THE BABEL FISH is among Douglas Adams's most inspired inventions. This short clip is from the 1981 BBC TV series, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which established Douglas Adams as the 2nd Funniest Holographic Insert within the Back-Up Google Earth* (the 1st died laughing at his own jokes, and not long afterwards - exactly six years ago to the day - Adams followed suit; now nobody wants to be the 3rd). Oddly enough I found this little gem by "pure chance" - while seeking technical advice on the Blogger forum. A friendly web designer named Nabeel Zeeshan was among those who came to my rescue. I checked out his blog and there it was... the original BBC Babel Fish... exactly what I needed to make sense of these goddam html codes! ---------
*Remember, the original Earth was destroyed by a Vogon Hyperspace Bypass project.
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| Douglas Noël Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) [First posted 11 May 2007] |
Thank you for this reminder of how brilliant Douglas Adams was - The Hitch-hiker's Guide was spellbinding as a Radio performance, but didn't really make it as a film.
ReplyDeleteThe Babel Fish - how I wish, then it could translate Malay for me!!!!
You're quite right, Marrtin, the film came across as totally flatfooted. Incredibly, I wasn't thinking of Douglas Adams when I found that Babel Fish video clip and was inspired to promptly blog it. Soon after the post was online, I stumbled on a Technorati page full of Douglas Adams links - and that's when I discovered 11 May was when he had a heart attack and died six years ago. Spooky huh? Or perhaps I never realized how deeply Douglas Adams had gotten under my skin (indeed at one time I was so envious of his talent and success as a writer I was tempted to change my name to "Douglas Adams," but I suppose "Dan Brown" would give me access to lots more cash :-). Richard Dawkins delivered a warm eulogy at a memorial service for Adams, whose impromptu 1998 speech at Cambridge has been immortalized here.
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