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

With Classic Show's Return, The Sky's the Limit

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2. Cosmos 1 Flash Website (1440 by 1080p Capture)
6. Apollo 11 Address Joint Session of Congress after Historic Flight Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts introduced the Apollo 11 crew members before a Joint Meeting of Congress. The moment marked the culmination of a determined American effort to defeat the Soviet Union in a “space race” that began with the launch of Sputnik by the Soviets in 1957. “We are honoring today three men who represent the best in America and whose coordinated skill, fantastic daring, and visionary drive have made history that constitutes a turning point of paramount importance in the journey of mankind,” Speaker McCormack proclaimed. Each astronaut—Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins—addressed the enthusiastic audience about their successful moon landing on July 20, 1969. Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, acknowledged the role of the House and Senate in the successful mission. “It was here, in these Halls that our venture really began”—a reference to the legislation that established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the funding of the space program by Congress. Before the conclusion of the meeting, the honorees presented Speaker McCormack and Vice President Spiro Agnew with two American flags that had flown over the respective chambers before being brought onto the moon.
7. With Classic Show's Return, The Sky's the Limit
11. Cosmos: Possible Worlds Companion Book Cover
12. New Cosmos - Key Image
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Launch Point Hello and welcome to my creative research project Star Stuff: An Exploratory Case Study of the Cosmos Television Franchise. I have completed this project to conclude my master’s in York and Toronto Metropolitan Universities’ jointly ran Communication and Culture graduate program. This project is an examination of three seasons of the television show Cosmos and the legacy of space exploration it is in conversation with. It has been designed in the open-source multimedia platform Scalar. This program can legally showcase a diverse range of often copyrighted media content. It does this by creating windows linking to their location elsewhere on the Internet rather than hosting them natively.

The project looks at over 60 years of history by documenting the space exploration missions and science communication initiatives surrounding the 40 years between the first and latest entries in the Cosmos series. So, why should you care about the Cosmos television franchise? The original Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, hosted by astrophysicist Carl Sagan in 1980, was one of the most successful educational documentaries in the history of American Public Broadcasting. It originally aired on PBS and was the channel’s most watched television series, drawing in roughly 750 million viewers worldwide throughout the 1980s. The two new seasons of the show hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson are titled Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and Cosmos: Possible Worlds. They were released in 2014 and 2020 on Fox and National Geographic. In 2014, the first run of A Spacetime Odyssey broadcasts was watched by 135 million people in 125 countries alone. That made it National Geographic's biggest show ever at that time. The release of Possible Worlds in 2020 expanded this audience to reach 172 countries.

There is a rich history of scientific research and media production surrounding these three seasons of Cosmos with Sagan and Tyson. This project will guide you through that history and introduce you to a cast of other interesting real-life characters along the way. There are two major public figures discussed in this project that I would like to draw your attention to, Ann Druyan and Seth MacFarlane. Druyan is Sagan’s widow and co-author of the original Cosmos. She has continued writing, producing, and directing some of the episodes in the new seasons after his death. MacFarlane is best known as the creator of the mature animated television comedies Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show. He pitched the new Cosmos series to Fox and produced both new seasons, making this revival of the show possible as a result.

These documentaries converge at the crossroads of science, spirituality, and politics. They ask us to reflect on what the findings of cosmology can tell us about our own lives and imagine what humanity’s future in space might look like. The study I have conducted here touches upon many facets of human experience. It is definitely worth your time as a result.

Before you get started, I would like to give you a brief introduction to the structure of the project. The project is divided into eight parts displayed at the bottom of this page. These include six sections covering different eras of historical research, a short essay titled "Who Owns (the) Cosmos? An Epilogue, Prologue, and Intermission", and a 30-page academic companion paper that I have written about my experience creating the project. As the subtitle for my "Who Owns (the) Cosmos" essay suggests, this project has a nonlinear structure. The six historical sections are placed in chronological order, but you can view any of these parts at the beginning, middle, or end of your experience. You can also leave and come back to this project at any time. The historical sections of the project contain videos that can be up to an hour long, but I have clipped them down to be much shorter. The video’s progress bar will still show the full hour, but don’t worry, I have used Scalar’s annotation feature to make it start and stop at the time I have specified.

I encourage you to follow your interests and impulses while exploring the project. If you’re becoming bored, do not hesitate to skim through it or move on to something completely different. There is no correct way to experience this case study of the Cosmos franchise. So, please feel free to play around and have fun!