r/HitchHikersGuide

Been driving an 02 F150 for the last 8 years or so. Finally upgraded to something with AC and cruise control.. so I had to get a cool plate to go with it. Now the 3 or 4 people in my town who understand the reference will get a kick when they see it!

Spotted on vacation in France, H2G2, amongst some other classics.

Quick reminder for the folks in the New Orleans area! We're doing an end of the earth party for our HHGTTG Chewbacchus SubKrewe.

I won't retype my entire facebook post here, but it began with a question to the ZZ9 facebook group and Kevin Jon Davies had the knowledge. So real quick version...

The question was "Did Mike Oldfield ever record a version of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy theme?" First if you don't know who this is... I didn't and shame on me. Why did I even ask about Oldfield? Well Paddy Kingsland mentions him and that he was working on a version of the theme during his interview portion for the Making Of for the TV Show that Kevin Jon Davies edited, did animation for, etc... So straight from the horses mouth to you:

>During the making of the TV series the producer/Director Alan JW Bell wrote to Mike Oldfield (via an address in Denham, Uxbridge) on 27 May 1980 to invite him to record the theme tune, enclosing a tape of the radio show, and said it would have to be a version of JotS, and need to fit their title sequence which was already being produced, so would need to fit the same tempo. He also said he'd talk to Richard Branson at Virgin Records about a tie-in single of the music. Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" was the very first record on the Virgin label, a massive hit launching both the company and the composer.

>Nothing ever came of this, to my knowledge. I bet the restrictions imposed were too much for someone who's reputation was for that enormous worldwide hit, "Tubular Bells" was used as the theme to the massive hit horror movie "The Exorcist". Maybe if Alan had asked Mike Oldfield to create something fresh and new, there would have been more interest... but who knows? Tim Souster (note spelling) had been involved with Hitchhiker since working on the LP from June the year before, so his involvement was a shoe-in. In the end they used his LP theme for the TV version and a single was released of that, by Original Records, who produced the LPs. Interestingly, when Mark Ayres was re-mixing the TV series for DVD, he pulled the tracks apart to re-create the mix and discovered a very very low level hint of the next bit on the LP record just coming in during the cross-fade to Paddy Kingsland's following incidental music cue! He reckons they must have simply used the LP for the TV show mix!