such Thing as a FishandWelcome to Night Vale. Start anywhere with No Such Thing as a Fish, but start at the beginning with Welcome to Night Vale
While I often profess to not have a sense of humor, I have a real fondness for Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. I find them quite funny! I got the paperbacks with the little round green guy at book fairs at my elementary school — I think I’d read through the first three by sixth grade. I got tapes of the BBC radio play around then and was pretty fixated on the franchise in 7th grade (I had a minor corrective surgery that year and the doctors were very perplexed by my 42-centric anesthesia ramblings). Around that time, someone passed along a floppy disk to me that had a Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy interactive fiction game (1984) on it. I set about playing it immediately. I found it maddeningly hard! I still do. I’ve never finished it. There were t-shirts made to specifically mock people like me. You can go to the BBC and bang your head against a web version of it if you like.
The difficulty didn’t impede the game’s popularity — it was one of Infocom’s biggest sellers and is warmly remembered today (the nice thing about text-based games is that they always look as good as they did on the day they released).
The feelies are kind of a mix of genius and eye-rolling, and I mean that in the most positive way. You have an empty plastic bag labeled “Microscopic Space Fleet” and opaque cardboard “peril sensitive” sunglasses and some pocket fluff (a cotton ball). There are also orders for the destruction of Arthur Dent’s house and the planet earth. The best one is the Don’t Panic pin. That one’s spent time on my various bags over the years, not gonna lie.
Marvel movies have completely eliminated the concept of practical effects from the movie-watching public’s consciousness
Not just practical effects just like. Basic set design lol
How… How do they think sci-fi was done before CGI?
Really badly? Do you remember sci-fi before CGI? It was shit. And don’t say Star Wars because they went back and fixed that with CGI later.
*big sigh* *puts head in hands* heathens who’ve never watched pre-MCU sci-fi movies OR the unedited Star Wars movies, my beloathed
So first of all, most people agree that the majority of the “CGI fixes” in the Star Wars original trilogy (excluding minor visual/sound effects like lightsaber colors and blaster sounds) are unececssary, extremely conspicuous, and/or bad. This is not news to literally anyone older than about 20 who has consumed Star Wars content on any level. There are quite literally two very famous ‘despecialized’ fan projects explicitly dedicated to un-doing all of the shitty “fixed” CGI effects while simultaneously restoring the OT in HD.
And yes, I do, in fact, remember sci-fi special effects before CGI was the foundational cornerstone of moviemaking. It was not, in fact, shit:
Also, ironically I can show you by….*gasp* using fucking Star Wars, of all things. Welcome to the Tatooine pod race set of The Phantom Menace, which was not, as popularly believed, CGI’d but was instead a fully-built miniature set:
Yes, they built the entire set as a minature, built life-sized pod racers for the actors, then spliced the two together using digital effects. Yes, they did such a fantastic job that people think the entire set and scene sequence was basically completely CGI’d to this day. You’re fucking welcome for undervaluing the time, effort, and talents of set designers by implying that set design and practical effects inherently mean things will look like shit.
CGI also ages really poorly. What you think looks incredibly realistic now is going to look terrible in a few years. Just look at the original vs remastered Star Trek. They “restored” Star Trek around 2006 and replaced a lot of the practical effects with CGI, and maybe it looked ok in 2006, but it looks so bad and fake now.
In the 60s they built a whole model of the Enterprise, complete with blinking lights and beautifully sculpted/painted details. It looks stunning! Then they replaced it with that horribly smooth and fake looking cgi ship.
Just look at this beauty
You can see the model at the Air and Space Museum in DC
Unfortunately the remastered version is the only version available to stream, but you can still find DVDs with the original effect.
made in 1968 and still stunning 2001 A Space Odyssey
the designers worked with engineers at NASA to make realistic futuristic special effects using models and matte paintings no computer effects at all! - and incidentally inspired David Bowie to write Space Oddity, later performed in space by astronaut Chris Hadfield
The CGI of the original Jurassic Park may not be aging well (though arguably still better than some), but the practical effects will always look stunning.
I want to talk fantasy.
This shot was achieved with splicing and green screen.
This wild-looking shot (and similar manipulations) was famously achieved by having a professional juggler in a duplicate of Bowie’s jacket and gloves sitting behind him, basically with Bowie in his lap, doing the handwork while Bowie kept his arms behind the juggler. You may have seen a game based on this on Whose Line Is It Anyway.
This? Wires! Splicing! THE CGI TO DO THIS DIDN’T EXIST YET! (The juggler is hidden under the cape. If there’s a scene where he’s wearing a cape, that’s actually probably why.)
And this? This heartstopping shot?
This does appear to be from the version with CGI—
—CGI THAT WAS USED TO ERASE THE SHADOW FROM THE PRACTICAL EFFECT.
The shot itself hasn’t changed. The lift itself was done with wires and Bowie was given some propulsion with an air cannon so he could make that turn at speed. A minor amount of CGI was used in the 30th anniversary to “touch up” the work done in 1986, and one of the things they did was to remove a shadow on the wall from one of the wires.
How about this?
You don’t know it, but you’re looking at a practical effect. In real life, the Ruby Slippers are almost orange. That luxe, rich ruby color showed up on the film as black when the shoes were the correct color, so the costumers adjusted the actual costume to give the color they wanted.
A MODEL OF A HOUSE SHOT INSIDE A NYLON STOCKING ATTACHED TO A FAN.
MAN IN A COSTUME.
HORSES DUSTED WITH COLORED GELATIN.
And this? This is where it would’ve been useful to have CGI. Margaret Hamilton got really badly burned on the steam doing one of her entrance/exits, and ended up in the hospital. THIS is what you use CGI for.
You come into my house and insult practical effects?
I’ll just finish off by reminding you THIS IS ONE, TOO.
That last one, iirc, was there was a double in a sepia-toned costume, and the interior door and wall there was painted brown, so when it was lit and shot it all appeared to still be in the sepia tone of the Kansas scenes, and part of why Dorothy stepped back out of the frame was so the double and Judy Garland (in the proper blue-and-white costume) could swap.
You are correct. The double’s name, by the way, was Bobbi Koshay.
There are so many practical effects in Mary Poppins that it’s unbelievable. Ranging from the big ones (popping through pictures, tea parties on the ceiling, flying with an umbrella, etc.) to the incredibly little details, there’s a big reason why Mary Poppins won the Oscar for “Best Visual Effects” in 1965
I can’t find a list of all effects used, so this is just going off my memory of a documentary I watched once, so bear with me here; some of these things might be misremembered. But, some of the practical effects used in this film:
- Actors suspended on wires
- Scenes filmed front of a white screen lit with sodium vaporlights (early cinema’s “greenscreen” before greenscreen was invented)
- Matte paintings on glass for the cityscape scenes (rooftops of London, St. Paul Cathedral, etc.)
- Animatronics (the robin that whistles with Mary Poppins is an animatronic controlled by a wire, and the movement and sound you see on-screen was what it was actually doing on-set. The talking parrot umbrella head was also an animatronic.)
- Moving set pieces (every time they slide up or down the banister, they’re riding on a mechanized chair-lift hidden from the camera)
- Padded stairs (when they climb up the staircase made of smoke, the actors actually were climbing up a staircase padded with thick styrofoam, so that their feet would actually sink in some. The children found it particularly challenging, prompting Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews to offer extra help in keeping them balanced, thus really selling the idea that they are two kids walking on smoke with assistance from their guardians)
- Scene splicing (When she pulls impossibly large items from her carpet bag, she’s pulling them through a hole from under the table. The scene was spliced with footage depicting the table with nothing underneath it - except for Michael, who crawled underneath to ‘examine’ for a hole)
- Hidden compartments in bottles containing liquid of different colors (this one is my favorite lol; the children were not told that the medicine would come out of the bottle in different colors; they were just supposed to complain about taking it. Their reactions of shock and amazement are 100% genuine)
Even tiny details that you wouldn’t normally even think of as “special effects” were paid careful attention to, in order to help sell the story. Such as, during the Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious scene, while Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke are dancing and acting their hearts out, the children are supposed to sit on a fence and eat candy-apples. However, after filming for a long time, the kids were sick of the candy apples they’d been eating. So, Disney called for candy-apples made in tons of unique and delicious flavors, just colored to all look the same. It became the children’s favorite thing about the scene: they just got to sit and listen to fun music and watch the adults sing and dance while they tried a hundred different candy-apples, which is why they’re devouring them like little lions every time you see them on-screen.
(Also not so much a practical effect but just cute to note while I’m talking about Mary Poppins: the kids kept actually falling asleep during filming for the scenes in which Julie Andrews sings them lullabies lol)
CGI has its uses, to be sure. But it ought to be used to ENHANCE practical effects, not REPLACE them.
tbh that’s what Coraline is. And pretty much every movie by LAIKA Studios. It’s all filmed with practical effects and then enhanced with CGI.
Practical effects are actually amazing, and the overreliance on CGI makes films look far more ‘fake’ and causes them to grow outdated far more quickly than modern producers want people to admit.
Mainly because set designers and practical effects specialists are UNIONIZED but computer animators are not, making their labor easy to exploit and often leaving them massively overworked and underpaid.
I know I was already here, but since @plushchrome1212 made this incredible addition, I just want to point out this is a gold standard of practical effects work. Like. What I wrote above probably clued you in that I love looking for the man behind the curtain and going “oh, THAT’S how they did that!”
Mary Poppins is my favorite Disney movie. In 33 years, it has never once occurred to me to question how any of it was done. The illusion is so complete, I’m a grownass adult who just. Accepted that they disappeared into the sidewalk.
The problem I have with today’s CGI is that it feels TOO fluid, too shiny. It lacks the dust and dirt you would get from a physical set or prop, the subtle imperfections that make them more believable. I’m not a fan of the modern TMNT films mostly because of how they made their turtles.
Of course, that’s also probably why CGI becomes more popular with studios. If a physical prop breaks, the production is held back for the time to fix it. And if a physical prop isn’t made well, it can look really lame and clunky. Basically, it comes down to how much effort is put into either method.
The best films aren’t the ones that choose CGI over physical props, but find a way to combine and balance the two to create an amazing experience. One example of this is in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film (2005), that used stunning CGI for their space travel sequences, but also had people in costumes for their aliens and robots (I think the film’s Vogons looked better than the TV show’s).
‘Tis done! First tattoo, with some nerdy shit that I adore. (Now I can plan the Otachi based one, because THAT one was going to be in color and a bit more complex. Wanted to be sure I could handle it.)
Knowing the Hitchhiker’s Guide radio plays are on spotify now is so gratifying/heartbreaking because all I can think of is downloading them episode-by-episode off limewire and grooveshark at like 10 pm on school nights to my ipod nano. May the high schoolers of the 2020s never know that experience.
Wow, I am now just discovering this! I was always either trying to find the files I downloaded or searching youtube links before they got taken down. Glad it’s so much easier to access now!
Here’s a link to Fit the First if anyone hasn’t had a chance to dive in yet:
HappyTowel Day! Time to grab your favorite towel and contemplate hard-boiled eggs and the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!
