Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets and Beyond (BBC 2004)

Space Ship Pegasus at Europa

Directed by Joseph Ahearne

Even though it never made it into my "currently-reading" sidebar, and I haven't blogged about it yet, I just got finished reading Andy Weir's The Martian, soon to be a major motion-picture starring Matt Damon. In case I don't get around to blogging it soon or ever, it is amazing! Really good, essentially contemporary hard-science fiction is so rare; I enjoyed the hell out of it, and the trailers for the movie look like they are going to follow the story almost slavishly. (There's one thing I spotted in the trailer that leads me to think they're going to change something about the main character's background to up the emotional ante, so to speak.) Anyway, when I finished it, I was wanting more, and I thought about an old faux-documentary I saw about a decade ago about a "Grand Tour" of the Solar System, and a few minutes' research found it, the subject two-part faux-documentary from BBC. I downloaded it from Youtube, put it on my portable hard drive, and USB'd it to the BluRay player, and voila!, it plays just like a DVD!

The Great Martian War: 1913-1917 (2013)

Directed by Mike Slee

As you may have gathered, I’m sometimes ‘way behind the times in watching things, even things I want to see, sometimes things I have queued up to see – such as this, which has been sitting on my TiVo for at least a couple of weeks since it aired on BBC-America.  Turns out, however, I’m even further behind than that, seeing as I discover now that this movie actually debuted last year on The History Channel.  Actually, the fact that I missed it there is not that surprising to me.  Even though – more probably, because – I’m a historian, I actually watch very little of The History Channel.  Yes, there’s some good stuff on there.  There’s also some very bad stuff.  (That’s besides the ridiculous stuff like Ancient Aliens and the uh-why-is-this-on-The-History-Channel? stuff like Ice Road Truckers.)  And of course, it seems that the closer the subject matter is to something of scholarly historical interest to me, the more superficial and downright mangled their treatment of it is.  So I just don’t watch very much.  And hence The Great Martian War flew entirely beneath my radar last year.