>I find it unlikely I would have heard about them, my local library was full of books from the 50's I had never heard of and was reluctant to read
Millions read LOTR and Hobbit before the movies, and they had very active communities all the way to the 90s. Like millions have read HGTTG before the movie (who didn't even do that well) and millions continue to do so -- including millions worldwide who never heard the radio show ever.
Is h2g2 still on the minds of people that age? When I got into it, to the eyes of a teen it seemed as if it had been there forever (1). Not quite as much as LoTR but well established nonetheless. But actually it was still in its increasingly inaccurately named phase, so it would still get an attention refresh from time to time. Decades passing with the only attention refresh being a not terribly well received movie, I suspect that much of the awareness we are prone to take for granted simply does not exist in people who only know the 20th century from hearsay (which brings us back to Watterson I guess, the topic of absent "attention refresh").
((1) and already established in book form, its radio origins already relegated to fan trivia - it was years after reading the books that I realized that I had actually heard quite a bit of it in radio form before, enjoying it to the point of deliberately tuning in each week, without committing the name of the show to memory. Not the original radio show buy a german language production, would be interesting to see where on the spectrum between original show and "radiofication" of the books those episodes were, I don't think they made that show before the books became a radiant success)
> Not the original radio show buy a german language production, would be interesting to see where on the spectrum between original show and "radiofication" of the books those episodes were, I don't think they made that show before the books became a radiant success.
Wikipedia claims the German audio version was based on first six episodes of the UK radios series, and I do remember noticing that some plot points differed somewhat from the books (and then when I finally listened to the original radio series, I somewhat recognised those differing plot points again).
Millions read LOTR and Hobbit before the movies, and they had very active communities all the way to the 90s. Like millions have read HGTTG before the movie (who didn't even do that well) and millions continue to do so -- including millions worldwide who never heard the radio show ever.