THHGTTG Villainy

The Colossus (who's supposed to be on vacation) has this to say in commenting on my last post about the invention of new villainous Hitchhiker's characters:

If they needed Douglas Adams villains, why not simply use the Krikkit-ers? Or even the Vogons?

While Adams does present certain difficulties from the point of view of a screenwriter (his books have no plots per se, they are really just a series of amusing incidents), certainly they could build up either a Vogon-who-is-trying-to-take-over-the-universe plot or a Krikkit-robots-have-John-Malkovich-as-an-evil-king plot and do less violence to the spirit of the books than this.

I can do you one better - Gag Halfrunt, Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz's "private brain care specialist". And Malkovich could play him very well:

It has been said that Vogons are not above a little bribery and corruption in the same way that the sea is not above the clouds, and this was certainly true in his case. When he heard the words "integrity" or "moral rectitude", he reached for his dictionary, and when he heard the chink of ready money in large quantities he reached for the rule book and threw it away. In seeking so implacably the destruction of the Earth and all that therein lay he was moving somewhat above and beyond the call of his professional duty. There was even some doubt as to whether the said bypass was actually going to be built, but the matter had been glossed over.

He grunted a repellent grunt of satisfaction.

"Computer," he croaked, "get me my brain care specialist on the line."

Within a few seconds the face of Gag Halfrunt appeared on the screen, smiling the smile of a man who knew he was ten light years away from the Vogon face he was looking at. Mixed up somewhere in the smile was a glint of irony too. Though the Vogon persistently referred to him as "my private brain care specialist" there was not a lot of brain to take care of, and it was in fact Halfrunt who was employing the Vogon. He was paying him an awful lot of money to do some very dirty work. As one of the Galaxy's most prominent and successful psychiatrists, he and a consortium of his colleagues were quite prepared to spend an awful lot of money when it seemed that the entire future of psychiatry might be at stake.

"Well," he said, "hello my Captain of Vogons Prostetnic, and how are we feeling
today?"

The Vogon captain told him that in the last few hours he had wiped out nearly
half his crew in a disciplinary exercise.

Halfrunt's smile did not flicker for an instant.

"Well," he said, "I think this is perfectly normal behaviour for a Vogon, you
know? The natural and healthy channelling of the aggressive instincts into
acts of senseless violence."

"That," rumbled the Vogon, "is what you always say."

"Well again," said Halfrunt, "I think that this is perfectly normal behaviour
for a psychiatrist. Good. We are clearly both very well adjusted in our mental
attitudes today. Now tell me, what news of the mission?"

From The Restaraunt at the End of the Universe.

Can't you just see Malkovich doing that line, perhaps with a slight German accent? I mean, c'mon! It strikes me that with just a little bit of padding, Halfrunt's character could be worked up to a more prominent position and could be tied into all the various events -the cop scene on Magrathea, the Frogstar World B attacks, the business with Disaster Area's stuntship, and so on. Why not go this direction - which would be consistent with the story - instead of veering off on a completely new tangent?

Don't knock parchment, man.

YIPS from Steve: I think I can join our regular reader and say, in response to the sheer inhumanity and epic wrongness of all this, only

The Horror......the horror....

Said, of course, with an Elmer Fudd accent.

This sort of mindless, juvenile, adolsecent, old-guy whining about destruction of what was a timeless classic of science fiction of our youth is frankly boring, and distracts from what should be the real focus of our blog: the coming menance of Episode III and the sudden diva-weirdness of George Lucas.