YMMV / The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981)

• Questionable Casting: Trillian's accent. Seriously, what the Belgium was that all about? Made even stranger by the fact that she could do a perfectly passable English accent, as seen on a few outtakes. Apparently she asked Douglas Adams if he wanted an English accent, and he was so happy with her casting in the first place that he said no, she should use her normal voice. He came to regret this, in part because he realised it wasn't a particularly flattering thing to say to an actress. Trillian is also described as vaguely Arabic-looking in the book, so the obvious choice to play her is a blonde American woman.
• Retroactive Recognition: That's Peter Davison, just before he took on the role of the Fifth Doctor, as the Dish of the Day. He was suggested by his then-wife Sandra Dickinson, who played Trillian.
• Special Effects Failure: Egregious. The effects compare to some of the worst from Doctor Who, but the show's so funny you stop caring.
  • The most egregious being Zaphod's second head, a mechanical prop which barely functioned and veered right into creepytown. They tried to cover for it by his first head telling the second to "go back to sleep."
  • May also qualify as Narm Charm.
    • Another actor performing as Zaphod's third arm works in most scenes, except for a sequence where everyone is thrown to the floor of the Heart of Gold bridge, where five pairs of legs can be seen but only four characters are present.
  • During scenes on the Vogon ship, Arthur has a partial hairpiece on the back of his head with a rather obvious join. This was due to another production insisting on cutting Simon Jones' hair mid-shoot, and the Hitchhiker's production team insisted the other production pay for the hairpiece.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The music that accompanies the guide's entry on Vogon poetry sounds a bit like a slowed-down version of "Choronzon" by Tangerine Dream.
  • The music that plays when they land on Magrathea is similar to Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond". It's a Call-Back to a throwaway gag from the original radio series where the album version was playing before it was revealed that it was just Marvin humming.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The series mostly suffers from terrible special effects, except for the sequences where we see the guide itself. All these shots were actually hand drawn replicas of typical computer graphics of the time, and even today you'd swear they were actually done on a computer.
  • Considering it was cobbled together on a shoestring (a lightbulb was lifted behind model railroad terrain), the series' opening scene of the Earth's last sunrise turned out surprisingly well.

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