The obvious challenge: pleasing the millions of devoted Hitchhiker's fans.
Douglas himself, however, wasn't overly concerned.
"He felt it was his story; he could do whatever he liked," Stamp said. "Douglas never saw his work as static. He thoroughly enjoyed the intellectual challenge of nursing his story through different media."
In fact, most of the scenes in the movie that were not featured in the books came from Adams himself. For instance, the character Humma Kavula, a cult leader, preaches to his people about the arrival of the Big Handkerchief. The scene reflects Adams's well-known mistrust of organized religion.
Meanwhile, most of the book's best moments have survived the jump to the silver screen. The villains are still the Vogons. Slaves to bureaucracy, they are notorious for their bad poetry.
Following Einstein
The impact of The Hitchhiker's Guide on pop culture is unquestionable. Rock bands named songs after characters in the series; artists like comic actor John Cleese and ex-Beatle Paul McCartney went on to collaborate with Adams on other projects.
The philosophical elements of the series were also debated in college courses. Though to say that Adams had a wide-reaching impact on science, as the filmmakers would have us believe, may be overreaching a bit.
"His questions—are we alone? is life just a cosmic accident?—have been with us for the duration of the human species," said Louis Friedman, the co-founder and executive director of the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. "I think The Hitchhiker's Guide rides the public interest in these questions."
For sure, Adams draws heavily on real-life science. The Improbability Drive, which powers the spaceship that Dent travels on, borrows from quantum theory. First advanced by Albert Einstein, the theory states that physics cannot make definite predictions but can only predict the probability that things will turn out a certain way.
The Hitchhiker's Guide itself could be seen as what Einstein was striving for: a unified theory to explain the workings of the universe.
"Douglas was driven by great intellectual curiosity," Stamp said. "He was in awe of space and keenly interested in the workings of the universe. At the same time, he was fascinated by the 'why' questions."
Of course, Adams never pretended to have a final answer for those why questions. After he learns that the answer to the meaning of everything is 42, Dent, the Hitchhiker's protagonist, confronts another dilemma: What is the ultimate question?
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