Quote:
Throughout all this discussion, I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the audiobook as a bridge between the written book and the movie.

Having neither read the original book...

Unless I'm much mistaken, your "audiobook" is the original radio series, from which the subsequent books, records, stage shows, towel, computer game, and film were derived. A lot of stuff ("He only had the one head and the two arms and called himself Phil") worked IMO better as throwaway radio jokes than as visual jokes with all the mechanism that entailed. It's like Seagoon paying Moriarty with fifty thousand hussars and receiving twenty thousand hussars as change: seeing it is less funny than imagining it.

Peter