There are a ton of rebroadcasts scheduled for all the NatGeo channels including NatGeo HD and NatGeo Wild. And according to TheWrap.com, NatGeo will include a re-air on Monday with extra footage.
*"FOX and National Geographic Channel have set a two-night premiere for “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” to air March 9 and 10, the networks announced Monday.
The premiere will start at 9 p.m. ET Sunday March 9 on FOX. The same episode will air with extra footage and special features on National Geographic channel on March 10 at 10 p.m…"*
Yeah, and they’re so much better because the focus on important things like Ancient Aliens, which I bet this Comos thingy will be too timid to address!
Put me in the “not a NDT fan” camp. But I’ll give it a chance. Definitely loved the original back in the day.
Sadly it looks like I’ll have to wait a bit longer. It’ll air in Germany (and dubbed) I think tomorrow night. I haven’t seen any mention of a streamed web simulcast tonight so I’m assuming there isn’t one, but if I’m wrong do send the link my way.
Agree, Sagan could have told Bruno’s story so much better. His telling of the story of the story of Hypatia still sticks in my mind after 30 years.
Maybe Sagan’s version sparked my imagination so strongly that anything else is anticlimatic. When Sagan said “We are all made of star-stuff” it sent shivers through me.
I’ll give it more time. But all I could think of at the end of the first half hour was this:
Something odd when I was watching this tonight. At about 9:47, NDT was talking about the first creature to walk onto land. He said something like ‘I’ll bet it felt like…’ and it went quiet. I could see his lips moving, but the sound cut out or something. Anyone else see this? Anyone know what he said?
I thought it was great, and speaking as a huge fan of the original. I found it inspiring. And, as a scientist myself, made me proud to be part of the family of scientists.
Totally agreed. This isn’t so much for us, the fans and true believers, as it is for everyone else. And IMHO it succeeded in being a continuation of Sagan’s pro-science manifesto that was accessible to the average person.
We really need to cherish the fact that so much attention is again being brought to the case for reason and scepticism, and giving people the sense of wonder that nature holds.
This series is breathing new life into Sagan’s legacy, 18 years after his death. What more could you ask for?
Before I move on to the sloppy content, what really **ruined **it for me was that unlike the original *Cosmos *-- which was lovingly broadcast on PBS – this thing was absolutely *drowning *in innumerable and incredibly disrupting commercials!
It very much seemed that NGT was rushing like crazy to get something said before the next mind-bogglingly awful ad. Gone was the lushly engaging, warmly contemplative pace of Sagan’s approach, and in its place here was NGT speeding to get a tweet-length bit of cheap, inaccurate prose out before Fox cut him off again.
As to the content, why the hell spend so much time grossly exaggerating the importance of Bruno, with a cheap-ass cartoon (it doesn’t deserve the term ‘animation’), no less? Just to get a bit of scientifically irrelevant Church-bashing in?
But to me, the worst part was the treatment of the Big Bang. Completely ignoring the actual science, they ignorantly illustrated the Big Bang as an explosion, and worse yet, NGT referred to it the same stupid way!
Idiots!! The Big Bang was **NOT **an explosion, and in fact that view is one of the first things any potential cosmologist has to unlearn before they begin their studies in earnest.
Furthermore, NGT didn’t even *mention *inflation!
Sagan had an excuse, as Guth’s idea was just barely coming into public knowledge by the time the original Cosmos was broadcast. But there’s no excuse for this remade piece of dreck!
Yeah, my wife asked me what I thought of it when the credits were rolling, and I replied:
“It wasn’t as good as Sagan’s was, for me. But they didn’t make this one to make the magic happen for the people who had seen the original, it’s so the magic will happen for a new set of people.”
And their picking Blind Willie Johnson to be the audible bed while they passed Voyager made me cry. That tells me they’ve some idea what they’re doing.
Huge fan of the original, was 13 when it came out. This one was ok, but again, I realize it’s not for someone like me who is already familiar with current scientific theories and ideas. Also, I feel that this one, is much like the first episode of the original which was a jumping point for the rest of the series. In the first episode of the original, it was pretty much a broad overview of what was going to be covered. Subsequent episodes dealt with specific topics. I’m hoping that this new version will follow that lead and more-detailed episodes will follow. And for those of you criticizing NDT, please go back and watch the original. Carl Sagan spends a LOT of time waving his hand around not saying anything while late-70s tv special effects go by. There’s a lot of silent gaps. And this is from someone who watches the entire original series on DVD at least once a year because I love it so much.
I was a huge fan of the original, and it was a major influence on my life. I thought this new version was excellent. More importantly, my sixteen year old kid was spellbound by it.
I actually choked up a bit at the end when NDT told his story about Sagan. And it was a wonderful way of bringing Sagan into this series and creating a connecting thread between them. It also made me like NDT more.
The funniest thing was the commercial for “Noah” right in the middle. I wonder what genius thought it would be a good idea to pitch a bible story in the middle of this show?
I have a DVR so the commercials didn’t bother me as much, but man did it chop up the narrative. However, this show will probably find a wide audience on blu-ray, where it will have a much better presentation.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if the additional material on the blu-ray was actual coursework? Watch the show, then dive deep with the extra material on the blu-ray if you want to expand your learning.
I probably should have expected that it was going to be a little light on real content but I still felt a little disappointed. I was kind of expecting a dagwood and got an amusebouche instead. I, also, was bemused and disappointed by the Bruno bit. I guess they were really trying to drive home the importance of imagination but it felt rather gratuitous and cheap to me.
I will still try to watch the other episodes but maybe not right away on Sunday.
Before I begin, I should mention that I was a young teen when the original came out, and it entranced me. I looked forward to this with great anticipation.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson did a great job. I enjoy listening to him from time to time because of his thoughts and the subject matter, but often find something a bit off-putting about his speech. It’s difficult to put it into words, but I guess the closest I can come is that it often sounds like he’s pontificating. Tyson did a wonderful job as host/narrator. If we didn’t already know he had a great deal of love for this project, his story of meeting Sagan as a 17-year-old made that clear. He brought his best effort, and his delivery and speech were engaging and passionate without being over-the-top.
It’s faster paced. It pretty much HAS to be faster paced. Times have changed, and it’s arguable that by today’s standards it was not overly rushed.
The production values were top-notch. Loved the effects, the music wasn’t Vangelis but it was just fine. Everything about the production says people with money, talent, and passion created it. Except perhaps. . .
The animated recreations of people/historic events. When I saw it in the previews, I thought it was an interesting and perhaps ill-advised stylistic choice. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. Just kind of ugly and drab. If they’d just saturated the color palette more, even that little bit would have helped. Oh well. I’ll live with it. It’s a relatively small part of the program, after all. I just hope that it doesn’t turn off others.
It’s likely nothing will ever grab me like the original “Cosmos” did because I’m not a teenager, and I think we all know programs like that don’t come along often. Still, it’s obvious they put forth a strong effort to live up to the original, and I’ll keep watching. That such a program is on the air, and on Fox, not some expanded basic cable station, is worth celebrating.
I liked it fine. I don’t think I even watched Cosmos in its first run. It was a space documentary and Sagan was one of those scientists who narrate those things. When I caught an episode here and there most of the concepts were things I’d already read about. I didn’t realize I was witnessing a history making production at the time.
I totally want a Spaceship of Imagination. When I was a kid and still believed in heaven, I imagined my heaven being just like that, zooming around the universe.
My 16 year old daughter was also spellbound. She’s part of the next generation of scientist, up and coming. It was great watching her become mesmerized, like I had been by Carl Sagan decades before.
