THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (film)

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. Garth Jennings, dir. Douglas Adams, book. Douglas Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick, script. USA/UK: complex prod. and dist., 2005. Prod. companies include Touchstone and Walt Disney Pictures; see IMDb for details:.

Possibly the last addition to the Hitchhiker's series. See for imaging of the computer Deep Thought as a kind of morphing of a TV set and a sperm whale (note the whale-like eye), for the modernist Heart of Gold vs. the pomo, "'Borgish" ships of the Vogon construction/destruction fleet (Scott Iasillo, personal communication), and for the Disneyfication of Marvin, the terminally-depressed robot. Marvin in this movie could be used as a textbook illustration for Konrad Lorenz's criteria (1943) for "cues that characterize infants" (Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology: The Biology of Behavior [New York: Holt, 1970] 431-33, quotation from IE-E on 431); cf. and contrast such robots as Robby in FORBIDDEN PLANET, Johnny 5 in the SHORT CIRCUIT films, and Huey, Dewey, and Louie in SILENT RUNNING (on last, with "Louey" spelling, see V. Sobchack, Limits of Infinity or Screening Space, 84-85). Summary evaluation: Harmless (or Mostly harmless).