<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a phenomenally successful franchise in the curious sub-genre of sci-fi comedy. In all of the work's many forms, it details the adventures or Arthur Dent, one of the last survivors of Earth after it had been destroyed to make way for an interstellar bypass. He is saved from sharing his planet's fate by his friend, Ford Prefect, who turns out to be an alien field researcher for a hilariously innacurate tourist guidebook known as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Author Douglas Adams penned the original radio show in 1978. At the time, he was also attempting to complete his first scripting commission for long-running television program Doctor Who. By the end of the year, the radio show had become so successful that it had already been repeated many times. Adams would be asked to pen additional episodes of the radio show and to novelize his work by 1980.

After the success of the novels, the story was the made into a six episode BBC television miniseries (also penned by Adams).

In 2005, HHG became a motion picture, again written by Douglas Adams.