Wikipedia:

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage

For the book, see Cosmos (book).
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
Image:CosmosCarlSaganDVDC.jpg
Cosmos DVD cover
Picture format 4:3
Audio format Stereo
Episode duration 60 minutes
Creator(s) Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan & Steven Soter
Director Adrian Malone
Producer(s) Gregory Andorfer & Rob McCain
Presented by Carl Sagan
Music by Vangelis; various artists
Country of origin United States
Language(s) US English
First shown on PBS
Original run 28 September 1980–
21 December 1980
No. of episodes 13
Official website

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as global presenter. It was executive-produced by Adrian Malone, produced by David Kennard, Geoffrey Haines-Stiles and Gregory Andorfer, and directed by the producers and David Oyster, Richard Wells, Tom Weidlinger, and others. It covered a wide range of scientific subjects including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe. The series was first broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1980, and was the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until 1990's The Civil War, and is still the most widely watched PBS series in the world.[1] It won an Emmy and a Peabody Award and has since been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 600 million people, according to the Science Channel. A book to accompany the series was also published.

Overview

Cosmos was produced in 1978 and 1979 by Los Angeles PBS affiliate KCET on a roughly $6.3 million budget, with over $2 million additionally allocated to promotion. KCET later alleged that the station eventually went $3 million into debt as a result, though there is dispute on the details of exactly what happened. The show's format is based on previous BBC documentaries such as Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man and David Attenborough's Life on Earth. (The BBC—a co-producer of Cosmos—repaid the compliment by screening the series, but episodes were cut to fit 50-minute slots and shown late at night.) However, unlike those series, which were shot entirely on film, Cosmos used videotape for interior scenes and special effects, with film being used for exteriors.

Sagan explains planetary orbits
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Sagan explains planetary orbits

The series is notable for its groundbreaking use of special effects, which allowed Sagan to apparently walk through environments that were actually models rather than full-sized sets. The soundtrack counted with pieces of music provided by Greek composer Vangelis such as Alpha, Pulstar, and Heaven and Hell Part 1 (the last movement serving as the signature theme music for the show, and is directly referenced by the title of episode 4). Throughout the 13 hours of the series it used many tracks from several 1970s albums such as Albedo 0.39, Spiral, Ignacio, Beaubourg, and China. The worldwide success of the documentary series also put Vangelis' music in the homes and to the attention of a global audience.

Sagan's historical description of Hypatia of Alexandria and the burning of the Library of Alexandria has been criticized by historians who interpret the sources on Hypatia's life and the end of the library differently and who believe that Sagan should have made clear that there is a scholarly controversy on this issue. Other parts of Cosmos were controversial among the general public, though hardly among scientists, such as Sagan's straightforward treatment of astrology as a pseudoscience and his equally straightforward description of biological evolution.

Sagan in the series' final episode, "Who Speaks for Earth?"
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Sagan in the series' final episode, "Who Speaks for Earth?"

Turner Home Entertainment purchased Cosmos from series producer KCET in 1989. In making the move to commercial television, the hour-long episodes were edited down to shorter lengths, and Sagan shot new epilogues for several episodes in which he discussed new discoveries (and alternate viewpoints) that had arisen since the original broadcast. Additionally, a 14th episode was added which consisted of an interview between Sagan and Ted Turner, and this "new" version of the series was eventually released as a VHS box set.

Cosmos had long been unavailable after its initial release because of copyright issues with the included music, but was released in 2000 on Region 0 NTSC DVD, which includes subtitles in seven languages[2], remastered 5.1 sound, as well as an alternate music and sound effects track. In 2005 The Science Channel rebroadcast the series for its 25th anniversary with updated computer graphics, film footage, and digital sound.

Episodes

Episode 1: "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean"

Episode 2: "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue"

In episode 2 Sagan journeys into the bloodstream by pricking his finger.
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In episode 2 Sagan journeys into the bloodstream by pricking his finger.

Episode 3: "The Harmony of the Worlds"

Episode 4: "Heaven and Hell"

Episode 5: "Blues for a Red Planet"

Episode 6: "Travelers' Tales"

Episode 7: "The Backbone of Night"

  • 1. Opening
  • 2. What are the Stars?
  • 3. Brooklyn Schoolroom
    • Teaching children about the cosmos (1)
  • 4. Mythology of Stars
    • The realization that stars are suns; the Milky Way mythology of the !Kung bushmen and ancient Greeks.
  • 5. Ancient Greek Scientists
  • 6. Science Blossoms
  • 7. Democritus
  • 8. Pythagoras
  • 9. Plato and the Others
  • 10. Distance to Stars
    • Christiaan Huygens
  • 11. Evidence of Other Planets
    • Teaching children about the cosmos (2)
  • 12. End Credits

Episode 8: "Travels in Space and Time"

Episode 9: "The Lives of the Stars"

Episode 10: "The Edge of Forever"

Sagan at the Very Large Array
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Sagan at the Very Large Array

Episode 11: "The Persistence of Memory"

Episode 12: "Encyclopedia Galactica"

Episode 13: "Who Speaks for Earth?"

  • 1. Opening
  • 2. Tlingit and Aztec Indians
  • 3. Who Speaks for Earth?
    • Sagan's vision (told as a dream) of traveling to a far distant world, only to return to find that the human race had long since been destroyed by nuclear warfare
  • 4. Nuclear War and Balance of Terror
  • 5. Alexandrian Library
  • 6. Hypatia
  • 7. Big Bang and the Stuff of Life
    • The beginning of the universe and good endeavors of our civilization
  • 8. Evolution of Life
  • 9. Star Stuff
  • 10. What Humans Have Done
  • 11. We Speak for Earth
    • Sagan's plea to cherish life and continue our journey to the cosmos
  • 12. Cosmos Update 10 years later

Episode 14

Some versions of the series including the first North American home video release included a specially made 14th episode, which consisted of an hour-long interview between Sagan and Ted Turner, in which the two discussed the series and new discoveries in the years since its first broadcast. This unique episode was not included in the DVD release.

Quotes

Episode 2: One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue

55 min 6 sec

“ Physics and chemistry permits such life forms. Art presents them with a certain reality but nature is not obliged to follow our speculations."..."Biology is more like history than it is like physics. You have to know the past to understand the present. There is no predictive theory of biology, just as there is no predictive theory of history. The reason is the same: both subjects are still too complicated for us. ”

Episode 4: Heaven and Hell

35 min 59 sec

“ "I can’t see a thing on the surface of Venus."

"Why not?"
"Because it’s covered with a dense layer of clouds."
"Well, what are clouds made of?"
"Water, of course. Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it. Therefore the surface must be wet."
"If the surface is wet, it’s probably a swamp. If there’s a swamp, there are ferns, if there are ferns maybe there are even dinosaurs."
"Observation: You couldn’t see a thing."
"Conclusion: Dinosaurs."

 ”

Episode 5: Blues for a Red Planet

11 min 41 sec

“ He believed the planet was inhabited by an older and wiser race perhaps very different from us. He believed that the seasonal changes in the dark areas were due to the growth and decay of vegetation. He believed that the planet was Earth-like. All in all, he believed too much. ”

Episode 7: The Backbone of Night

0 min 40 sec

“ The sky calls to us; if we do not destroy ourselves we will one day venture to the stars. ”

37 min 45 sec

“ So a crisis in doctrine occurred when they discovered that the square root of two was irrational. That is: the square root of two could not be represented as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how big they were. "Irrational" originally meant only that. That you can't express a number as a ratio. But for the pythagoreans it came to mean something else, something threatening, a hint that their world view might not make sense, the other meaning of "irrational". ”

38 min 10 sec

“ Instead of wanting everyone to share and know of their discoveries the Pythagoreans suppressed the square root of two and the dodecahedron. The outside world was not to know. The Pythagoreans had discovered, in the mathematical underpinnings of nature, one of the two most powerful scientific tools, the other of course is experiment, but instead of using their insight to advance the collective voyage of human discovery they made of it little more than the hocus pocus of a mystery cult. Science and mathematics were to be removed from the hands of the merchants and the artisans. ”

40 min 35 sec

“ But why had science lost its way in the first place, what appeal could these teachings of Pythagoras and Plato have had for their contemporaries? They provided, I believe, an intellectually respectable justification for a corrupt social order.

The mercantile tradition that had led to Ionian science also led to a slave economy, you could get richer if you owned a lot of slaves. Athens in the time of Plato and Aristotle had a vast slave population. All that brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few.

 ”

Episode 11: The Persistence of Memory

37 min 25 sec

“ It might be more efficient if all civic systems were periodically replaced from top to bottom. But, as in the brain, everything has to work during the renovation. So the city mostly adds new parts while the old parts continue, more or less, to function...

Or consider Third Avenue. In the 17th century you made your way uptown on foot or on horseback. A little later, there were coaches – the horses prancing, the coachmen cracking their whips. And then these were replaced by horse-drawn trolleys, clanging along fixed tracks on this avenue. Then electrical technology developed and a great elevated railway line was constructed called the Third Avenue El, which dominated the street until 1954, when it was utterly demolished. Anyway, the El was then replaced by buses and taxicabs, which still are the main forms of public transportation on Third Avenue. Now as gasoline becomes a rare commodity, the combustion engine will be replaced by something else. Maybe public transportation on Third Avenue in the 21st century will be by, I don’t know, pneumatic tubes or electric cars. Every step in the evolution of Third Avenue’s transport has been conservative following a route first laid down in the 17th century. But the brain is still more conservative than the city. If this were the brain, we might have horse-drawn trolleys and the El and buses all operating simultaneously, redundantly, competitively.

 ”

Music of Cosmos

Some of the music from the television series was compiled on CD:

Cosmos, a special edition

TV program logo of Cosmos special edition
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TV program logo of Cosmos special edition

The 1986, special edition of Cosmos is distinctive in many ways. It featured new narration by and filmed segments with Sagan, including content from Sagan's book Comet and discussion of his theory of nuclear winter (none of which was used in subsequent television or home video releases.) The series is much shorter than the original, running four and a half hours. It premiered as one marathon program on the TBS network and has been repeated as six episodes each about 45 minutes in length:

  1. Other Worlds part 1
  2. Other Worlds part 2
  3. Children of the Stars part 1
  4. Children of the Stars part 2
  5. Message from the Sky part 1
  6. Message from the Sky part 2

Visually, the series uses several of the historic sequences and animations from the original series, but interweaved are also new computer animated sequences and additional scenes with host Carl Sagan. As known today, the special edition version was at least broadcast in the United States, Japan, Germany, and Australia.

This version of Cosmos contains a mix of music used in the original series, together with a unique score by Vangelis, composed specially for this series. This score in some sources is also referred to as "Comet", with "Comet 16" acting as the title and ending theme of each episode. Only one of the total 21 cues of this score has officially been released, "Comet 16." Some of the new music also appears in the 2000 remastered DVD release.

External links

  1. ^ According to The Science Channel.
  2. ^ English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Mandarin and Japanese

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 
 

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