TURN-ONS AND TURN-OOFS IN CURRENT HOME ENTERTAINMENT RELEASES : *****Excellent***Good **Fair*Poor : AUDIOCASSETTES

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. Simon & Schuster. “Based on the Original BBC Radio Production,” says the 90-minute cassette’s jacket, and this is indeed an ear-tingling, if greatly condensed, tour de force dramatization of Adams’ best seller. Clipped British voices say Adams’ inspired nonsense with all the winningly deadpan sincerity we’ve come to associate with Monty Python. Augmenting the voices is a veritable delicatessen of sound effects: bleeps, queeps, vast interstellar sighs and gasps, rattles and roars. All this to tell the tale of Arthur Dent, late of the late planet Earth, and his Betelgeusean guide, Ford Prefect, having adventures that constitute satiric comments, I think, on why it is the late planet Earth, and concluding that the answer to practically everything is 42--which anyone could have told them, but not as brilliantly. ****