Science Fiction Parody and Satire: Hitchhiker's Guide Radio Play (6 Points)

 The official prompt for this week is to discuss how what you read for this week uses satire and speculative tropes to examine and critique accepted social ideas.

I listened to the Hitchhiker’s Guide Radio Play and it gave me such Guardians of the Galaxy and weird retro transatlantic less vulgar Borderlands vibes. The amount of unbridled sarcasm and sheer bluntness adds to the punchlines and I like how they skim over really important stuff because something about it is just silly. Everything that happens is just thrown at you without much explanation and you as the reader is also, in a way, put into the same positions as Arthur Dent. From the get-go we’re with this space weirdo named Ford Prefect who kinda just casually tells Arthur all the crazy things that have happened and Arthur just has to accept those terms and be slung around in the new situation he’s been put in. While listening, I can imagine the scenes being played in my head just like an Edgar Wright film with the cut-throat editing and obnoxious sound effects, I feel like he can do a pretty well-done job of translating this story into a film. Like I said in class, I haven’t fully watched the movie so I don’t know how it’s done there, but thinking about it in Edgar Wright’s style feels just.

The way the universe is explained in Hitchhiker’s can be perfectly described as just absurd. The words that they use and how they talk and explaining that the entire Earth is just a huge computer that is run by a team of mice just because. I feel like if you don’t pay full attention to the audio, you’ll miss the little bits of information that make this story understandable at all because of how much little things are being said that makes absolutely no sense but attempt to explain this universe. Comparing the space society to our own makes it seem like an apocalyptic everyone out for themselves kind of thing, almost Mad Max-like. The citizens of space see something they want or something they don’t like and do what they will.