Posts: 6
From: U.K.
Registered: Sep 2007

posted 01-09-2008 03:07 PM               

---

Hi, I picked up Castle Films' 8mm cine film entitled 'Mission 22 Orbits: The Flight of Astronaut Gordon Cooper'.

The film appears in good order. Wondered if anyone had heard of or seen the film before and whether it would be worth transferring to video/disc?

Posts: 1306
From: Staten Island, NY
Registered: Jun 2007

Posts: 1634
From: Smithfield, Me, USA
Registered: Mar 2005

Posts: 42981
From: Houston, TX
Registered: Nov 1999

posted 01-09-2008 08:18 PM               

---

Not to rain on any potential plans, but if the film is not a NASA production, permission from Castle Films would need to be sought before offering any copies to others.

Transferring the movie to DVD for personal use is of course fine.

Posts: 1368
From: Chester, Cheshire, UK
Registered: May 2001

posted 01-10-2008 02:14 AM               

---

In my experience the Castle Films were assembled from standard NASA footage made available to Castle at the time. As such the same material can almost certainly be found (in much higher quality) on Spacecraft Films' Mercury DVD.

But that's not to say that the Castle Film isn't worth owning (or even transferring); I have about 120 8mm and Super 8 space films, ranging from a Sputnik film to the launch of STS-1. Video superseded 8mm at this point and the format became obsolete; as such 8mm home films provide a brilliant social record of the golden era of space exploration.

From the box-art to the grainy images of the films themselves, these films serve to remind just when this happened and what a different world it was then.

If you do decide to pursue the rest of the Castle series it can be an expensive set to complete but it's a fun project for a year or two.