h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How about SPARTACUS!
Man thats a great name, and I can't believe I came up with a totally unique, never ever in the history of the world heard of before name. Maybe we could make a movie with the title, like about gladitorial slaves who rebel against the namoR eripmE.

Actually, I think I've heard of a Sparticas before. Maybe it was Sparticis, actually. Still, I must agree that it's a very good name. Maybe I'll use it in the next story I publish . . .

okay, I am done with spartacus, no more mentioning. hey I had a stupid idea. Maybe we should make a little conversation full of tallies. Like for example: as of 2-18-00 8:31 pm PST the name Bruce has been mentioned 150 times in "A New Story"
It's true, and yes I do have too much time on my hands.

We could compare that to the number of times Bruce was mentioned in the original story. Or, if someone feels like counting to really high numbers, we could count how many characters (not counting the number of mauve weasels) are in the story! I can see that if this is made into a movie we'd use almost everyone on the talent agencies' lists.

That would require a whole lot of free time. I just used the find function of my browswer and typed in bruce. Then I counted how many times I hit next. And reached a remarkably clean number, 150. It would be a really long job to do that same thing with "is this a good idea" cuz that was like nine million posts. Well, umm, LOOK OVER THERE!!!

What? Oh, I see it, there's a blind mauve iMac on a unicycle piloted by a rubber weasel with blueberries for eyes flying past the window. Well, I sure am glad I looked.

Actually, since I don't think Bruce appeared in the story until about chapter 3, it might not be such a long job. But I'm not going to do it!

Also, do we count the Danish/Dutch/Whatever royal family as one person, or many? Also, what about the hit man/kangarroo? Is Next Researcher a legitimate character? What about all of the times when it's an undefined number of characters from the same organization? Wasn't the first mention of sassy robots an army? Would Douglas Adams play himself in the movie? Would his attourney? How would we pay all of these actors? The special effects budget alone is enough to make a few nations have heart attacks! How much film would this take? Does Bill Gates himself have this much money? Does . . .

I need to switch to decaff. However, I think these are all items we should consider before someone gets assigned to counting characters.

Hmm, well it might save on actors if we just got Pixar to do an animated version - we wouldn't have to do a worldwide appeal for mauve weasels then. It'd mean a lot of special effects but I'm sure they could just make the main characters look really good and then just draw different faces on them for other characters. Mind you, we'd need a lot of voice actors - but they're quite good at doing different voices so if we had each person doing the voice of say, five characters, we might only need a few hundred. Actually less than that because it won't matter if a few of the one-off cameos have the same voice as other characters. Or if we were going to do it not animated, maybe we could ask Peter Jackson (the Lord of the Rings guy) to help out... I think he played about half a dozen different parts as well as being director, cameraman and a few other things in the movie Bad Taste. Mike Myers could probably help with that too considering how many main characters he played in the Spy Who Shagged Me.

Oh, and if Bill Gates had enough money, I think he'd probably want to change the bit about him being turned into a paperclip. Actually, maybe he'd want to play the part of the all-powerful Next Researcher.

We could always make it a TV series... after all it does keep going all the time and people might be a bit annoyed after paying for the ticket to the 24th movie sequel.

Do you think maybe Bob Evans would help with the funding? After all there is a lot of publicity for his breakfast sausages. We might have to put a 'kids, don't try this at home' label on the unicycle scenes.

wow, I got a lot of posts. Firstly we don't have to just tally the name bruce, we can tally whatever. And if we really do want to do this then just use your judgement. If you just wanna see how many times arnold is mentioned then go ahead. It doesn't mean we have to document every time Arthur/Possibly/whatever was in the story. Do whatever you like. As for the movie (not actual quote but if you can guess its source then you get 15 points towards and Arby's sandwich):

...okay you have 2 minutes "but what if i need more" now you have one minute "okay, now we follow the journey's of our heroes through Canada" No we set it in Alabama. "wait we shoot in alabama?" no we shoot in Canada, have to. "Okay, but we keep the plot about their adventures with Rawsdauer and stuff right?" No here's the way I see it, they're all girls "girls? even Rawsdauer?" Especially Rawsdauer. And they all live in a big dormitory "but they are supposed to be on the road" Look do you want this produced or not (BEEP) Oh hold on, Guttenberg's people are coming in "what?"

Forget what I just wrote, I should really delete it, I know I will post it on the internet so someone can tell me how to delete it.

Really easy: just wait a few months/years for the DELETE FORUM POST command to be written. Of course, by then it might be too late.

You know, I have a feeling that you're right about it being a digitally animated television series, drawn by pixar, with only a few hunderd people. Well, we might not even need that many. The Simpsons has about three hundred forty characters, and only about ten voice actors.

Okay, we've mentioned several celebreties. How many do you honestly think we can get in this?: Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Arthur Fonzerellie, Bob Evans (is he even a real person?), and Erik Evari (THE GRAND INQUISITOR RULES!!!). How many do you think we could (cheaply) get on this. DNA might not mind, but I think he's probably got somewhat better things to do than cameo in a fan made movie. Hey, wait, how are we funding this again? Are we planning in talking TDV into doing it? Or are we planning it out before we work through the details?

well, arthur fonzerellie is not the proper spelling, but who cares (character was played by Henry Winkler).
No way we are getting gates, lets just get Anthony Michael Hall to play him. As for animation, that is probably the best way to go. Ofcourse computer animation is very expensive and I doubt we would be able to pump out very many episodes a year. Especially with all the insane special effects that probably would require months each. Won't stop us from making a pilot though. We will call it "When animals attack slow moving children whose parents are caught in the act at work on VIDEO!" Sure it has nothing to do with it but FOX will buy it without thinking. They send us some money for the pilot, and then boom! I'm in Tahiti, I mean we. Right we'll share it (chuckle under breath)

Well, as I mentioned, some funding might come from Bob Evans from all the breakfast sausage ads. I don't think we'll get much from Bill Gates unless we turn him into something other than a paperclip. Maybe he should have been turned into a windows 2000 CD, because then when the universe smiled a little (which it did, after he was turned into a paperclip), he can interpret it as meaning that the universe is happy about there being another copy of windows 2000. Do you think he'll fall for that, or would he guess that the universe is smiling because there's no more Bill Gates?

We'll need to casually mention some more products, I think... so we can get funding from other companies. Well we've got plenty of iMacs in the first chapter so Apple might contribute - it might get us on the right side of Pixar, at least. Maybe there could be a logo on the yellow plastic bag even. So I'd say that all up, we'd have almost a 1% chance of being able to make a movie of this. (that's rounded up of course)

Hey, why don't we each choose a character or five, and tape ourselves acting out those characters' parts, and then just stick all the pieces together on an iMac DV with several terabytes of firewire hard drives? It would save on professional actors, and after all we're not professional scriptwriters anyway. But probably an animated movie would be better unless we're all going to paint our pets mauve.

I would never send a picture of myself to you people. One might think that after all our weeks together I would be sure that you all weren't crazy pediphiles. But to be truthful my suspicion has gone up that you are either crazy arsonists, or 13 year old boys. PS: nobody is continuing the detective story? Are you bored of it?

I'm sure the detective story will continue - it's just a bit more difficult than the other stories because there is more pressure to make sure that what we add to it doesn't conflict with what's already written. In the other stories, if someone mucks up the plot then it can be miraculously and ridiculously fixed later in the story, but in a backwards story there can be no miraculous fixings unless they come before the plot-hole being fixed, so we have to be a bit more cautious.

Unless of course Detective Slade is the one from the TV show Crime Traveller and he can time travel to fix up any inconsistencies.

I like it.

'Nonnie

Ap: But you have to remember, a lot of those characters were the original characters with name changes.

Arthur Fonzerellie isn't a real person, so why worry about Bob Evans? And isn't 'working through the details' what 'planning' is all about?

I think the detective story is more of a 'before time travel' setting.


'Nonnie

Oh.. one more thing. Can we move the 'Let's make a movie' bits to a new thread? 'Twould make it lots easier to figure out who wants what titles. (Though I'll prolly have to start a new thread for those and change the page when I update, even so.)

'Nonnie

Well, I'll mae the new forum. I don't know the name of it yet, though. Sue me. Then again, don't.

at first I thought I didn't understand the last few posts because I hadn't read the new conversations. Well now I have read them and it still doesn't make sense. Make a new forum for what? there were like 2 posts in the lets make a movie section, why worry about overflowing it yet.

I don't find it important whether we make a new forum or not for the movie... but the movie and story is quite related here, so why not just call it "*something* the movie" until we know what to do?