Star Stuff: An Exploratory Case Study of the Cosmos Television Franchise

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage & Sagan’s Antinuclear War Activism

You have just arrived in the Cosmos: A Personal Voyage & Sagan’s Antinuclear War Activism section of the project. This section is focused on the original Cosmos series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which debuted on September 28th, 1980, and Sagan’s antinuclear war activism that would follow the show’s release. Prior to the release of Cosmos, Sagan was already a known public figure. This was partly due to his frequent appearances on The Tonight Show with Jon Carson, and the popularity of his 1977 book, The Dragons of Eden. However, it was the success of the Cosmos series on PBS that led him to acquire international celebrity status. Prior to the show’s premiere, Sagan appeared on The Tonight Show with Jon Carson. In the interview, they discuss why the show was on PBS and not a commercial network, the difference between the cosmos and the universe, and other cosmological concepts covered in the program. Here is a six-minute clip from that interview for you to watch if you’re curious.

Prior to the release of Cosmos, Sagan would write a short essay titled, Cosmos: An Appreciation. In this document, he discusses that he was inspired to create the show after the underwhelming media coverage of the Viking space probe missions he worked on. Here’s the direct quotation from that document. 

COSMOS began during the Viking exploration of Mars, the first long-term mission to the surface of another planet. B. Gentry Lee, the Viking Director of Mission Testing and Data Analysis and I were unhappy with the mass media's tepid depiction of this historic expedition. In late 1976, Lee and I decided to form a production company dedicated to communicating science in an accurate and exciting way. Of several offers tendered to us, that of KCET --to produce a thirteen-part television series on astronomy -- seemed by far the most challenging and the most promising. Soon, KCET was soliciting underwriters, Lee and I were interviewing candidate executive producers and talking to scientists, writers, and artists: the project was underway (Sagan, 1980, P. 4).

The premiere of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage would also be accompanied by a companion book release. This book mostly treads the same ground as the television show with some slight deviations for clarity in the absence of visuals. I would now like to present to you the first six minutes of the show. The introduction will provide a glimpse into the narratives, topics, and aesthetic makeup of the program if you haven’t watched it. It may also serve as a nice refresher if it has been a little while since your last viewing.
After Cosmos, Sagan would go on to co-author a book called, Comet, with Ann Druyan in 1985. That release would quickly be followed up by the science fiction novel, Contact, also released in 1985. This novel served as a sort of thought experiment on what a realistic first encounter with intelligent life from another planet might look like. The publisher, Simon and Schuster, provided Sagan with a $2 million advance before the book was written. It went on to sell 1.7 million copies in its first two years.
During the mid-80s, Sagan’s activism against nuclear war intensified. In October 1986, he was arrested while protesting at a nuclear weapons testing site in Nevada. He chronicled the experience a week later on the TV talk show, Larry King Live. The bulk of this interview discusses the United States’ ongoing nuclear weapons testing, despite a Soviet moratorium; President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (also known as Star Wars) that was intended to protect the U.S. against nuclear missile strikes; and the discovery of the nuclear winter theory. It also mentions the Challenger disaster that killed seven NASA astronauts in January of that year, the Soviet Union's own disaster at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant that April, and the recent sinking of a Russian submarine containing nuclear weapons. The 20-minute interview is available below. You can watch as much as you wish. You can then use the blue button at the bottom of the page to continue to the section on the end of the Cold War and the privatization of Cosmos. Alternatively, you can also select another section you might be interested in by returning to the Launch Point or using the drop-down menu at the top of your screen.

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