Sunday, July 19, 2009

Live from 1969

The History Channel just ran an ad announcing their schedule for Monday, 20 July.

They will run a half-hour program at 8:30 EDT (re-run about three hours later at 8:00 PDT) that is essentially a re-broadcast of the CBS News coverage I watched as a kid.

the actual CBS News/Walter Cronkite coverage of man's first lunar landing. Using minimal editing and leaving the original footage untouched viewers will feel as if they are watching the CBS coverage in July of 1969. While today we know the outcome of Apollo 11's mission it was not a given then. This will become evident watching Walter Cronkite and his colleagues as they watch the historic lunar mission unfold before them.

Afterwards, from 9 to 11, they will run the movie "Moonshot" with the film parts converted to high definition. I can't wait to see that.

Having seen other "as it happened" re-broadcasts (one was of the NBC coverage of the Kennedy assassination that I never saw in real life), this promises to be excellent.

You will also get to see how TV looked back then, and I'll get to see it in color.

(We could not afford a color TV back then. Or, to be more precise, my parents could not afford to save for our college education and have a color TV back then. They made some excellent economic choices.)

1 comment:

Doctor Pion said...

Almost as good, TCM has been showing moon-related movies all day.

The highlight was probably "Destination Moon" (1950) produced by George Pal based on a book (Rocketship Galileo) by Robert Heinlein. TCM argues that it can be considered the first true *science* fiction film. They did a remarkable job getting action-reaction correct, and even found a way to get a Woody Woodpecker film (used to sell the project to other industrialists) into it that also explained how you don't need air for a rocket to work and that there is no sound in space.

They are showing the 12 minute silent film "A Trip to the Moon" (1902) tonight at 8:00 EDT, which won't conflict with the real thing on the History Channel at 8:30. That movie is based on the Jules Verne novel and could be the first EFX film!