posted 08-12-2007 09:44 PM               

One frustration the guy who wrote the "Televising The Space Age" thesis touched on in his source remarks was how difficult it is even for researchers to view any of the CBS coverage by going through the network's archives.

posted 08-16-2007 06:08 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by dom:
Is the "Walter Cronkite's Man on the Moon" DVD the same documentary as the 1989 CBS video?

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posted 01-03-2008 04:50 PM               

I'm wondering if anyone who might have this DVD and the earlier 1989 CBS video "Man on Moon" could tell me if there is more on the video or are they roughly the same?

For example I was disappointed there wasn't any of the Cronkite/Shirra/Arthur C. Clarke banter the broadcast was famous for!

posted 02-27-2008 10:15 PM               

The program on the DVD has a 1981 copyright date and looks like something that aired on CBS just before the Shuttle program began (I'll try to look it up in my copies of "Special Edition" tomorrow in the office; that may give me a title and an air date). The VHS program is a direct-to-video program that was released in 1989, and has a lot of latter-day reflections from Walter Cronkite on it.

As for content between the two, the VHS program has nothing but Apollo 11 on it. The DVD program is pretty much a sum-total review of the program from Mercury through Apollo 17. There's a good bit of Apollo 11 material in the DVD program, but much of it is different from what you get on the VHS program. On the other hand, you do get to see extracts of footage from other missions, including some neat CBS launch videotape from Gemini (including an Atlas-Agena launch or two), the Apollo 8 launch as carried by CBS, and even some television pictures from the Apollo 8 recovery I had never seen.

Some of the Apollo 11 stuff duplicates what's on the videotape, but there are some other things I hadn't seen, including some of the Heywood Broun interviews from Disneyland on the day of the landing, and a fragment of Robert Heinlein's reaction (no Arthur C. Clarke, lamentably).

The DVD program is much longer (about 75 minutes or so) than the VHS program (about 55 mins.) It also has some bonus material, including the NASA films on Apollo 13 and STS 1, and a present-day interview with a helicopter crewman from the Apollo 14 recovery.

posted 03-04-2008 08:03 AM               

Of note to some folks who have written that the "Man on the Moon" titles and theme music have haunted them for years, you get to see that at the very end of the program.

posted 03-05-2008 12:49 PM               

Also, I can't recommend the book "10:56:20" highly enough for anyone interested in TV coverage of the first moonlanding.

This is a beautifully produced limited edition book released in 1970 that contains a full transcript of the CBS broadcast plus screenshots of all the main coverage.

posted 05-06-2009 04:33 PM               

Both seem to be very different... with more material on the video edition - which is the one on YouTube I think?

posted 05-06-2009 09:59 PM               

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Originally posted by dom:
Now we are back to old question above: Is this new DVD re-issue the 1989 'Man on the Moon' video or just a repackaged edition of the already available 'Walter Cronkite's Man on the Moon' DVD.

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quote:

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Any chance CBS, ABC or NBC will eventually release their full minute-by-minute coverage of this historic (TV) event on DVD soon or are they saving it for the 50th anniversary?

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(In the case of the CBS Apollo 11 coverage, you would also run into some rights and clearances issues because of a documentary that aired during the coverage; it made pretty extensive use of clips from motion pictures and other works in order to put the moon landing into some cultural context.)

One other thing, and I would once have called myself a heretic for saying this: an awful lot of the minute-by-minute coverage can get tedious to watch. Not a lot happens in a good bit of it. The Apollo 8 coverage, for instance, has a lot of Cronkite just sitting at a desk filling air time between transmissions from the spacecraft and Western Electric commercials. Please don't get me wrong: I love the stuff, and I'd buy it if it became available, but even the die-hard footage collector has to restrain the urge to hit the "fast forward" button.

Be that as it may, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point an edited "highlights" DVD set became available, something on the order of what A&E did with the NBC coverage in 1989 or the PBS rebroadcast of the ABC coverage in 1994. Something like that, of four or six hours' duration, could plausibly include enough material to keep we enthusiasts content but hold the interest of a general audience. Maybe it'll happen. I would love it if it did. I do know that good chunks of the as-aired CBS coverage is out there circulating among the tape-trading community, too.

posted 05-19-2009 07:21 PM               

It is a POOR copy of the original anniversary program. Quality is like your watching TV on an old analog TV with rabbit ears type quality. A friend watching with me thought they pointed a camcorder at a TV and recorded part of the program.

• Disc 1 has the original documentary and includes the NASA documentaries "Houston we have a problem..." and The Space Shuttle: A Remarkable Flying Machine. Also included is an extra feature, a very brief interview with a Navy member who was on one of the recovery copters during the splashdown of Apollo 14 (not a frogman).

• Disc 2: NASA documentaries. Twenty Five Years of Progress: Part 1 - "The Birth of NASA" - Part 2 "The Moon - A Goal". Also on this disc are "The Eagle has Landed"
  and "Time of Apollo" narrated by Burgess Meredith (this is well done). Extra Feature: Celebration at the Houston Astrodome to welcome home the astronauts.

If you have ever seen the metal box set of NASA's 40th anniversary edition then you have pretty much seen the quality. If they would have done a disc with the CBS coverage of the launch, landing and EVA it would have been really been the ticket. Even if they would have had more of the worldwide reaction coverage it would have been more interesting. Could have and should have been done much better. Watchable, I guess.

posted 07-17-2009 09:06 PM               

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Originally posted by Orthon:
I've been trying for quite a while to get the Walter Cronkite coverage of Apollo 4.

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Cronkite (calmly): "The building's shaking."

Pause... you can hear the roar in the background.

Cronkite (getting more and more excited): "The roar is terrific - the building's shaking."

Pause.

Cronkite: "This big blast window is shaking, we're holding it with our hands. Look at that... ROCKET GO!"

posted 07-18-2009 06:41 AM               

Pellegrino & Stoff's Chariots for Apollo has several pages about this mockup.

Apparently two Japanese businessmen visited the Cradle of Aviation Museum and talked with the museum director about borrowing an LM: "We're designing a special building to house the vehicle. We want to put two actors dressed in space suits inside and lower the vehicle one hundred feet to a simulated lunar landscape. Two actors come out and walk around. They go back inside, and then we raise the ascent stage to the ceiling."

While at first chuckling about their naivete, the museum director eventually got them in touch with Grumman, who would eventually "completely rebuild the old CBS TV mock-up so it could handle an elevator hoist," and make other cosmetic changes on-the-cheap: They used a strobe light from a school bus as the rendezvous light, some metallic film from a window-dressing place for the gold foil, and the bulkheads from some tanks which were about to be discarded for antenna dishes.

posted 07-18-2009 11:15 AM               

Somewhere out there is a Powerpoint show that has some neat pictures of some of the hardware, including some of the mockups and a view of the "lunar conveyor belt" that was used in tandem with models and Chromakey (or "guy in front of the weather map" technology) to provide a really cool simulation of lunar orbit, descent, and so forth.

Also neat in the footage are the remotes from North American Rockwell and Grumman, where a correspondent would be in a mockup of the real thing with one of the project pilots (Leo Krupp at NA Rockwell, and Scott MacLeod at Grumman). They'd be able to show precisely what was going on at the time and talk about what the astronauts were doing. There are some stills of these guys in the color section of "10:56:20" and it gives you an idea of what that was like.

posted 07-19-2009 06:56 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by alanh_7:
I seem to recall watching the CBS coverage of "A Man on the Moon" that they had a pretty decent full size mockup on the Lunar Module they used to do simulations during the moonwalks and also explain technical details. As I recall it was a fairly accurate mockup. Does anyone know what happened to it?

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posted 07-20-2009 05:50 AM               

CBS landed on the Moon about five seconds later. The "Lunar Contact" light goes on right about the same time Buzz Aldrin calls out "lights on."

Joel Banow, who was the director at CBS for this broadcast, later explained that he used a copy of the Apollo 11 flight plan as his script, and he got all his cues from it. Of course, we know what ended up happening during the flight, and for about 20 seconds there were quite a few nervous people at CBS. They later re-edited the tape so that replays would be in sync with the actual events, but copies of the original are still out there, and you can find it on YouTube as well.

(There was a great November 2000 presentation at NASM with Cronkite, Banow, CBS producer Robert Wussler, Julian Scheer and NBC's James Kitchell, and this was among the stories told that evening. A partial transcript was reprinted in a 2002 issue of "Quest," and it's highly recommended.)

posted 07-20-2009 06:51 AM               

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Originally posted by pittendreigh:
I'd love to see the video - haven't seen it since I saw it with my Dad in 1967.

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