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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
1981 · TV series · 33 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Douglas Adams
Don't Panic! The story of Arthur Dent, an average Englishman whose life was spared by his friend, who turned out to be an alien, while the planet Earth is destroyed. His friend tells him about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a guide with anything you ever needed, and wanted to know. They travel across the galaxy, meeting friendly, and not so friendly characters in order to find the great question (the answer being 42).
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From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
7 comments on Hacker News
The graphics (and sound!) remind me of the 1981 BBC Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series. The DVD release of the original BBS television series had a "making of" about the graphics, which were done using stop-motion photography of hand-made transparencies. I suspect these graphics were done the same way.
(If I could find that video online I'd link to it. I'm having no luck and I can't be bothered to go digging for the DVD...)
I think futuristic computer UIs in TV and films before computer graphics would make for a fascinating topic. For example, the computer UI in the BBC TV series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy deserves a mention.
The low-budget series was broadcast in 1981 - a time when computer graphics were limited and not widespread in TV and film. All the "computer graphics" were hand animated to simulate a computer display. The "computer" graphics still stands up brilliantly more than 40 years later:
A clip: https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=126
A TV series based around the bureaucrats from A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Count me in.
In the 1981 BBC TV series of the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', the animated sequences simulated the look of a computer display but weren't actually computer generated. They were drawn on sheets of acetate as traditional 2D animators had done for decades.
The animation is one of the most memorable aspects of the TV series and, despite being almost 40 years old, still holds up really well:
https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=127
In the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Captain Kirk accesses classified information in the ship's computer through a retina scan. This was well before the word 'biometrics' became a more familiar term. The filmmakers had the tricky task of how to represent a retina scan in a highly visual way. So what we see is a flythrough inside Kirk's eye until the retina is reached and verified.
Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG) is a pocket electronic book that contains all the accumulated knowledge about the universe. In the BBC TV series broadcast in 1981, the HHGTTG was represented by a 'computer graphics' aesthetic which was entirely hand animated. The animations still hold up brilliantly (and are better than the animations in the 2005 film).
It was the same for the original TV series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They got enquiries about what computer system they used to make the graphics for the guide. They were all hand drawn.
Special effects were done manually until quite recently. Independence Day was probably the last big budget film to use models. Now it's all computer generated.
Tron was mentioned, in addition to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy television series and Escape from New York.