First seen in , Cosmos: A Personal Voyage , and its beguiling, turtleneck-sweater wearing host, the astrophysicist and author Carl Sagan, has achieved cult status. Its mindbending visual effects and soaring music, coupled with Sagan's lyrical, almost hypnotic narration mesmerised viewers, making it one of the most successful programmes ever to run on America's Public Broadcasting Service. And it didn't just captivate American audiences.
You get the picture. But Cosmos was far more than just a fanciful tour of our solar system hosted by an exalted professor in a corduroy jacket.
Delving into the nature of the universe, the fabric of our being and the lives of those who made some of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time, Cosmos was an immersive experience.
And with Sagan, in his slow, compelling drawl, uttering knock-out lines like "the cosmos is also within us, we're made of star-stuff", the show thrilled and informed in equal measure.
But like all good things, it came to an end, and after Sagan died in aged 62, it seemed that Cosmos was destined to remain on a nostalgic pedestal. Druyan, however, had other ideas. About seven years ago, together with astrophysicist Steven Soter, who with Sagan and Druyan was also a writer on the original series, she began planning new episodes of Cosmos. Later Tyson joined the team as host, but there was a problem.
No network was prepared to give Druyan creative carte blanche. But then Tyson met MacFarlane. And MacFarlane had a plan. It was a project a world away from the ribald romps of Family Guy or Ted.
Yet for MacFarlane, Cosmos pressed buttons. Tyson was not surprised that MacFarlane was interested. So I said 'there is some machinery churning in Seth MacFarlane's head beyond the fart jokes'. What would Fox, home of the notoriously conservative news channel, want with a science show fronted by the director of New York's Hayden Planetarium?
Yet the more they thought about it, the more the team realised that Fox — and the National Geographic Channel that it co-owns — was the perfect place to bring science and the excitement of discovery to a huge and diverse audience. And so, like the fairy godfather of astrophysics, MacFarlane delivered the team to Fox.
He authored hundreds of popular articles and more than two dozen books, and he frequently appeared in Time magazine — landing the cover on Oct. In , Sagan began work on the television series "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage," serving as writer and presenter. The first show aired on the Public Broadcasting Service in October of Between new episodes and reruns, the show was the most widely watched series on U.
The show won an Emmy and a Peabody award and was broadcast around the world. Sagan's book of the same name Random House, stayed on The New York Times best-seller list for 70 weeks and was the best-selling science book ever published in the English language at the time.
In addition to "Cosmos," Sagan also appeared as a guest on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" 26 times, calling it "the biggest classroom in history. At Sagan's request, NASA commanded its Voyager 1 spacecraft to turn its camera on Earth, creating an image that came to be known as the " Pale Blue Dot ," one of the most famous pictures of Earth from space ever taken.
Sagan used that name as the title of another book. The sequel to "Cosmos," Sagan's "The Pale Blue Dot" Random House, toured the solar system and the galaxy , arguing for the necessity of planetary science and the exploration of Earth's closest neighbors. This book, too, was widely well-received by the general public.
The story revolved around interactions between the human race and an advanced civilization of extraterrestrials. The novel sold over a million copies in its first two years of publication, and in , it was released as a major motion picture starring Jodi Foster as main character Ellie Arroway who was inspired by real-life SETI astronomer Jill Tarter. Entertainment Inc. The production company hasn't released any details about the movie since the initial announcement.
In Sagan's New York Times obituary , then-President of the National Academy of Sciences Bruce Alberts said, "Carl Sagan, more than any contemporary scientist I can think of, knew what it takes to stir passion within the public when it comes to the wonder and importance of science.
It would be an epochal event in human history. He made Cosmos an appealing invitation to rethink everything we thought we knew about creation, and then learn anew. Cosmos: A Personal Voyage was produced for a generation raised on manned space flight and heroic moon landings. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is produced for a culture that just mothballed its space shuttle program and struggles to see the practical purpose in leaving orbit, much less exploring other planets.
The first Cosmos took as givens the intelligence and interest of its audience. The new Cosmos does not proceed with these assumptions. It all but states that the cultural conservation started by its predecessor has fizzled out. Their Cosmos is very Hollywood, from the subtitle evoking the grandest of speculative sci-fi sagas, A Space Odyssey , to the digital special effects and eclectic range of storytelling devices, to the music bye-bye moody-Moogy Vangelis; hello bombastic Alan Silvestri, whose filmography includes Back To The Future and The Avengers , to the spaceship of the imagination.
Call this a mercenary mission to capture our imagination anew. Providing the human face is Tyson. Sagan mirrored the brainy-meek leading man archetype of his time.
Think: Alan Alda; Woody Allen. Tyson reflects his own era. Eschewing the artful meander of the original, the reboot is more muscular and blunt, leaner and mean, and sometimes, just mean.
Tyson immediately goes into space after his Northern California intro, just as Sagan did in the original. The melancholy moment reminds us that to some degree, and hopefully only for now, our species has given up on its spacefaring destiny. This survey of space is very gee-whiz and feel-good; future episodes will hopefully do a better job explaining — and selling — what we might gain from a more aggressive exploration of our celestial neighbors.
When Sagan returned to Earth in his premiere, he told a legend about a society that once actively cultivated scientific investigation — an aspirational allegory for the kind of society Sagan wanted — and framed the history of science as that of a lost-and-found legacy. Similarly, Tyson tells a politically charged tale about the past, one that also puts the history of science in a selective context.
He was ultimately tried by the Inquisition and burned at the stake. The flat, crude 2-D cartoon befits a tale of an intellectually immature society denying itself a proper 3-D and more! But it also has the feel of cheap propaganda, all caricature, no nuance or rebuttal. Tied at the stake, a cross is raised to his lips to kiss; Bruno spurns it. Which is perfectly fine.
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