"From the Earth to the Moon" on Blu-ray July 16th (1 Viewer)

[Jeff Flugel]

July 16 is also 50 years to the day of the launch of Apollo 11. But I too would have preferred an early June release of the new Blu-ray set. I'm so hyped up about everything Apollo and space program that I need to watch From the Earth to the Moon in the lead up now, on my old signature WS DVDs. And then, I hope to binge watch at least the first 6 episodes of the new Blu-ray set upon my receipt of it. Hopefully in time for the 20th of July.

I watched the CNN airing of Apollo 11 last Sunday and like everyone else was blown away by it. I'll get the Blu of that also. I was mildly perturbed that they didn't show archival images of Dr. Werner Von Braun in Apollo 11, except for showing the back of his head in one scene, presumably for stupid political sensitivities in 2019. You simply can't rewrite history. They did show Johnny Carson and Hugh O'Brien among the celebrities with LBJ at the launch. And they couldn't avoid showing Von Braun's fellow WW2 German, Von Neuman, the launch pad crew supervisor (jokingly called "der Fuhrer" by the astronauts themselves), in the sequences showing the astronauts getting into the command module capsule.

Smithsonian channel also has a new four part series Apollo's Moon Shot currently airing. PBS Nova has just rerun the Neil Armstrong bio, First Man on the Moon, and the truly great 4 part BBC 2005 docudrama Space Race. And PBS also has the new and stunning 3 part series Chasing the Moon premiering on July 8.

Good stuff, Randall! I'll have to track some of those documentaries down...

It must have been such an exciting time to be alive and watching it all happen back in '69. I was alive then, but not yet two years old, and certainly not cognizant of what was going on in the wide world yet.

 

[Jason_V]

Long ago, I had the DVD set of the mini-series and watched one, maybe two episodes. I'm very much looking forward to this new set (especially at this price) so I can give the series the due it deserves.

 

[BobO'Link]

Good stuff, Randall! I'll have to track some of those documentaries down...

It must have been such an exciting time to be alive and watching it all happen back in '69. I was alive then, but not yet two years old, and certainly not cognizant of what was going on in the wide world yet.

It was absolutely amazing! Watching the lead up from Project Mercury to Gemini and then the Apollo program. I don't know what the adults thought but I loved every minute of it and feel supremely privileged to have seen the majority of it as it happened. I was too young to notice the early Mercury flights but starting in 1960 I was 5 and payed attention as it was space exploration and that was neat!

 

[Nelson Au]

Looking forward to the release too!

I didn’t know about some of these new PBS shows airing. I’ll have to check them out, thanks Randall.

I have the Apollo 11 Blu Ray and was saving it to view leading up to the anniversary date. I’ve not seen it yet. Nor have I seen First Man yet, I have that Blu Ray too. And I have a bunch of the Space Films DVDs that have footage of each series, Gemini and Apollo and the moon landing. And I have not watched the Blu Ray Edition of For All Mankind yet.

I was alive then too. So I’ve seen it. But as a kid then, it was truly amazing, but I was too young to realize the feat it was. I just grew up looking forward to watching the next Apollo launch on TV. I did watch Armstrong with my parents on a small color TV that evening as he set foot on the moon. A few years later I was home from school and watched the LEM launch from the surface of the moon. It was an amazing time, and I grew up taking it for granted. It wasn’t till the 90’s I realized fully it was a real Space Race. Even though I’d heard about that. I thought it was truly an effort to go to the Moon for scientific reasons and because it was something Man always wanted to do. To Boldly Go for real.

I loved the space program. Not enough to collect all the mission patches and etc. But it was an amazing era.

 

[Flashgear]

Oh, these guys (astronauts) were some kind of folk hero to us kids in the '60s! I can remember watching the launch of Gemini 3 (Gus Grissom, John Young) in March 1965 at school. It helped that the teachers were eager to see the launches live on TV, and thus we never missed any launches during school hours, sometimes also seeing the orbital rendezvous and spacewalks live at school! This was the first manned Gemini mission and as they were riding the Titan 2 ICBM for the very first time to orbit, and the Titan had only been designed originally as a booster to deliver H bombs to the Soviet Union, everybody was worried that the Titan might explode on live TV. Well, that left us all as a class of 8 and 9 year olds praying on our knees (literally) at the behest of the Nuns who led us in a hurried prayer just before liftoff. Those were the times!

The heroes we were praying for...Gus Grissom and John Young of Gemini 3...had he not died in the tragic Apollo one fire of January 1967, we would likely see Gus Grissom's name in history as the first man on the moon. John Young would indeed go on to walk on the moon as commander of Apollo 16 in 1972. Young was also the first man to pilot the space shuttle in 1981...

Ed White and James McDivitt in the follow up mission, Gemini 4, June 1965...

Ed White as the first American to "walk" in space...June 3, 1965...Ed White also died in the tragic Apollo one fire of January 1967. Perhaps had fate been kinder to him, he would have been the second man to walk on the moon.

Gemini 6 (Wally Schirra, Tom Stafford) and Gemini 7 (Frank Borman, Jim Lovell) rendezvous within one foot of each other at about 17000 mph, December 1965...

Splashdowns were also carried live on TV...Schirra and Stafford return to earth, recovered by the USS Ticonderoga...

And aren't you glad this happened? Ed White and James McDivitt shake hands with the first man in space, Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin at the 1965 Paris air show...VP Hubert Humphrey looking on...within 18 months both Ed White and Yuri Gagarin would be dead in the very dangerous pursuit of early space exploration...joining the pantheon of fallen space heroes, but here joining hands joyfully across the havoc of cold war confrontation...

These guys were among the real heroes...as kids we felt that we were also kind of following the Gemini program by watching I Dream of Jeannie, with fictional astronauts Tony and Roger...I Dream of Jeannie premiered that very fall of 1965...

Of course, it certainly helped when the great Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier in 1947, appeared on I Dream of Jeannie as himself...a renowned supersonic test pilot and fighter ace in WW2 who could have been an astronaut had he wanted to be, as depicted in the Tom Wolfe bestselling book The Right Stuff and the 1986 feature film...Chuck Yeager, obviously delighted to meet Barbara Eden during filming of season one's Bigger Than a Breadbox...

And with Hayden Rorke and Larry Hagman in front of an F-102 Delta Dagger jet fighter at Andrews AFB...the very same place that Chuck Yeager first flew past mach one in 1947, at the then Muroc AFB...

 

[CraigF]

July 16 is the closest release date to July 20, the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. As such, I think the release date is perfect.

Maybe from that point of view. But from a practical POV, like acquistion and actual watching, it's not the best marketing IMO. For things like this, getting the year right is usually good enough for marketing. That's why I suggested the BDs may not have been planned until "recently", when they saw public interest in this field was higher than suspected (Apollo 11 movie).

If you're into various Apollo stuff, you may have noticed that lots of the reasonably-priced 50th Anniversary stuff pretty much sold out months ago...it was ready to go when 2019 hit. I got my 50th Ann. stuff together last year in fact, that's when I assembled my Apollo 11 "shrine" (just some stuff I got back in '69, plus a newish Saturn V model, all on top of a corner bass trap in HT room) and separated out all my related discs (mostly DVD docs).

I do not remember Shepard's flight clearly, though I was 5 and remember plenty before that, so I don't know why. But I do remember Glenn's flight, it was a big deal. I tore all the Mercury and Gemini sections out of National Geographic (best pics!) and Life (bigger!). Still have it all, about all I have left that survived childhood. I lived in a foreign country, no TV, and we used to borrow U.S. newsreels (yes, they still made them then, and I thought they were really good) so I saw stuff in 16mm instead of umm...TV rez, also the Apollo fire. Then it was back to uncensored land for regular broadcasts. But the actual Apollo 11 landing, I only saw on a teensy B&W TV at the cottage.

 

[Jasper70]

Just finished a rewatch of my DVD set. Great miniseries. I cheated and skipped the last episode, didn’t really care for it much.
On a side note, is there an HD version of I Dream of Jeannie? I haven’t heard of one but with all of the various streams these days just thought I’d ask.

 

[Doug Wallen]

Just put in a pre-order for this at BB with $15 in Reward certificates. Looking forward to rewatching this one.

 

[Nelson Au]

PBS American Experience is airing a three part, 6 hour series Chasing the Moon now. The first part is looking really good with footage like Randall has posted above. I see the blu ray will be available on July 9th. I’ll be picking it up too.

 

[Yee-Ming]

I suppose there's no likelihood of a UHD release? Don't really want to end up triple-dipping this (I have the original DVDs, didn't get the 16:9 ones).

 

[Doug Wallen]

Received my copy this past Friday the 12th. Obviously Best Buy is on the ball.

I am no video expert and I only viewed the series as originally aired on HBO, I have watched the first two episodes and I am impressed with the widescreen version. I have not seen the widescreen DVD's so I cannot make a comparison. I like what I have seen so far.

 

[Nelson Au]

Today is the day, 50 years ago Apollo 11 launched on its historic mission from the Earth to the Moon. I haven’t looked to see if there is a specific thread on this event so I thought I’d post here. I was one of the kids who saw it. So it’s amazing to me to think it was that long ago. It’s amazing to look at the vintage footage and think about how crude the technology was to make it happen. But also it’s amazing to think so much technology came out of the space program that benefits us today.

There’s a tracker website that you can view to watch the mission real-time. I looked at it a bit this morning. It could get to be a bit boring between the big stuff.

Apolloinrealtime.org/11/

And I see other sites like CBS news is live-streaming the original broadcast. Can’t do better then Walter Chronkite. I’ve not looked at it yet, but I will. I see YouTube is doing the live stream.

My copies of From The Earth To The Moon and Chasing The Moon are supposed to arrive today. I look forward to seeing the new Blu Ray of From The Earth to the Moon.

 

[Robert Crawford]

I am no video expert and I only viewed the series as originally aired on HBO, I have watched the first two episodes and I am impressed with the widescreen version. I have not seen the widescreen DVD's so I cannot make a comparison. I like what I have seen so far.

I viewed the first episode and it's a big improvement over the 2005 DVD set. Furthermore, the Dolby Atmos track is impressive.

 

[Nelson Au]

My copy arrived today! But the outer sleeve was all crumpled.

 

[Sam Favate]

Got my copy yesterday. So glad to have this on blu-ray. It's my favorite mini-series of all time.

 

[BobO'Link]

Mine hasn't arrived yet - that's OK as during July I participate in a SF/Fantasy movie watching "challenge" on another forum so don't know that I'd watch it until August anyway...

Maybe some of you knew this. I don't recall seeing it anywhere else so here it is...

I did some reading about this release and discovered that even though the series was first broadcast in 4:3 it was actually filmed in 1.78:1. The visual effects were produced for 4:3 and with the later WS DVD release all they did was repurpose the 4:3 master to 16x9 - and it showed with some scenes badly cropped. For this release they went back and re-created *all* of the visual effects in 16:9 to make a true WS product. It's not cropped FS like before. Knowing that makes me even more excited to get this release.

 

[BobO'Link]

Here's a very nice article on the software that made the moon shot and landing possible:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-11-had-a-hidden-hero-software-11563153001?mod=rsswn

 

[KeithDA]

My copies of From The Earth To The Moon and Chasing The Moon are supposed to arrive today

BBC Four has been broadcasting the 6 episodes of CTM in 2 episode chunks over the past two nights (the last two are on tonight). I'm really enjoying it, although there is much (expected) overlap between this, FTETTM and Nasa's Greatest Missions.

What do folks think about this new series? To my mind it appears a bit more political and revelatory... (particularly regarding Chuck Yeager and the links to the civil rights movement..) Looking forward to the last two parts tonight.

 

[Nelson Au]

My replacement copy of FTETTM arrived and I watched part 1. It does look great! Image clarity and color are a massive improvement. Hairpieces and set details were so much clearer. Though I couldn’t help but feel the image of the live action at times looked cramp from the framing at 16x9. I pulled out the original DVD and took a look. I rewatched the first 20 minutes where we see the guys at the White House discuss going to the moon as the only course to beat the Soviets. Those are mainly headshots of the actors and comparing them from memory of just having seen the Blu Ray, it looks like the lower edge of the image was cropped. Unless they had image available on the sides, the 4x3 image is already a full headshot with some shots, so I wondered if they were able to zoom in less if there was image available on the sides. The freedom 7 sequence seemed a bit less cramped.

The new CGI effects were mostly great, I really didn’t know they made that effort, as in the style of Star Trek The Next Generation of recreating the original effects. Though I see they made some changes with some of the shots to add movements or change some of the movements. I look forward to watching the rest of the series.

One last thing, the video of the JFK speech to Congress in 1961 looked better without the video processing on the DVD. The Blu Ray appeared to soften the black and white image. He was such a great orator! Really liked watching his speech at Rice University for the ‘We Choose to go to the Moon’ lecture, as it’s so inspiring. Not to get political.

Keith, I didn’t think Chasing the Moon was too political. It was showing what the times were like. I liked the film as it showed things I’d not seen before.

 

[RMajidi]

Here's a very nice article on the software that made the moon shot and landing possible:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-11-had-a-hidden-hero-software-11563153001?mod=rsswn

Great article. Thanks for posting it, Howie. I’ll share it with my programming students to hopefully inspire them.