The new Cosnos series, hosted by the ever-awesome Neil deGrasse Tyson, has a trailer out… and it will blow your mind.
The original Cosmos still moves and inspires me, and Carl Sagan will always be one of my personal heroes. Hopefully this new series will inspire the new generations of the 21st century.
Looks interesting.
I hope they concentrate on presenting science and not waste time bending over backward trying to assuage those for whom science and logic are the enemy.
I’m sure it will be true to the spirit of the original. NDT, Ann Druyan and Seth MacFarlane (yes, that Seth MacFarlane) wouldn’t be doing this if it involved compromising the science, I’m sure.
Unfortunately that’s *exactly *what I think it may be. deGrasse Tyson is a really smart guy, but I cannot watch most of his shows because he dumbs stuff down way too much. I watched the original *Cosmos *way back when it first aired and was kinda disappointed for the same reason (I was a smart kid). Also, seeing it again recently, Sagan too was a really intelligent person, but a terrible TV show host! He was long-winded, overly ethereal, slow & plodding. I remember how James Burke’s phenomenal series *Connections *premiered around the same time as *Cosmos *(late 70s). That guy took 30 seconds to make the same point as Sagan did in an entire hour!
Got to agree plus with Tyson everything ends up being “Hey look, black holes.” I mean his motto could be pretty much “Well, at least I’m not as bad as Michio Kaku.” Personally I would have preferred if Jim Al-Khalili had done the show. (Or Brian Cox if he wasn’t available.) Actually now that you mentioned it I wish Burke could have done the new Cosmos.
The important question is whether they’ll have the same weird electronic music as the original. (Which I loved, by the way.)
The original’s electronic music was Vangelis (from Heaven and Hell and Albedo 0.39), FWIW.
I knew NDT had a time traveling space ship- I knew it!
I just hope the animated people don’t hurt him.
Which is the same make and model as Sagan’s was, no?
When I saw the dandelion seed / pod escape, I knew it would be dead on to the original.
What’s the beef with Kaku?
Also, Fox could be putting all the eggs in the brain basket this time, would the average fox viewer even begin to watch this? So what does fox lose by doing the show right?
That was beautiful.
Has someone made up a list of all the SF references used in this trailer? On my first watching I only caught a few that I could peg for sure (Mass Effect 2, Close Encounters, M.I.B.), but I saw a lot of others that pinged a memory without fully bringing it forth.
I think it will be the highest quality science program in many years regardless of its level. To reach a wide audience you have to dumb it down some, probably a little more than the original, and actually that’s kind of the point; NDT has often spoken of his passion for igniting/re-igniting the public’s interest in actual science and while you can’t do that if you go History Channel level crap you also can’t do it if you lose them in the first ten minutes. It’s not a documentary for college physics majors, after all- they’ve “already been got”- but for teenagers and for people like me who love science even though they’d be the first to admit they aren’t good at it.
Agree that I prefer James Burke’s shows to COSMOS, largely because he has more history than COSMOS (which had a lot for a widely popular documentary), though I have found more errors in his books than I have Sagan’s. (Is Burke still up and around these days? I know he’s still alive but I was wondering if he’s still active in producing and presenting.)
It looks pretty sweet, but I must admit I’m going to miss the old “dandelion” spaceship. I’d love to see an updated version of that thing.
I know the whole “Sagan flying around in a spaceship” thing was a hallmark of the original miniseries, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just seen a trailer for Marvel’s latest movie, starring Tyson as Uatu the Watcher.
Personally, the only time I’ve ever watched Cosmos was in bits and pieces while taking a community college astronomy class in 2002, as occasionally interrupted so the instructor could fill us in on which of Sagan’s remarks had been proven incorrect by later science. I know a whole lot more has happened in our understanding of the universe since then (I don’t think we’d even heard of dark energy at the time), so if this remake can incorporate the latest findings in a way that’s simple and relatable it may very well be great TV.
I saw part of an episode of the original not too long, and I think they had ‘Lucas-ized’ it! IOW they’d redone all the exterior space effects with CGI, removed completely all the videotaped ‘interior’ shots of Sagan at his ship’s control panel & view screen and him walking around bad models via green screen, and they may have edited out some of its dated ‘facts’. Personally, I kind of liked it better. Those interior scenes were awful, even for the time. Cheesy looking set shot directly on video, all the green screen stuff was Land of the Lost quality, plus Sagan had this really annoying, dorky thing he’d do: His control panel was supposed to be a futuristic touch-screen, and every time he’d pretend to use it he’d always shoot his hand & pointed index finger out at the end like he was Fonzie using The Force to ‘press’ the last button or something. Bugged me even as a kid…
I feel like Cosmos is one of those “you had to be there” things. I tried watching it, and I sorta wanted to punch Carl Sagan. It is spectacularly dated, and it has not aged well. And please god, no shitty 1980s Casio synthesizer music. I am looking forward to this, because I want to have that same love for it that everyone else has for the original. Things are looking good for that, since Neil deGrasse Tyson >> Carl Sagan, but if it has a shitty 1980s synthesizer soundtrack, even NdGT won’t be able to save it.
(ETA: I was like 1.5 years old when the original came out, so I kinda missed it.)
Hey now. I quite like Michio Kaku, even if he does spend a bit too much time hanging out with the kooks. On the other hand, if he hadn’t spent time hanging out with the kooks, I wouldn’t have bumped into him–I first heard him when I was working nights and listening to Art Bell (as entertainment, not documentary!).
Well, I’d stop short of wanting to punch Carl, but the rest I’m on board with. When it originally aired, you didn’t have tons of science-oriented cable outlets, and it really was a big thing. But ya had ta be there to appreciate how ground-breaking it appeared at the time.
The main thing I noticed upon re-watching was how Sagan “puffs” many of his initial p’s and b’s, which accounts for the Johny Carson’s caricature of “Billions and Billions.” In “The Persistence of Memory,” I think, he does say the word “billions” quite a few times.
Yep, I can remember as a kid, this is one of the few shows that the whole family looked forward to. (And my parents aren’t really sciencey type folks either.) For me, Cosmos was inspiring.
Anyway, I was half expecting this coming from Fox. 