YMMV / The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978)

• Adaptation Displacement: Few people seem to realize the radio series predates the book.
• Ass Pull: The Babel Fish's never-before-mentioned ability to save themselves and anyone who happens to be near from certain death at the end of the Quintessential Phase is this done blatant and flagrantly. However, it does help avert the massive Downer Ending of Mostly Harmless.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A student proposes that shoe shops deliberately selling bad shoes so they can sell more shoes will eventually lead to a Shoe Event Horizon where the economy can only support shoe shops, leading to widespread ruin. While funny enough back then, the rise of the Starbucks coffee chain means the world seems to be heading the same way in Real Life. According to Adams it was heading that way at the time, which was why he wrote it; the name of the Galactic shoe conglomorate, Dolmansaxlil, is a portmanteau formed from three of the chains owned by the British Shoe Corporation (Dolcis, Manfield, and Saxone, Lilley & Skinner), all of which had shops on Oxford Street and none of which - in Adams's opinion - had any decent shoes.
  • The joke about how humans are so primitive they think digital watches are neat was a jab at a fad of the time, which as all fads gradually died out (with cellular phones killing watches in particular). Then smart watches came along...
• Retroactive Recognition: Vroomfondel is Horace Slughorn.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The discotheque scene in the secondary phase - the background music is very obviously "Stayin' Alive" played in reverse.

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