I was 13 years old when COSMOS premiered on PBS in September of 1980 and amazingly as this may sound it was **THE** TV show to watch every week that year amidst my coterie of friends. Our science teacher pimped the show mercilessly and every week the day after the broadcast we would discuss what might have been mentioned, compare ideas on what we thought about it, and usually have some good laughs aping the wonderful speech habits of Dr. Sagan.
He became one of my heroes, as important as The Bionic Man, Captain Kirk, Peter Gabriel and David Bowie. I promptly had my parents supply me with not only the hardcover book edition, but one of the ubiquitous hooded parka jackets that became Sagan's trademark ... though it took me a few years to warm up to the idea of the turtlenecks. One indication of in what high esteem COSMOS was held in our household is that -- cover your eyes, libertarians -- it was one of the few television shows airing after 7pm that we were "allowed" to watch in our household. My father was a professor of environmental sciences (my mom collaborated as a library archivist at the college which employed him) and was himself smitten not only by Sagan's emphatic encouragement of scientific method, natural sciences, and critical thinking based on empirical observation, but was also an avid classical music fan. No doubt he believed (quite rightly) that Sagan's populist method of teaching science crossed with his frequent use of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Vivaldi might encourage me to toss my Queen and Sex Pistols records into the trash and perhaps choose a life devoted to science.
It didn't quite work out that way, though I did initially choose anthropology as a major when entering college half a decade later, and am sympathetic to the music of Mozart and Vivaldi in particular (the hallowed Vangelis album which contained the show's iconic theme music also found it's way into my library of records, right next to The Clash, Dead Kennedys, and Monty Python) but eventually chucked it all aside after a month of Biology 101, and transferred into Visual & Performing Arts, with an emphasis on Media Studies, video production, and experimental studios. Eventually clips from COSMOS found their way into some of my experimental video works, and one of Sagan's brilliant lines opened up the Master's Thesis in Studio Arts that I composed in 1997: "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition."
I am not sure who coined the phrase, but the most correct thing that can be said about Sagan's prose is that he was incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence. COSMOS is brimming with one interesting sentence after the other, and perhaps his greatest contribution to the human condition in regards to this show was to demonstrate that science was not necessarily an exercise in applied boredom. Science could be an exciting "personal journey" of discovery, and his enthusiasm for endowing his viewers with a zeal for critical thinking helped me to breeze my way through high school biology & chemistry, which made perfect sense by the time I encountered the ideas presented.
COSMOS also encouraged the young people who witnessed it at the time that science could actually be COOL, and that it was cool to be smart, informed, inquisitive, and open to new ideas. It was also pretty far out television, and during the second year it was on the air as repeats I made a point to always watch the show while stoned on whatever marijuana that I could get my chubby little hands on. We used to joke about Carl Sagan "smoking billions and billions of Quaaludes", so imagine my surprise when it came out after his far to early death at the age of 62 that he was a lifelong cannabis user himself. Just like with chemistry, it makes perfect sense once you think about it, though these days it's almost impossible to watch some of the episodes without relating certain on screen mannerisms as being chocked up to Sagan having probably been completely baked during filming.
One of my favorite moments from the show perhaps speaks most clearly for what endeared him to me: It's during a sequence when he discusses the social hysteria that gripped the earth in 1911 when it became clear that the Earth would pass through the trail of Halley's Comet, composed in part of cyanogen gas. An enterprising mind of the time made "Comet Pills" composed of unspecified substances that would ward off the toxic effects of the cometary residue, and Sagan had managed to find (or have re-created by a clever prop technician from the RPI iEAR studios it was filmed in, where I took a semester of experimental video arts as a scruffy graduate student) a jar of the Comet Pills. He opens the lid, removes one and says, "Think I'll take one for later" and pops it into the pocket of his famous corduroy jacket. Hilarious, but that's Carl Sagan for you, and I have always wondered if it got him off.
10/10: Buy the DVD box set, even though some of the episodes have "updates" that intrude on the purity of the original production, though it helps to prove his cannon that science is a self-correcting process. Even Carl Sagan was bound to his own theory. I like that.
He became one of my heroes, as important as The Bionic Man, Captain Kirk, Peter Gabriel and David Bowie. I promptly had my parents supply me with not only the hardcover book edition, but one of the ubiquitous hooded parka jackets that became Sagan's trademark ... though it took me a few years to warm up to the idea of the turtlenecks. One indication of in what high esteem COSMOS was held in our household is that -- cover your eyes, libertarians -- it was one of the few television shows airing after 7pm that we were "allowed" to watch in our household. My father was a professor of environmental sciences (my mom collaborated as a library archivist at the college which employed him) and was himself smitten not only by Sagan's emphatic encouragement of scientific method, natural sciences, and critical thinking based on empirical observation, but was also an avid classical music fan. No doubt he believed (quite rightly) that Sagan's populist method of teaching science crossed with his frequent use of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Vivaldi might encourage me to toss my Queen and Sex Pistols records into the trash and perhaps choose a life devoted to science.
It didn't quite work out that way, though I did initially choose anthropology as a major when entering college half a decade later, and am sympathetic to the music of Mozart and Vivaldi in particular (the hallowed Vangelis album which contained the show's iconic theme music also found it's way into my library of records, right next to The Clash, Dead Kennedys, and Monty Python) but eventually chucked it all aside after a month of Biology 101, and transferred into Visual & Performing Arts, with an emphasis on Media Studies, video production, and experimental studios. Eventually clips from COSMOS found their way into some of my experimental video works, and one of Sagan's brilliant lines opened up the Master's Thesis in Studio Arts that I composed in 1997: "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition."
I am not sure who coined the phrase, but the most correct thing that can be said about Sagan's prose is that he was incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence. COSMOS is brimming with one interesting sentence after the other, and perhaps his greatest contribution to the human condition in regards to this show was to demonstrate that science was not necessarily an exercise in applied boredom. Science could be an exciting "personal journey" of discovery, and his enthusiasm for endowing his viewers with a zeal for critical thinking helped me to breeze my way through high school biology & chemistry, which made perfect sense by the time I encountered the ideas presented.
COSMOS also encouraged the young people who witnessed it at the time that science could actually be COOL, and that it was cool to be smart, informed, inquisitive, and open to new ideas. It was also pretty far out television, and during the second year it was on the air as repeats I made a point to always watch the show while stoned on whatever marijuana that I could get my chubby little hands on. We used to joke about Carl Sagan "smoking billions and billions of Quaaludes", so imagine my surprise when it came out after his far to early death at the age of 62 that he was a lifelong cannabis user himself. Just like with chemistry, it makes perfect sense once you think about it, though these days it's almost impossible to watch some of the episodes without relating certain on screen mannerisms as being chocked up to Sagan having probably been completely baked during filming.
One of my favorite moments from the show perhaps speaks most clearly for what endeared him to me: It's during a sequence when he discusses the social hysteria that gripped the earth in 1911 when it became clear that the Earth would pass through the trail of Halley's Comet, composed in part of cyanogen gas. An enterprising mind of the time made "Comet Pills" composed of unspecified substances that would ward off the toxic effects of the cometary residue, and Sagan had managed to find (or have re-created by a clever prop technician from the RPI iEAR studios it was filmed in, where I took a semester of experimental video arts as a scruffy graduate student) a jar of the Comet Pills. He opens the lid, removes one and says, "Think I'll take one for later" and pops it into the pocket of his famous corduroy jacket. Hilarious, but that's Carl Sagan for you, and I have always wondered if it got him off.
10/10: Buy the DVD box set, even though some of the episodes have "updates" that intrude on the purity of the original production, though it helps to prove his cannon that science is a self-correcting process. Even Carl Sagan was bound to his own theory. I like that.