Marvin the Paranoid Android
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![In the BBC TV series, the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot [like Marvin] as "Your plastic pal who's fun to be with".](../../../upload/thumb/1/14/Marvin_plastic_pal.jpg/240px-Marvin_plastic_pal.jpg)
Marvin the Paranoid Android is a fictional character in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams.
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[edit] About Marvin
Marvin is the ship's robot aboard the starship Heart of Gold. He was built as a prototype of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's "Genuine People Personalities" technology. Marvin is paranoid in the literal sense that he deems himself more important than he truly is. Marvin is more obviously afflicted with severe depression and boredom, in part because he has a "brain the size of a planet" which he is seldom allowed to use. Indeed, the true horror of Marvin's existence is that no task he could be given would occupy even the tiniest fraction of his vast intellect. Marvin claims he is 50,000 times more intelligent than a human, though this is, if anything, a vast underestimate. When kidnapped by the bellicose Krikkit robots and tied to the interfaces of their intelligent war computer, Marvin simultaneously manages to plan the entire planet's military strategy, solve "all of the major mathematical, physical, chemical, biological, sociological, philosophical, etymological, meteorological and psychological problems of the Universe except his own, three times over," and compose a number of lullabies. He seemed to find the latter the hardest.
Marvin's voice was performed by Stephen Moore on radio and television, while Alan Rickman played this role in the movie. David Learner operated his body on television, having previously played and voiced the part for the stage version, and Warwick Davis wore the Marvin costume for the feature film. He is "probably... the most popular character to appear in the Guide", according to Geoffrey Perkins, producer of the radio series. Stephen Moore released two pop singles — "Marvin"/"Metal Man" and "Reasons to be Miserable"/"Marvin I Love You" (double B-side) — in the UK in 1981, though neither reached the top 40. There was also a short-lived fanclub called "The Marvin Depreciation Society". Two of these were re-recorded and remixed to coincide with the 2005 Hitchhiker's movie release. Reasons to be Miserable and Marvin are now performed by Stephen Fry.
- Marvin Marvin excerpt (file info) — play in browser (beta)
- An excerpt from Marvin
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According to Douglas Adams, "Marvin came from Andrew Marshall. He's another comedy writer, and he's exactly like that." Indeed, in an early draft of Hitchhiker's, the robot was called Marshall. It was changed to "Marvin" partly to avoid causing offence, but also because it was pointed out to Adams that on radio the name would sound like "Martial", which would have undesirable connotations. However, Adams also admitted that Marvin is part of a long line of literary depressives, such as A. A. Milne's Eeyore or Jacques in Shakespeare's As You Like It, and even owes something to Adams's own periods of depression.
Marvin from the 2005 film was featured (although behind a glass screen) in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Exhibition that ran at Blackpool Zoo. The costume from the BBC Television version of the story has a cameo role in the feature film, appearing in the Vogon office queue with various other life forms.
[edit] Name
Marvin does not actually display signs of paranoia, despite his moniker, nor does he show any signs of mania, though he is referred to as a "manically depressed robot." He remains consistently morose throughout. In fact he exhibits remarkable stoicism, being willing to wait millions of years for his employers.
[edit] Marvin's life
The details of Marvin's incredibly long and unenviably mirthless life are complicated by the fact that his story assumes different forms in the various media in which it has been told. The books tell a substantially different tale to the original radio series, which in turn tell a different tale from the television series and albums. An attempt to piece it together follows:
According to his autobiography read in the Secondary Phase of the radio series, Marvin was constructed much against his own wishes by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as a prototype human personality artificial intelligence. He was subsequently left in a dark storage unit for six months, during which no one bothered to visit him. His first and only friend was a small rat, which one day crawled into a cavity in his right ankle and died. He has "a horrible feeling it is still there." The cutaway illustration of Marvin made by Kevin J. Davies for the "Depreciation Society" featured a "rat cavity".
It is unclear how much time elapsed between then and his posting aboard the Heart of Gold starship, but since every other component of the ship was brand new, it seems likely to have not been very long. As the menial labourer on the spaceship, he grew immensely resentful of the insistence of his new masters (Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian; later also Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent) that he open doors, check airlocks and pick up pieces of paper. He reserved a particular contempt for the sentient doors; despising their blissful satisfaction with their existence.
When the Heart of Gold crew arrive on the ancient planet of Magrathea, they abandon Marvin on the surface. Here is where the first divergence between the different versions of his story occurs. In both the radio and television series, the crew are teleported directly from Magrathea 976,000,000,000 years into the future to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. However, in the novels, Marvin inadvertently saves the crew by plugging himself into the onboard computer of a police vehicle, which, when exposed to the true nature of Marvin's view of the universe, commits suicide, taking the two police who were then firing at the ship's crew with it. The crew leave Magrathea on The Heart of Gold, but are teleported summarily to Ursa Minor Beta, where Zaphod's great grandfather, in an apparent fit of vicious humour, forces Marvin to accompany Zaphod on his mission of self-discovery. Marvin subsequently saves Zaphod's life by engaging in a (ridiculously easy) battle of wits with a vicious automated tank, and then is abandoned on the planet Frogstar B when Zaphod is sent to the Total Perspective Vortex.
In either case, eventually the crew arrive at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, to find that, in fact, they haven't traveled an inch. The Restaurant was constructed on the ruins of the planet they had just left (Magrathea or Frogstar B), and, while there, they find Marvin, who had been waiting patiently for their return for 976,000,000,000 years. Apparently, the last interesting conversation he'd had was over 35,000 years ago, and that was with a coffee machine.
Deciding they had better leave, the crew make a desperate and futile attempt to engage Marvin's enthusiasm (he "hasn't got one") before he simply does what they really want and opens the door to the ship they want to steal. Here another divergence occurs. In the radio series, the ship turns out to be a Haggunenon battle cruiser, and the entire group, including Marvin, but excluding Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, who escape, are eaten by its crew. Marvin's subsequent survival is never really explained, but, against all probability, he eventually finds himself on Ursa Minor Beta, just in time to rescue Zaphod from the tank.
A subsequent section of Marvin's biography occurs only in the Secondary Phase of the radio series. Marvin rejoins the crew on the Heart of Gold, using the improbability drive programmed by Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth, takes them to the ravaged planet Brontitall. Having landed in a giant floating marble copy of a plastic cup, the crew accidentally find themselves falling several miles through the air. The carbon-based members of the crew manage to stay alive by grabbing onto passing giant birds. Marvin has no such luck, and, upon impact with the ground, creates his own archaeological excavation site. Mercilessly intact, he grudgingly saves the crew multiple times from the Foot Soldiers of the Dolmansaxlil Shoe Corporation. Marvin remains in Heart of Gold whilst Ford, Zaphod, Zarniwoop and Arthur bother the Ruler of the Universe, and leaving when an enraged Arthur hijacks the ship.
However, in the Tertiary Phase, Trillian claims this story is Zaphod's hallucination, especially as reverse temporal engineering explanation hasn't entered the plot yet. However of the stories of Zaphod's visit to the Frogstar, the Guide says "10% are 95% true, 14% are 65% true, 35% are only 5% true", and listeners are presented with one "version" of that visit.
In the novels, television series and albums, the black ship stolen at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe is actually the stunt ship of the Disaster Area rock band, and, having taken them back in time two million years before the present, is set on an irreversible course to collide with the sun of Kakrafoon. Forced to flee in the ship's barely functional teleport, the crew politely ask Marvin to stay behind and operate it. He does so, and stoically awaits his fate "almost as good as death" in the heart of the blazing sun.
In the third novel, Life, the Universe, and Everything, we find that Marvin did indeed survive, having been rescued just before blazing impact by a scrap metal merchant (Confusingly, this is also how Marvin recounts his past in the Tertiary Phase of the radio series, even though the black ship never went into a sun in that continuity). The merchant grafted a steel rod to Marvin's now lost leg, and sold him to a Mind Zoo, where excited onlookers would try to make him happy. This made him something of a celebrity on the planet of Squornshellous Zeta, and he was asked to open the brand new bridge that was meant to revitalise the planet's economy. Marvin dutifully plugged himself into the bridge's opening circuit, and, just like the police computer, the bridge, which was probably gifted with a modicum of intelligence, committed suicide, taking a sizable crowd with it. Marvin was left in the swamp, his false leg having trapped him in the mud, so he spent over 1.5 million years walking around in a circle, "just to make the point."
Suddenly, he is kidnapped by a squad of Krikkit war robots, who are after his leg, a fragment of the key that will reopen their imprisoned world and restart the genocidal Krikkit War. Thinking that Marvin's intelligence will be an asset, they wire his brain into the central intelligence core of their war computer. This is a mistake. The once formidable Krikkit robots find themselves overcome with crippling sorrow and depression, and rather than focusing on their mission of extermination, instead sulk in corners doing quadratic equations. Marvin is rescued by his "friends," who bring him back to the Heart of Gold. From here his story is unknown.
Marvin reappears in the second-to-last chapter of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. Arthur and Fenchurch find him on the planet where God's Final Message To His Creation is located. He is barely functional, claiming that due to time travel he is now "thirty-seven times older than the Universe itself," and every part of his body has been replaced, with the exception of "'all the diodes down my left side,'" which have been giving him severe pain for the whole of his existence. Arthur and Fenchurch end up carrying him, enduring the robot's constant abuse, to the God's Final Message viewing station, where they lift him up to see the words of the message: "We apologize for the inconvenience." Astonishingly, Marvin responded thus: "'I think,' he murmured at last, from deep within his corroding rattling thorax, 'I feel good about it.' The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time ever." His already worn circuits then completely stopped working, and Marvin was no more.
However, in the 2005 radio adaptation of the fifth and final novel in the series, Mostly Harmless, in which Marvin did not originally appear, he has a cameo at the end of the last episode alive and well. He explains that it turned out he was still covered by his warranty agreement, and is back to parking cars at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. This revival was possibly due to the makers wishing to include such a popular character in the final ever radio episode of the Guide, and possibly in line with Douglas Adams' stated wish that he'd given the book series a more upbeat ending.
[edit] References in popular culture
- "Paranoid Android" is the name of a song by British rock band Radiohead, possibly named after Marvin, but without any other apparent explicit reference. The line "When I am king you will be first against the wall" might be a reference to Marvin's introduction, in which it is said that the marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is defined by The Hitchhiker's Guide as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."
- Kimi Wong was the female voice accompanying Stephen Moore (the original radio and TV voice of Marvin) on "Marvin, I Love You" which is a love song to Marvin. Wong is the ex-wife of Richard O'Brien, known for creating The Rocky Horror Show. The song can be found on a Dr. Demento compilation CD, and the B-side of one of the Marvin 7" singles.
- In an episode of My Life as a Teenage Robot, Jenny discovers a collection of early prototypes in her basement. One of which is a pessimistic robot with a very depressing outlook on life, who directly quotes Marvin the Paranoid Android.
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