I always love this video, and I have been a lifetime dedicated fan of James Burke, but few seem to note that the whole segment didn't have to be timed as there is a cut shortly before the launch. If I recall either James or one of the producers talked about it once. They knew they had to start the last bit 13 seconds before launch and had practiced it repeatedly. At 13 seconds to countdown James nailed it. I'm sure even after practicing it I would have stumbled over a word in the clutch moment!
It would appear that this was the Titan IIIE which launched Voyager 2. They would have had another chance to get the shot about two weeks later when Voyager 1 launched. (Due to quirks of interplanetary orbital mechanics, Voyager 1 got to Jupiter several months before Voyager 2 despite launching second).
The IIIE did indeed have a Centaur stage with a "thermos" full of liquid hydrogen and another with liquid oxygen, but that's not what we see in this clip -- the pillars of fire and smoke come from a pair of solid-fuel boosters that burn for about two minutes, followed by about six more minutes of flight powered by two more stages burning non-cryogenic liquid propellants (hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide) before the Centaur was ignited.
For those wondering, it's actually quite common that two spacecraft launched that way (if two spacecraft are launched, which is not common) would arrive out of order. The reason is that you can think of a "launch window" as really a specific ideal launch time, but a little earlier or later will also work, although being early or later would result in arriving at the destination later. They aim to launch the first spacecraft right at the opening of the window, so if there is any delay they won't run out of time. If it launches "on time", then it actually launched early for the launch window, and takes longer to get there. The second launch right after then launches closer to the actual ideal launch date.
Decades ago, I worked a mission that went up on a Titan IV, and I spent a few weeks at Pad 41 working in the IUS clean room. Riding up and down the tower in the rickety (self operated) elevator was frightening. Walking the gantry and looking out at CCAS, you could see for miles in all directions. Standing under the thrust cones was an amazing experience. Unfortunately, no photos were allowed because it was a classified mission. All I got were a few stupid tee shirts.
About 15 years earlier, I had done some work at the VAB and walked around the Saturn IV that was laying on its side there, just as James Burke had a few years earlier. It wasn't there when I worked the above referenced mission. I'm not sure when they moved it, or where it ended up (but it's not in the "rocket garden" at the Visitor Center).
Do you mean a Saturn IV-B? Those were the third stages of the Saturn V. If so, the complete Saturn V was displayed horizontally outdoors for quite a while. I was in the US in 2018 and stopped by KSC too see a Falcon 9 launch, by then the complete Saturn V was in a building.
If you mean just the Saturn IV (no B), that was the second stage of some early Saturn rocket. I don't know much about those or if one was ever on display.
Sorry about my typo. I meant Saturn V. If you watch the video in the parent article, you'll see James Burke walking around it with the VAB in the background.
Actually... Rockets don't use thermos bottle tanks. Having two surfaces with a vacuum in between, like in a thermos bottle, would be way too heavy. That's why you see these chunks of ice falling at liftoff from cryogenic rockets.
Centaur has balloon tanks which is just very thin metal. It can't even stand on its own without pressure. But no thermos.
I wrote "thermos" in quotes because that's how Burke referred to the propellant tanks.
That said, on the Titan IIIE at launch, there was an second outer surface around the Centaur -- the payload fairing -- which was discarded only after atmospheric pressure was low enough that it was no longer needed to protect the payload and the Centaur upper stage. (It wasn't a true thermos as the space in between wasn't sealed and was at ambient pressure at launch).
Yes, sorry, my criticism was meant to be directed at Burke, since the thermos comment has always bothered me.
You're correct about payload fairing. Also, Space Shuttle External Tank was spray foamed, causing the Columbia disaster when a piece of foam from the tank with hit the wing leading edge. I was googling for what the final verdict was but couldn't easily find an answer. Nice summary in [1]. Cryogenics are complicated.
Cuts from the speaker to some background footage, then back to the speaker, are a very useful technique. They can be used to lie, too, of course (cut from the interviewee's face to the interviewer, then back to the interviewee, and you can cut out context that changes the meaning of what was said). But when used with no deception in mind, they can really enhance a powerful moment. And this was a perfect example of it: no deception at all, just a wonderful visual image that makes an impact on the viewer.
I think if you watch Connections 2 & Connections 3 (and even Start Trek: The Next Generation) then you can see the progression that all documentaries went by the 1980s. "Story" used to be more important, but then "eye candy" became far more important.
Connections was so influential that my university (Purdue) introduced a 3 semester series of courses on the history of technology.
Agreed that Connections 2 and (especially) 3 were pale shadows of the original series.
However the related The Day the Universe Changed, which took a slightly different conceit (the episodes aren't necessarily linear in time) and focus (science and philosophy rather than technology), is excellent, and I'd put it right next to the original Connections series.
(There is, it turns out, a fourth season of Connections, "Connections 4", released in 2023 on Curiosity Stream according to Wikipedia. I've net seen any of it. It consists of only 6 episodes. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...>.
Yes, but the YouTube ed channels are such a treasure in and of itself. We had the “tech” to produce content like this for almost a century, but it took the Internet and democratization of content creation to come up with gems like smarter every day, veritasium, extra history, etc
My fear is that this is also being reshaped with ai, mostly for good now but I feel like the personal touch and passion of these creators is being diluted with the advent of generated content.
Maybe we are in a valley of the uncanny valley and the ai tools will become so good that they can successfully translate someone’s passionate vision faithfully, then it could be another renaissance.
In among all the MrBeasts and JackSepticEyes on Youtube there are some incredibly creative people.
Two that my 5-year-old loves are OddAnimalSpecimens who could easily have been on BBC children's programming in the 1980s, and Terragreen who would have been his ITV counterpart :-)
Probably the most entertaining child-friendly programme you can watch right now is whatever Jake Carlini is doing. Some wee guy in a house in Austin, Texas is coming up with better stories, better production values, and better life values than any of the "proper" children's TV productions, except maybe Sesame Street.
Thanks for the recommendations - I’m also big fan of 3blue1brown and PBS science, but as a recent dad am on lookout for content for my son to watch when he comes of that age - he’s just 1month now, hopefully by that time AI has not enshittyfied everything
We're a multilingual household, so another that gets a lot of love is Sendung mit der Maus which was originally a TV series but now is on Youtube as well - including some very old episodes. My son's German is way better than mine though, and these days so is his Gaelic - mostly I deal with people in English and I've kind of started to lose that skill.
If you like big 4x4s (and who doesn't?) then Matt's Off Road Recovery is pretty good. Utah looks lovely, and of course they're culturally fairly free of rude words so that's pretty okay for children.
Quiet Nerd is another of my son's favourites, he builds little electric-powered campers and drives them out into the woods near where he lives.
> The youtube channels are nowhere near the style and depth of documentaries like the ones above...
My friend, if you enjoy long format, deep diving documentaries written, produced and narrated without AI about Space, Physics, Human evolution or planet Earths history, then I insist you head over to the History of the Universe YouTube channel and start watching!
This specific video is probably my favorite (I'm a sucker for contemplating "time"and what it actually is) and was the one that got me hooked on their channel. They go way deeper into the details without becoming a formal lecture and it's genuinely captivating. https://youtu.be/ZSmNii0uOmw?si=3Jaty3XcMGlryhh2
Thinking about it I have to revise my statement somewhat. I have seen The Great War, Technology Connections etc and my Youtube algo is after 15 years very tuned to me.
The issue is somewhat that this stuff needs to be pushed more into peoples feeds and not pregnant spiderman videos.
Depends on what you follow. For example, look up The Great War.
At least where I live, basically everything that's on discovery, national geographic and the history channel now is just "experts" talking (reading a script) about "hitler's secret sex life" or some such thing, interspersed with a re-enactment shot or one of the "experts" walking around a slightly relevant building.
That is fair, I have checked out some The Great War videos. Not to mention podcast stuff like Hardcore History. They are very good an in depth. There is also full MIT/Harvard courses on Youtube. So yes it is all about what one looks up.
Any particular recommendations? I’ve been meaning to queue some up to have in the background playing when the kids are around hoping to stumble across something that that might pique their interests
Throwing out my recommendation for History of the Universe as well as its sibling channels. Honestly, the people behind these channels produce higher quality documentaries, both in substance and style, than 99% of the "professionally" created stuff I've watched in at least three last 5 years.
Huygens Optics - https://www.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics - Retired optics guy, lots of interesting stuff on making lenses and other optics phenomena and physics.
Dr. Jorge S. Diaz - https://www.youtube.com/@jkzero - Really good videos on the early history of quantum mechanics and related physics around that time.
Idealized Science Institute - https://www.youtube.com/@idealizedscience -Educational non-profit aimed at helping teachers and students, mostly physics. Typically featuring great physical demonstrations.
Tasting History - https://www.youtube.com/@TastingHistory - Recreates historical dishes, as well as serving interesting history about or surrounding the dishes.
Modern History TV - https://www.youtube.com/@ModernKnight - Lots of interesting videos about the middle ages in Europe, how people lived their lives as peasants or knights etc.
Modern audiences are expected to be glued to twelve different things at once. Producers are being told to adjust to this reality. Watch any movie now and they are all compensating for the distracted audience.
Movies used to be watched in a place for that purpose. Now its the toilet. Now the phone itself is ringing. A message comes in. Time to upgrade. Ding! All while some key scene in the movie is taking place.
Well, even if it’s the living room, it’s not like being glued to a seat in a theater.
I used to be associated with content groups at a former company and in the almost 15 years I was there we saw clear trends in type of content and length of content viewers consumed.
Even Golden Age TV documentaries can seem dumbed down compared to actual books. Even at the time, in the 1960s and 1970s, thinkers expressed concern that the medium of television was inherently likely to delight audiences with spectacle more than truly educate them.
My parents have a book published in 1849, "The Chemistry of Modern Life" and it's interesting to see how they transition very deliberately between "technical" and then "dumbed-down" descriptions of things.
It's as jarring as Star Trek's habit of "30 seconds of technobabble followed by a metaphor involving a balloon" trope they keep hammering.
> Connections, Cosmos, Civilization, The Ascent of Man and Attenborough's Life on Earth
Civilization and The Ascent of Man were both commissioned by Attenborough - he had a major impact on the broadcast landscape well beyond natural history.
We watched all of The Ascent of Man in middle school. The only thing I remember is that when the narrator, Jacob Bronowski, gestured with the back of his hand (fingers up), he always tucked his middle finger behind his ring and index finger. I assume this was so that he wouldn't "give the finger" to the audience.
(I've been wasting neurons on this for fifty years...)
I feel it myself, I am dumbed down too. Having trouble even formulating this as I never type formally anymore.
Our state TV SVT buys in documentaries from BBC, Showtime, PBS and some of their own production. Some of their own are still good. The BBC ones are absolute garbage dumbed down now.
The world the aristocrats warned about in the 60s and 70s are here now.
What are 2 or 3 feature length documentaries you watched produced in the last 5 years? I’m curious what you’re watching and what made them so bad. I saw several excellent ones over the last few years.
They’re out there and they’re not obscure IMO.
> What are 2 or 3 feature length documentaries you watched produced in the last 5 years?
Since GP mentioned TV, I suspect the ones he's complaining about are the ones I complained about: one-hour TV documentary-style shows like BBC Horizon or PBS Nova.
The ones I've seen from recent years contain interesting stuff, but the presentation is too rapid, to flashy, too repetitive yet not enough time to let things settle.
There was a lot of garbage back then too, they just aren’t a memorable so that’s why you only remember the best ones. There are a lot of great documentaries out these days. The early to mid-2010’s had a huge surge in particular, though there is plenty happening now as well.
I don’t know how someone could call The Act of Killing or Five Broken Cameras “dumbed down.” Or 20 Days in Mauripol just a few years ago
Unlike with a lot of award shows, one can actually do pretty well watching all the Oscar nominees for documentary any given year. Guaranteed at least half are good or great.
> Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
I hear this often and believed it myself for a while, but I cannot find much evidence for it. It's just the presentation style that people are nostalgic for.
These old documentaries are quite dumbed down as well (and sometimes wrong!). If you were to just read the literal text you'd think it was an excerpt from a children's book. The next time you come across an old video you feel this way about turn on the captions, mute the audio, and block out the rest of the screen except that tiny rectangle at the bottom.
I agree there was pride in the work that shines through, but don't be fooled into thinking it's any "better".
I think the number of good documentaries has remained constant as the total number of documentaries has risen. So sure, the percentage of documentaries that are good has fallen as we are innundated with crap, but as previous posters have noted, there are still several good productions every year.
> Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
It's not just you. Most modern TV documentaries, especially series, are dumbed down and sped up. Fast cuts, lots of woo, not too much to challenge your brain, don't want it to get strained.
Gone are the days where someone conveyed the information calmly while not driving a car somewhere irrelevant. No more lingering shots allowing you to process what you just saw and heard.
Thats because we have a trove of in depth specialist and deep youtube content including all those old documentaries to mine through these days
Youtube and the internet is a goldmine and way bigger than old 80s/90s content, im over 50 and remember the 80s well enough.. a few great well produced documentaries are not a comparable to gigabytes or petabytes of videos and podcasts we have today
The cultural format of exchange has changed and the consequences of that - so called tiktok attention deficit folks means perhaps no one watches this content but I think that too is a generalization and great content is watched probably by a greater proportion of smart curious people today than back in the 80s on your phone nonetheless- we have a pocket tv with an almost unlimited amount of content
Im an information junkie and just today I spent 3 hours watching a documentary series on the incan civilization follower by a Stanford video on LLMs and then watching Blaise Arcas’s interesting ideas on computational life and intelligence
Is that to be the end result of the pursuit of knowledge, creating something? There is the true dumbing down, insisting on a vague kind of productivity as the point of life.
>Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
A pet peeve of mine is the sound effects added to nature documentaries. I had to explain, once, that the ants do not actually sound like robots no matter how far you zoom in, despite the whirring of servos that the editors decided to add in.
I don't know the show, but when I first watched this clip (under the title of "greatest shot on television") I totally bought in to the hype and thought it really was amazing. You start out just walking alongside him, and only slowly realize where you are and what is about to happen, and everything is perfectly timed and composed: he ends his walk, reaches the conclusion of his explanation, and you realize what is going on, all at the exact time the launch begins. Brilliant!
Except that this is not "a shot" at all. I just hadn't noticed on my first watch that there's a very obvious cut just at the end of the "walk". It's a different angle from a different location at a different time of day, and he just has one sentence to say before he looks back at the blast off.
It would be no different from any news reporter on location at the time, reading a prepared message ahead of the launch, timed to end before the launch itself with no need for extensive rehearsals, the launch timing is widely broadcast, you time yourself accordingly with your talking speed, by adding pauses, etc. And on top of everything they probably had to do it live too.
I have no issue with James Burke or his show. And this scene is really beautifully done. But it's not the greatest shot in television. It's not even one shot!
> Watch it enough times yourself, and you’ll notice that it also pulls off some minor sleight of hand by having Burke walk from a non-time-sensitive shot into another with the already-framed rocket ready for liftoff. But that hardly lessens the feeling of achievement when the launch comes off.
Personally, I saw it exactly that way when I first saw it - the cut is super obvious because the background is totally different after. If the commentary before had been with the same background then it could well have had the illusion of being continuous.
Regardless: Like the article author, I still think it's great television.
It's high single digits of seconds away. But I think your point still stands. Burke turns his head to look at the rocket, so you can't see his lips aren't moving. His voice-ove that includes "planets or peking" is surely an edit and yes, you can hear the rumble of a rocket (maybe not even the same rocket.)
However, I don't think people were praising this shot for it's audio editing. I wouldn't be surprised if Burke re-recorded it and they dubbed it over the video. I think they're saying this is an amazing shot because the timing seems to be pretty good... He points at the rocket and about a quarter or half of a second later it ignites. This comes at the end of a 10-ish second sequence. Pretty good timing. Unlike other shots in popular media up to this time it would have been difficult to try to do a second time (though I guess they could have tried again at the Voyager 1 launch a couple weeks later.)
> … when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes that same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. What are we, to believe that this is some sort of a magic xylophone?
The amount of sound creation in documentaries, particularly nature docus featuring long-lens shots of animals in the wild, is a whole 'nother domain of lying-to-tell-the-truth.
Odd Angry Shot... One scene in Gallipoli... Apocalypse Now and Big Red One do "funny" things with the sound... I'm not sure those two films trying to be accurate as much as they're toeing some fi formalist line.
If you dig around, you can find more examples, but I think you're right in that the vast majority of films take liberties with physics in the service of visual storytelling.
No. They don't lose points for using a film production technique that was in popular use at the time (and is still in use.) The reason people say this is a well timed shot has nothing to do with the voice-over at the end of the shot.
They say it's a great shot because Burke hits his mark at the beginning of the shot, then he progresses through the shot, hits his final mark and points within half a second of ignition. All while delivering dialog. (Props to the camera operator who tracked Burke and pulled focus at the appropriate time.)
And then I think there's the thematic element of the subject matter. What you don't get by watching the final shot in that episode was the emotional impact of the Voyager launches. The space program was, at the time, continuing on from the high of the moon landings. The Pioneer probes had returned black and white images from Jupiter and Saturn but the Voyagers were going to return more colour images. They were a RETURN to space, demonstrating that the pioneer mission wasn't a fluke and that, as a people, we were capable of doing great things.
And now, as a people, we bitch in online forums about voice-overs.
One does not, as you suggest, need to deduct any points for editing the sound of an impressive bit of writing, timing, presenting and camera work.
I've always thought he just kind of slurred over the "a", like you'd do in casual speech, it came out like "f'r'a man". In the recording there's a tiny slight bit of a vowel after the "r" sound. I don't think he blew the line, just didn't speak it clearly.
Not a lot of people know that after his famous lines as he descended the ladder, Armstrong quietly muttered "and good luck Mr. Lansky". The few people who have heard the audio asked him about over the years, and he was never willing to explain ... until one day. "Well, you see" said Armstrong at a NASA publicity event, "when I was a kid growing up one of my neighbors were Mr & Mrs Lansky. I was playing on the street one day, maybe 8 or 9 years old, it was a hot summer's day and everyone had their windows open. Mr & Mrs Lansky were having some sort of argument inside their house - I couldn't hear much of what they were saying. But then Mrs Lansky must have moved closer to the window, because I heard her very clearly say "Oral sex? You'll get oral sex from me the day that kid next door walks on the moon!"".
I'm not seeing it. Starting at "if you mix those gasses..." to after "...you get that." seems to be a single shot.
Just a reminder, we didn't have AI editing tools at the time. Traditional editing tools of the time would probably be obvious. Maybe you're responding to the focus change where the camera operator adjusts the focal plane from Burke to the rocket in the distance.
That focus change makes me certain the shot wasn't reverse projection as the screen would have to be exceedingly large (too large to keep sufficiently flat.)
I remember seeing film (yes, film!) on the news of the Voyager 2 launch and I remember seeing this episode of Connexions on PBS shortly after.
I'm honestly flummoxed you think there's a cut in the final shot of that sequence. I just don't see it. Maybe it's a generational thing
The final shot of the sequence runs from about :44 to 1:06. I'm talking about the bit that STARTS at :44, after the cut. I think you're talking about the sequence before the SHOT.
I think that's why you aren't seeing what people are talking about then. It's being pitched as "one long shot", folks are seeing the cut at :44 and saying "no it isn't!"
It's also not as hard as it might seem because they could track the countdown and cue him at the appropriate time.
Well, he is standing still, the camera is stationary. For just that last segment, it is easy to answer "how did he do it?" Write out his remarks, rehearse with a timer, then figure out at what point in the countdown to begin speaking.
The main thing is that he has say basically one sentence right in a single take, but he is a seasoned television announcer, so that in itself is not too surprising.
The much longer segment, including walking with a moving camera at exactly the right timing, would have been much harder to get in a single take. (Not to mention that that Saturn V lying on its side is probably not even in the same location.)
Yes and no. The Saturn V he walks past was on it's side next to the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is close to launch complex 41 from which the Voyager missions launched.
But I think it's about 120 degrees to the left from where they shot the shot of Burke walking. They absolutely had to set up a different shot to get Burke and the Titan III in the same shot.
As an aside... That Saturn V is no longer at that location. Several years ago they moved it a mile to the north and built a building around it to create the Apollo / Saturn V center. Or at least I think it's the same artefact.
I think the level of irritation is proportional to knowledge of the technical art of cinema, since what makes a good "shot" is often a discussion of minutiae. There are innumerable examples of better shots in television, particularly in the "second golden age" begun with series like "The Sopranos" and climaxing in television like "Better Call Saul" or "Chernobyl"[1]
[1] Which would certainly have some scenes competing for actual best shot. Calling it TV feels a bit misleading.
It's not at all pointless! (This is a joke, where I'm quibbling pointlessly, but saying it's not. It's stupid, I grant you, but it's offered in good humor.)
This is such a weird complaint. "The shot" is the one where he's standing in front of the blast off. Of course the shot before it is a different shot. Who cares?
No, because then the rocket would probably launch in the middle of the sentence. He had to start saying that sentence at the right second and pace the words and his movements perfectly.
It's not a "weird complaint" at all. The cut goes to the heart of why it's supposedly impressive. Because of the cut, all he had to do was say one sentence before the rocket lifts off (which is happening at a time that's known down to the second).
It still holds up for the most part, though of course some of the takes, being almost 50 years old, may seem a bit quaint. It's certainly worth watching the first series at least start to finish. Burke is an interesting guy.
I personally feel like _The Day The Universe Changed_ (his second documentary) is better. I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology) ends up pretty scattershot, spreading out like Brownian Motion. _tDtUC_ is much more focused. Largely based on Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ for individual stories, it traces how the understanding of time in Europe changed from the middle ages to the 1980's- the idea of time as a marker of descent from a previous golden age (1), or at best a repeating cycle, evolves into our modern conception of time as endlessly improving into a better future. And the supporting book was amazing too.
I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood: _In Search of the Trojan War_, _In Search of the Dark Ages_, _The Story of England_, _The Story of India_ they were also a staple of American PBS and informed my understanding of the world.
1: My go to example for this is imagine you walk into the Pantheon in 1000 AD: no one on your entire continent has known how to build a dome like that in 500 years, and won't again for another 500 years. The fundamental way you understand the world has to be completely different from the "newer is better" baseline that we have understood the world by for the past 150 years.
> "I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology)..."
Good grief, no. The basic thesis of Connections 1 was that humanity has become fatally dependent on technology (the "technology trap" he speaks of), that that dependence continues getting deeper and deeper, and it's hard to predict what technologies will emerge or where technology will take us, possibly utopia but just as likely a living hell, and finally that we don't even have the option to stop digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the technology trap because technological advancement can't be stopped because its emergence is unpredictable. Re-watch just the first and last episodes and they will terrify you.
Connections 2 and 3 were indeed scattershot because people liked Burke's charming mannerisms and didn't want to think about the ever more complex and ever more fragile panoply of technologies that individuals, even the technologists themselves, can neither understand nor control that is all that stands between humanity and its extinction.
Better still, like a well-written essay, there is closure to the series. All the ends left about in the preceding episodes are drawn together neatly in the final one.
"The point about all this technological pizazz isn't the gee-whiz high-tech stuff. It's the secondary effects of using it. Take say what this chip could do to change the pattern of work. With this you could have telecommuting, that's where you work at home from a screen and you never go into the office.
Great! No more rush hour. But what does that do to the public transportation system and the taxes it uses. Or to the car manufacturers and their workers' jobs, and the rest of the economy that depends on their output?
Or to the concept of the city itself, with its support systems and businesses. Or to the downtown properties where maybe your pension fund's invested.
Not to speak of working at home day in and day out and what that might do to a marriage. And what do you get out of work when it's only you? What would be the effect of isolating and fragmenting the community like that?
Second the comment re the day the universe changed, and found the episode on how Islamic Spain influenced the world quite surprising. Think it was the 2nd one, starting with two competing views of the world from African Roman scholars/clerics.
Many of these older docu’s wanted you to stop and think.
I first saw Connections in the late 2000s... the final scene of the last episode, "inside the British Airways computer" (an entire floor of a large building), had me standing on my couch pointing at the screen.
A year or two before I was born, James Burke wandered between mainframes and reel-to-reel tape machines, speaking with extraordinary prescience about data, communications, decision-making systems, and power:
"This is the future. Because if you tell a computer everything you know about something, it will juggle the mix, and come up with a prediction. Do this, and you'll get that. And if you have information and a computer, you too can look into the future. And that is power. Commercial power, political power, power to change things."
I'm going to watch that scene again, because it's even more important 20 years further along: smart phones, "big data", large language models, Palantir...
A fun background show (for those of us with ADHD?) I like to have on is Computer Chronicles - a weekly show that basically documented the weekly history, for the most part, of the evolution of personal computing. It basically starts out as "these things are cool and can run spreadsheets" to evolution into music, the internet, and beyond. Lots of crazy things happen in the 1980s that we're now realizing today like touch, voice, and ai that people kept saying we'd be 2-4 years away from...I guess that is marketing speak for 20-40 years, but it's still seems very relivant to today.
It really grinds my gears that the uploader had to ruin the "Greatest Shot in Television" by stretching the 4:3 video to 16:9.
I know I sound like a pedant but so many of these old TV recordings are uploaded this way on youtube. I was so annoyed by this infact that a few years ago I made a dumb extension that squeezes the video element back to 4:3 [1]. I'm not sure if this still works though.
A question about aspect ratio on youtube, Does it care? or can you put whatever aspect ratio you want, I guess my complaint is that I don't see nearly enough (none) square video on the site.
I think it will show in whatever aspect ratio you upload.
It cares about overall pixel size, and for example standard 720x576 standard def 4:3 video will be brutally compressed compared to the exact same video upscaled using any non-AI upscaler (even nearest-neighbour) to 1440x1080.
I dug into this a bit a while ago, and could probably post my finding here if anyone was interested.
YouTube, as well as any decent player, plays any aspect ratio video, even portrait mode.
As an uploader you should never add black bars (if they are in the source, crop them out before uploading) and of course never distort the video. This ensures the best playback experience for all devices.
In an ideal world yes. In practice, the YouTube layout looks weird on aspect ratios that aren't 4:3 or 16:9. If you upload any vertical video it gets categorized as a short, so that's out of the window - and even for things like 21:9 you get a teeny tiny player on desktop since it just fits the width.
Yes, there are some YouTube-manufactured issues. However it bothers me more when I try to watch a 21:9 video fullscreen on my 21:9 display and get black bars on all four sides.
Ah yes, the good old "shot in portrait mode, converted to 16:9 with added black bars, and then displayed under YT shorts in portrait mode again" category on youtube. This is almost artistic at this point. Sometimes I wonder how small can the content of a video get before people will stop watching it. Is there any research on this?
AFAIK youtube will stretch the player window to match the aspect ratio of the source media, lots of cinematic content that's a wider than normal (21:9 I think?) ratio that youtube adjusts the player window to fit around without black bars.
They won't ever squash or stretch video though, so this means the original uploader stretched the 4:3 content to 16:9 at some point before upload
I watched this show religiously as a kid (by then in reruns in the early 90s), along with Star Trek: TNG, Jeopardy, and playing Civilization for PC. The most formative years of my life were spent absorbing as much science, technology, and history as my growing brain could muster. I think that's why I'd grown up to be so optimistic about the future.
I think there's still a lot of room for optimism, despite all of the pessimism in the media, and I'm not even talking about AI. There are a ton of other things which have benefitted enormously from ubiquitous, efficient, and powerful computing that hardly get talked about anymore, we've come to take it all for granted.
The very first episode of Connections walks through might happen in New York City if power went out and never came back on. Pretty much an apocalyptic scenario for people living there!
He didn’t shy away from talking about technology for good or ill, for the ways it liberates us but can also trap us, for the ways it makes new sources of energy possible, and new weapons.
Could have just been intercontinental ballistic human transport... I can't tell you how many times I've wished to just be fired out of a cannon to Hong Kong from SF.
He's even clearer about it in the last episode of season 1, where he assembles all the inventions from the season and shows how they make the US nuclear triad.
I’d also mention the ascent of the Apollo 17 LM. The camera could be commanded to move up to follow the ascent, but the command had to be given ahead of time, from the MOCR, to coincide with the launch, which was commanded from the LM. The audio from the LM was delayed, as was the video from the camera, and the command would take about a second to reach the camera on the moon.
I loved Connections so much as a kid, but I'm so tired of this clip. There's so many better clips from this show.
So he nailed a 13 second countdown. Who cares? Newscasters do this at every commercial break. Sports announcers do this without a script and they still nail the cut to commercial almost every time. Yes, there's a talent to timing your speech to a countdown in your ear, but it's a talent that people do thousands of times a day around the world on far less preparation than Burke had here.
The fact that this article calls a simple cut a "sleight of hand" just terrifies me. Does the public really not know what editing is?
If it gets someone to watch the show for the first time then that's a win in my book. I think every young student should be exposed to Connections at various stages of their education.
I absolutely adore both Burke and the Connections series, and without a doubt this is a lovely shot, but I feel the same: I don't get the hype. It's been memefied to death for no real reason. There's no incredible feat involved. It wasn't a tightrope walk without a net live on air. You can bet they had stand-in footage done before that they could have made a montage of in case Burke stumbled a line.
I suppose it's like a magic trick. It's less impressive once you understand how it all works. But still, it's clearly effective and you can admire the artistry.
In the 80’s I worked for a radio station in Asheville NC. That allowed us to get press passes to launches at the cape. I was in the press area for 2 shuttle launches including the very first night launch of the Space Shuttle. They launched right after an incredible thunderstorm had rolled through. I’m old now but still remember it like it was yesterday. Incredible to see in person.
The most emblematic thing about this clip is how generally audiences are totally blind to video cuts, and how how much that allows video producers to get away with.
The "Trigger Effect" episode ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcOb3Dilzjc ) that set off Connections:I was one of the finest hours ever produced for television. It influenced my family and I in the years to come. Hope for the best, while preparing for the worst.
It begins at South Tower of the World Trade Center, and as Burke enters an express elevator (Car 6 or 7 if you must know) he says in effect, "Do I worry about ascending to the top in a steel box? Of course I don't! We take going up in the world like that for granted." When an elevator later goes dark he says. "We expect this to happen sometimes so what do we do? We strike a light and look around in the dark for an emergency button to push and if we find one, we press it." In this discussion of single takes, note what the temperature of the butane lighter must have been by the time he finishes his speech. Ouch!
Also interesting to note in the realm of happenstance: the airliner portrayed in trouble over darkened New York was flight 911.
Growing up in Argentina, back in the day these were all dubbed. The version I watched on tv had a voice and personality of its own - Latin American "neutral" Spanish - and for the life of me I could never find that same version, only the Spain-dubbed one.
I strongly encourage all HN readers to seek out any of his work online. Including the meta, where he tasks about being hired for the job, and the approach he took to communicating. Although some of it will look a little dated, the messages are timeless.
Connections is one of the greatest shows in television. The pilot episode is amazing, highlighting the problem with dependence on technology that we don't understand.
"Never have so many people understood so little about so much."
It doesn’t compare to this shot, but I particularly enjoyed the one episode of the The Studio with Seth Rogan where it starts with him driving to a filming location where they were going to do a one shot scene and he was explaining to someone how difficult they are to pull off, etc.
The episode was funny (although cringey too) for the things that happened in it.
But what was quite clever I thought was that the episode was itself done (at least seemingly) in one-shot.
I remember on a podcast interview I listened to that he said he intentionally made every episode as close to a “oner” as possible using very long takes and hidden transitions where possible.
It’s to heighten the sense of anxiety and tension for the viewer in order to amplify the comedy.
I just don't think it's that great? It's cool, I just don't think we should all accept it's the greatest. I mean I feel like some spacex stream segments are more awe-inspiring than this. Or some planet earth shots.
James Burke is a great man. I have a personal policy that when I write a white each paragraph has a "layperson's" explanation beneath it, which was inspired by the first and the last episode of his BBC show Connections
I grew up watching Cosmos and Connections (and a bunch of stupid prime time on the one TV in the house and something like 5 clear channel [PBS being the best]).
reminds me of "Scene 113: The Bridge" in the show The Franchise when they're on location in Armenia. I won't spoil the show/episode but let's just say it doesn't go as well as the shot highlighted here.
I love this style of documentary, I feel like we had it even when I was a kid in the 90s - 00s and as an adult in the 10s, but now is totally a dead style.
Sadly, it is not produced anymore. The producers chase a style and person that no longer exist, so they get their panties in a twist and make TikTok style and "true crime" style interviews is all I see from newer documentaries sadly. Women love "true crime" so 50% of new docus are just true crime drama slop.
I used to watch all or most of our state TV ones but they are no longer as good (They do some of their own buy buy in most from BBC, Showtime and PBS.)
I have been watching World at War and The World at War and such. Should watch Civilization and How should we then live?
I would not be surprised if Tom Scott stated one day that this video was an inspiration for his legendary old video format: just him walking through some random place and explaining things, seemingly completely without script.
I always love this video, and I have been a lifetime dedicated fan of James Burke, but few seem to note that the whole segment didn't have to be timed as there is a cut shortly before the launch. If I recall either James or one of the producers talked about it once. They knew they had to start the last bit 13 seconds before launch and had practiced it repeatedly. At 13 seconds to countdown James nailed it. I'm sure even after practicing it I would have stumbled over a word in the clutch moment!
It would appear that this was the Titan IIIE which launched Voyager 2. They would have had another chance to get the shot about two weeks later when Voyager 1 launched. (Due to quirks of interplanetary orbital mechanics, Voyager 1 got to Jupiter several months before Voyager 2 despite launching second).
The IIIE did indeed have a Centaur stage with a "thermos" full of liquid hydrogen and another with liquid oxygen, but that's not what we see in this clip -- the pillars of fire and smoke come from a pair of solid-fuel boosters that burn for about two minutes, followed by about six more minutes of flight powered by two more stages burning non-cryogenic liquid propellants (hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide) before the Centaur was ignited.
For those wondering, it's actually quite common that two spacecraft launched that way (if two spacecraft are launched, which is not common) would arrive out of order. The reason is that you can think of a "launch window" as really a specific ideal launch time, but a little earlier or later will also work, although being early or later would result in arriving at the destination later. They aim to launch the first spacecraft right at the opening of the window, so if there is any delay they won't run out of time. If it launches "on time", then it actually launched early for the launch window, and takes longer to get there. The second launch right after then launches closer to the actual ideal launch date.
Decades ago, I worked a mission that went up on a Titan IV, and I spent a few weeks at Pad 41 working in the IUS clean room. Riding up and down the tower in the rickety (self operated) elevator was frightening. Walking the gantry and looking out at CCAS, you could see for miles in all directions. Standing under the thrust cones was an amazing experience. Unfortunately, no photos were allowed because it was a classified mission. All I got were a few stupid tee shirts.
About 15 years earlier, I had done some work at the VAB and walked around the Saturn IV that was laying on its side there, just as James Burke had a few years earlier. It wasn't there when I worked the above referenced mission. I'm not sure when they moved it, or where it ended up (but it's not in the "rocket garden" at the Visitor Center).
Do you mean a Saturn IV-B? Those were the third stages of the Saturn V. If so, the complete Saturn V was displayed horizontally outdoors for quite a while. I was in the US in 2018 and stopped by KSC too see a Falcon 9 launch, by then the complete Saturn V was in a building.
If you mean just the Saturn IV (no B), that was the second stage of some early Saturn rocket. I don't know much about those or if one was ever on display.
Sorry about my typo. I meant Saturn V. If you watch the video in the parent article, you'll see James Burke walking around it with the VAB in the background.
I even remember visiting that Saturn V in Florida as a child!
Actually... Rockets don't use thermos bottle tanks. Having two surfaces with a vacuum in between, like in a thermos bottle, would be way too heavy. That's why you see these chunks of ice falling at liftoff from cryogenic rockets.
Centaur has balloon tanks which is just very thin metal. It can't even stand on its own without pressure. But no thermos.
I wrote "thermos" in quotes because that's how Burke referred to the propellant tanks.
That said, on the Titan IIIE at launch, there was an second outer surface around the Centaur -- the payload fairing -- which was discarded only after atmospheric pressure was low enough that it was no longer needed to protect the payload and the Centaur upper stage. (It wasn't a true thermos as the space in between wasn't sealed and was at ambient pressure at launch).
See the cutaway views on pages 16 and 17 (pdf pages 19-20) of https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/TC-6-Voyager-Fl...
Yes, sorry, my criticism was meant to be directed at Burke, since the thermos comment has always bothered me.
You're correct about payload fairing. Also, Space Shuttle External Tank was spray foamed, causing the Columbia disaster when a piece of foam from the tank with hit the wing leading edge. I was googling for what the final verdict was but couldn't easily find an answer. Nice summary in [1]. Cryogenics are complicated.
1:https://idlewords.com/2003/08/things_i_have_learned_about_fo...
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I'm sure they had a second camera running without Burke in the shot so that they could dub over it if they messed up the shot, too.
What makes you sure of that?
Cheap insurance.
Cuts from the speaker to some background footage, then back to the speaker, are a very useful technique. They can be used to lie, too, of course (cut from the interviewee's face to the interviewer, then back to the interviewee, and you can cut out context that changes the meaning of what was said). But when used with no deception in mind, they can really enhance a powerful moment. And this was a perfect example of it: no deception at all, just a wonderful visual image that makes an impact on the viewer.
I was amazed by the perfect timing. I realized, if you listen closely, there is commentary audio feed from the launch with countdown.
So knowing, the engines starts 3 seconds before liftoff, he was able to time the speech.
I saw this clip dozen of times, and only after keeping attention I realized this.
So with the cut technique, it seems like seamless feature, and that's the magic of the TV. Nevertheless amazing delivery.
The late 1970's were the golden age of documentaries: Connections, Cosmos, Civilization, The Ascent of Man and Attenborough's Life on Earth.
Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
As a side note: Quite ironic that he ends up pointing to a rocket propelled mostly by solid fuels.
I think if you watch Connections 2 & Connections 3 (and even Start Trek: The Next Generation) then you can see the progression that all documentaries went by the 1980s. "Story" used to be more important, but then "eye candy" became far more important.
Connections was so influential that my university (Purdue) introduced a 3 semester series of courses on the history of technology.
Agreed that Connections 2 and (especially) 3 were pale shadows of the original series.
However the related The Day the Universe Changed, which took a slightly different conceit (the episodes aren't necessarily linear in time) and focus (science and philosophy rather than technology), is excellent, and I'd put it right next to the original Connections series.
(There is, it turns out, a fourth season of Connections, "Connections 4", released in 2023 on Curiosity Stream according to Wikipedia. I've net seen any of it. It consists of only 6 episodes. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...>.
Yes, but the YouTube ed channels are such a treasure in and of itself. We had the “tech” to produce content like this for almost a century, but it took the Internet and democratization of content creation to come up with gems like smarter every day, veritasium, extra history, etc
My fear is that this is also being reshaped with ai, mostly for good now but I feel like the personal touch and passion of these creators is being diluted with the advent of generated content.
Maybe we are in a valley of the uncanny valley and the ai tools will become so good that they can successfully translate someone’s passionate vision faithfully, then it could be another renaissance.
In among all the MrBeasts and JackSepticEyes on Youtube there are some incredibly creative people.
Two that my 5-year-old loves are OddAnimalSpecimens who could easily have been on BBC children's programming in the 1980s, and Terragreen who would have been his ITV counterpart :-)
Probably the most entertaining child-friendly programme you can watch right now is whatever Jake Carlini is doing. Some wee guy in a house in Austin, Texas is coming up with better stories, better production values, and better life values than any of the "proper" children's TV productions, except maybe Sesame Street.
Thanks for the recommendations - I’m also big fan of 3blue1brown and PBS science, but as a recent dad am on lookout for content for my son to watch when he comes of that age - he’s just 1month now, hopefully by that time AI has not enshittyfied everything
We're a multilingual household, so another that gets a lot of love is Sendung mit der Maus which was originally a TV series but now is on Youtube as well - including some very old episodes. My son's German is way better than mine though, and these days so is his Gaelic - mostly I deal with people in English and I've kind of started to lose that skill.
If you like big 4x4s (and who doesn't?) then Matt's Off Road Recovery is pretty good. Utah looks lovely, and of course they're culturally fairly free of rude words so that's pretty okay for children.
Quiet Nerd is another of my son's favourites, he builds little electric-powered campers and drives them out into the woods near where he lives.
The youtube channels are nowhere near the style and depth of documentaries like the ones above...
> The youtube channels are nowhere near the style and depth of documentaries like the ones above...
My friend, if you enjoy long format, deep diving documentaries written, produced and narrated without AI about Space, Physics, Human evolution or planet Earths history, then I insist you head over to the History of the Universe YouTube channel and start watching!
This specific video is probably my favorite (I'm a sucker for contemplating "time"and what it actually is) and was the one that got me hooked on their channel. They go way deeper into the details without becoming a formal lecture and it's genuinely captivating. https://youtu.be/ZSmNii0uOmw?si=3Jaty3XcMGlryhh2
https://youtube.com/@historyoftheuniverse https://youtube.com/@historyofhumankind https://youtube.com/@historyoftheearth
Check out Technology Connections. This is way, way, way more in depth than anything one can find on TV.
Thinking about it I have to revise my statement somewhat. I have seen The Great War, Technology Connections etc and my Youtube algo is after 15 years very tuned to me.
The issue is somewhat that this stuff needs to be pushed more into peoples feeds and not pregnant spiderman videos.
If anybody wants some more encouragement to check out Technology Connections ... the vibe is hour+ long Andy Rooney pieces.
Damning with faint praise. He was never a first-rate reporter, AFAIK. More like Paul Harvey.
Depends on what you follow. For example, look up The Great War.
At least where I live, basically everything that's on discovery, national geographic and the history channel now is just "experts" talking (reading a script) about "hitler's secret sex life" or some such thing, interspersed with a re-enactment shot or one of the "experts" walking around a slightly relevant building.
That is fair, I have checked out some The Great War videos. Not to mention podcast stuff like Hardcore History. They are very good an in depth. There is also full MIT/Harvard courses on Youtube. So yes it is all about what one looks up.
Close to style, naturally styles are different
Lack of depth? Wrong. Just go beyond the usual pop-sci stuff on YT.
You can go as deep as you want. Surely it won't be "as fun" or "tiktok sized" but if you want depth it's there
That is fair, I have checked out some The Great War videos. Not to mention podcast stuff like Hardcore History. They are very good an in depth.
There is also full MIT/Harvard courses on Youtube.
So yes it is all about what one looks up.
Any particular recommendations? I’ve been meaning to queue some up to have in the background playing when the kids are around hoping to stumble across something that that might pique their interests
Throwing out my recommendation for History of the Universe as well as its sibling channels. Honestly, the people behind these channels produce higher quality documentaries, both in substance and style, than 99% of the "professionally" created stuff I've watched in at least three last 5 years.
https://youtube.com/@historyoftheuniverse https://youtube.com/@historyofhumankind https://youtube.com/@historyoftheearth
Not GP but here are mine, perhaps not all work for the kids and might require some attention but:
AlphaPhoenix - https://www.youtube.com/@AlphaPhoenixChannel - Probably needs no introduction to HN, but some great educational physics videos.
Huygens Optics - https://www.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics - Retired optics guy, lots of interesting stuff on making lenses and other optics phenomena and physics.
Dr. Jorge S. Diaz - https://www.youtube.com/@jkzero - Really good videos on the early history of quantum mechanics and related physics around that time.
Idealized Science Institute - https://www.youtube.com/@idealizedscience -Educational non-profit aimed at helping teachers and students, mostly physics. Typically featuring great physical demonstrations.
Tasting History - https://www.youtube.com/@TastingHistory - Recreates historical dishes, as well as serving interesting history about or surrounding the dishes.
Brian Lohnes - https://www.youtube.com/@brianlohnes3079 - Weird and fascinating history tidbits from mostly motorsports like drag racing.
Marshall Bruner - https://www.youtube.com/@MarshallBrunerRF - Accessible videos explaining radar and RF concepts.
ProjectsInFlight - https://www.youtube.com/@projectsinflight - Has a few amazing videos explaining how semiconductors work, also how to make them at home.
Modern History TV - https://www.youtube.com/@ModernKnight - Lots of interesting videos about the middle ages in Europe, how people lived their lives as peasants or knights etc.
Extractions&Ire - https://www.youtube.com/@ExtractionsAndIre - Fun guy from down under making compounds for his main channel Explosions&Fire in his shed.
Modern audiences are expected to be glued to twelve different things at once. Producers are being told to adjust to this reality. Watch any movie now and they are all compensating for the distracted audience.
Movies used to be watched in a place for that purpose. Now its the toilet. Now the phone itself is ringing. A message comes in. Time to upgrade. Ding! All while some key scene in the movie is taking place.
Well, even if it’s the living room, it’s not like being glued to a seat in a theater.
I used to be associated with content groups at a former company and in the almost 15 years I was there we saw clear trends in type of content and length of content viewers consumed.
Even Golden Age TV documentaries can seem dumbed down compared to actual books. Even at the time, in the 1960s and 1970s, thinkers expressed concern that the medium of television was inherently likely to delight audiences with spectacle more than truly educate them.
My parents have a book published in 1849, "The Chemistry of Modern Life" and it's interesting to see how they transition very deliberately between "technical" and then "dumbed-down" descriptions of things.
It's as jarring as Star Trek's habit of "30 seconds of technobabble followed by a metaphor involving a balloon" trope they keep hammering.
Connections had an accompanying book (at least one) and so did the day the universe changed.
To that list I'd like to add Music of Man hosted by Yehudi Menuhin. His interview with Glenn Gould by itself is worth the price of admission!
I also feel most of the documentaries are awful these days. There are a feww that are pretty good but I miss the older stuff.
> Connections, Cosmos, Civilization, The Ascent of Man and Attenborough's Life on Earth
Civilization and The Ascent of Man were both commissioned by Attenborough - he had a major impact on the broadcast landscape well beyond natural history.
We watched all of The Ascent of Man in middle school. The only thing I remember is that when the narrator, Jacob Bronowski, gestured with the back of his hand (fingers up), he always tucked his middle finger behind his ring and index finger. I assume this was so that he wouldn't "give the finger" to the audience.
(I've been wasting neurons on this for fifty years...)
I guess we now have Veritasium, Jonny Harris, and the art of the problem instead.
NOT just you.
I feel it has gotten worse the past 10 years.
I feel it myself, I am dumbed down too. Having trouble even formulating this as I never type formally anymore.
Our state TV SVT buys in documentaries from BBC, Showtime, PBS and some of their own production. Some of their own are still good. The BBC ones are absolute garbage dumbed down now.
The world the aristocrats warned about in the 60s and 70s are here now.
What are 2 or 3 feature length documentaries you watched produced in the last 5 years? I’m curious what you’re watching and what made them so bad. I saw several excellent ones over the last few years. They’re out there and they’re not obscure IMO.
> What are 2 or 3 feature length documentaries you watched produced in the last 5 years?
Since GP mentioned TV, I suspect the ones he's complaining about are the ones I complained about: one-hour TV documentary-style shows like BBC Horizon or PBS Nova.
The ones I've seen from recent years contain interesting stuff, but the presentation is too rapid, to flashy, too repetitive yet not enough time to let things settle.
Feature length documentaries are better I agree.
>one-hour TV documentary-style shows like BBC Horizon or PBS Nova.
Yep, these must be them, but our Swedish state TV buys them and somewhat rebrands them, but the BBC logo is usually there at the end.
Yes they are much more flashy and "americanized" compared to 10-15 years ago. Sadly. I still appreciate them.
Cleo Abrams' YT tomes, albeit much shorter and more attuned to modern attention spans, are getting close to that quality level at least.
There was a lot of garbage back then too, they just aren’t a memorable so that’s why you only remember the best ones. There are a lot of great documentaries out these days. The early to mid-2010’s had a huge surge in particular, though there is plenty happening now as well.
I don’t know how someone could call The Act of Killing or Five Broken Cameras “dumbed down.” Or 20 Days in Mauripol just a few years ago
Unlike with a lot of award shows, one can actually do pretty well watching all the Oscar nominees for documentary any given year. Guaranteed at least half are good or great.
> Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
I hear this often and believed it myself for a while, but I cannot find much evidence for it. It's just the presentation style that people are nostalgic for.
These old documentaries are quite dumbed down as well (and sometimes wrong!). If you were to just read the literal text you'd think it was an excerpt from a children's book. The next time you come across an old video you feel this way about turn on the captions, mute the audio, and block out the rest of the screen except that tiny rectangle at the bottom.
I agree there was pride in the work that shines through, but don't be fooled into thinking it's any "better".
I think the number of good documentaries has remained constant as the total number of documentaries has risen. So sure, the percentage of documentaries that are good has fallen as we are innundated with crap, but as previous posters have noted, there are still several good productions every year.
Also The Shock of the New with Robert Hughes.
It was the golden age of the US at least also. Times that belittle, defund, or destroy science or art are dark ages.
> Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
It's not just you. Most modern TV documentaries, especially series, are dumbed down and sped up. Fast cuts, lots of woo, not too much to challenge your brain, don't want it to get strained.
Gone are the days where someone conveyed the information calmly while not driving a car somewhere irrelevant. No more lingering shots allowing you to process what you just saw and heard.
Thats because we have a trove of in depth specialist and deep youtube content including all those old documentaries to mine through these days
Youtube and the internet is a goldmine and way bigger than old 80s/90s content, im over 50 and remember the 80s well enough.. a few great well produced documentaries are not a comparable to gigabytes or petabytes of videos and podcasts we have today
The cultural format of exchange has changed and the consequences of that - so called tiktok attention deficit folks means perhaps no one watches this content but I think that too is a generalization and great content is watched probably by a greater proportion of smart curious people today than back in the 80s on your phone nonetheless- we have a pocket tv with an almost unlimited amount of content
Im an information junkie and just today I spent 3 hours watching a documentary series on the incan civilization follower by a Stanford video on LLMs and then watching Blaise Arcas’s interesting ideas on computational life and intelligence
https://youtu.be/KhSJuqDUJME?si=-TMkLdapsbcWuoft
You watched all that content. Did you take action on it? What did you make or do as a result?
Is that to be the end result of the pursuit of knowledge, creating something? There is the true dumbing down, insisting on a vague kind of productivity as the point of life.
Why would doing something or taking action be dumbing down?
You are bristling with something like anger but it has nothing to do with what I wrote.
I'm off to go hiking. There are thousands of stars out there.
What will you make or do as a result of going hiking and looking at stars?
>Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
A pet peeve of mine is the sound effects added to nature documentaries. I had to explain, once, that the ants do not actually sound like robots no matter how far you zoom in, despite the whirring of servos that the editors decided to add in.
This is my pet peeve.
I don't know the show, but when I first watched this clip (under the title of "greatest shot on television") I totally bought in to the hype and thought it really was amazing. You start out just walking alongside him, and only slowly realize where you are and what is about to happen, and everything is perfectly timed and composed: he ends his walk, reaches the conclusion of his explanation, and you realize what is going on, all at the exact time the launch begins. Brilliant!
Except that this is not "a shot" at all. I just hadn't noticed on my first watch that there's a very obvious cut just at the end of the "walk". It's a different angle from a different location at a different time of day, and he just has one sentence to say before he looks back at the blast off.
It would be no different from any news reporter on location at the time, reading a prepared message ahead of the launch, timed to end before the launch itself with no need for extensive rehearsals, the launch timing is widely broadcast, you time yourself accordingly with your talking speed, by adding pauses, etc. And on top of everything they probably had to do it live too.
I have no issue with James Burke or his show. And this scene is really beautifully done. But it's not the greatest shot in television. It's not even one shot!
(edited: typos)
The article mentions this:
> Watch it enough times yourself, and you’ll notice that it also pulls off some minor sleight of hand by having Burke walk from a non-time-sensitive shot into another with the already-framed rocket ready for liftoff. But that hardly lessens the feeling of achievement when the launch comes off.
Personally, I saw it exactly that way when I first saw it - the cut is super obvious because the background is totally different after. If the commentary before had been with the same background then it could well have had the illusion of being continuous.
Regardless: Like the article author, I still think it's great television.
The press location is surely double-digit seconds sonically from the launch site. So the simultaneous launch rumble is also an edit.
It's high single digits of seconds away. But I think your point still stands. Burke turns his head to look at the rocket, so you can't see his lips aren't moving. His voice-ove that includes "planets or peking" is surely an edit and yes, you can hear the rumble of a rocket (maybe not even the same rocket.)
However, I don't think people were praising this shot for it's audio editing. I wouldn't be surprised if Burke re-recorded it and they dubbed it over the video. I think they're saying this is an amazing shot because the timing seems to be pretty good... He points at the rocket and about a quarter or half of a second later it ignites. This comes at the end of a 10-ish second sequence. Pretty good timing. Unlike other shots in popular media up to this time it would have been difficult to try to do a second time (though I guess they could have tried again at the Voyager 1 launch a couple weeks later.)
> … when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes that same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. What are we, to believe that this is some sort of a magic xylophone?
The amount of sound creation in documentaries, particularly nature docus featuring long-lens shots of animals in the wild, is a whole 'nother domain of lying-to-tell-the-truth.
The Conversation's treatment (there are many others): "The animal sounds in most nature documentaries are made by humans – here’s how they do it and why it matters" (2024) <https://theconversation.com/the-animal-sounds-in-most-nature...>.
Burke's time-shifting is a relatively minor sin, though I'd have appreciated if they'd allowed the original sonic lag to be experienced.
I think Full Metal Jacket is the only war movie that correctly delays the sound of an explosion.
The sounds in combat footage of WW2 are all dubbed in, as the cameras did not record sound.
Odd Angry Shot... One scene in Gallipoli... Apocalypse Now and Big Red One do "funny" things with the sound... I'm not sure those two films trying to be accurate as much as they're toeing some fi formalist line.
If you dig around, you can find more examples, but I think you're right in that the vast majority of films take liberties with physics in the service of visual storytelling.
Having a delay gives a feeling of depth to the movie.
There's also clearly a voiceover, they must lose points for that too. /s
No. They don't lose points for using a film production technique that was in popular use at the time (and is still in use.) The reason people say this is a well timed shot has nothing to do with the voice-over at the end of the shot.
They say it's a great shot because Burke hits his mark at the beginning of the shot, then he progresses through the shot, hits his final mark and points within half a second of ignition. All while delivering dialog. (Props to the camera operator who tracked Burke and pulled focus at the appropriate time.)
And then I think there's the thematic element of the subject matter. What you don't get by watching the final shot in that episode was the emotional impact of the Voyager launches. The space program was, at the time, continuing on from the high of the moon landings. The Pioneer probes had returned black and white images from Jupiter and Saturn but the Voyagers were going to return more colour images. They were a RETURN to space, demonstrating that the pioneer mission wasn't a fluke and that, as a people, we were capable of doing great things.
And now, as a people, we bitch in online forums about voice-overs.
One does not, as you suggest, need to deduct any points for editing the sound of an impressive bit of writing, timing, presenting and camera work.
If you want a single, unedited shot, Neil’s ladder descent would be a candidate. If you didn’t think Stanley actually did it.
He did, but he was such a stickler for accuracy that he insisted they shoot on location.
https://youtu.be/P6MOnehCOUw (Mitchell and Webb's take on the fake moon landing.)
The CIA didn't read his contract carefully enough. He snuck it into one of the rider clauses.
It's very explanatory of his fear of flying.
But he blew his line! He intended to say "That's one small step for a man", but he left out the "a".
I've always thought he just kind of slurred over the "a", like you'd do in casual speech, it came out like "f'r'a man". In the recording there's a tiny slight bit of a vowel after the "r" sound. I don't think he blew the line, just didn't speak it clearly.
I was never impressed by that line anyway. I would have said something trollish, which is why I never would have been selected as an astronut.
> astronut
I honestly can't say for sure whether that was intentional or an actual typo. Good job.
"Look, Ma, I'm on the Moon!"
I always liked a joke about this:
Not a lot of people know that after his famous lines as he descended the ladder, Armstrong quietly muttered "and good luck Mr. Lansky". The few people who have heard the audio asked him about over the years, and he was never willing to explain ... until one day. "Well, you see" said Armstrong at a NASA publicity event, "when I was a kid growing up one of my neighbors were Mr & Mrs Lansky. I was playing on the street one day, maybe 8 or 9 years old, it was a hot summer's day and everyone had their windows open. Mr & Mrs Lansky were having some sort of argument inside their house - I couldn't hear much of what they were saying. But then Mrs Lansky must have moved closer to the window, because I heard her very clearly say "Oral sex? You'll get oral sex from me the day that kid next door walks on the moon!"".
I'm not seeing it. Starting at "if you mix those gasses..." to after "...you get that." seems to be a single shot.
Just a reminder, we didn't have AI editing tools at the time. Traditional editing tools of the time would probably be obvious. Maybe you're responding to the focus change where the camera operator adjusts the focal plane from Burke to the rocket in the distance.
That focus change makes me certain the shot wasn't reverse projection as the screen would have to be exceedingly large (too large to keep sufficiently flat.)
I remember seeing film (yes, film!) on the news of the Voyager 2 launch and I remember seeing this episode of Connexions on PBS shortly after.
I'm honestly flummoxed you think there's a cut in the final shot of that sequence. I just don't see it. Maybe it's a generational thing
It's really, really obvious. Watch the bit from 43 to 45 seconds in to the video on the article.
The final shot of the sequence runs from about :44 to 1:06. I'm talking about the bit that STARTS at :44, after the cut. I think you're talking about the sequence before the SHOT.
Ah.
I think that's why you aren't seeing what people are talking about then. It's being pitched as "one long shot", folks are seeing the cut at :44 and saying "no it isn't!"
It's also not as hard as it might seem because they could track the countdown and cue him at the appropriate time.
What if we instead look at the last clip as “the one shot”
Personally I don’t think that takes anything away
Well, he is standing still, the camera is stationary. For just that last segment, it is easy to answer "how did he do it?" Write out his remarks, rehearse with a timer, then figure out at what point in the countdown to begin speaking.
The main thing is that he has say basically one sentence right in a single take, but he is a seasoned television announcer, so that in itself is not too surprising.
The much longer segment, including walking with a moving camera at exactly the right timing, would have been much harder to get in a single take. (Not to mention that that Saturn V lying on its side is probably not even in the same location.)
Yes and no. The Saturn V he walks past was on it's side next to the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is close to launch complex 41 from which the Voyager missions launched.
But I think it's about 120 degrees to the left from where they shot the shot of Burke walking. They absolutely had to set up a different shot to get Burke and the Titan III in the same shot.
As an aside... That Saturn V is no longer at that location. Several years ago they moved it a mile to the north and built a building around it to create the Apollo / Saturn V center. Or at least I think it's the same artefact.
I think the level of irritation is proportional to knowledge of the technical art of cinema, since what makes a good "shot" is often a discussion of minutiae. There are innumerable examples of better shots in television, particularly in the "second golden age" begun with series like "The Sopranos" and climaxing in television like "Better Call Saul" or "Chernobyl"[1]
[1] Which would certainly have some scenes competing for actual best shot. Calling it TV feels a bit misleading.
Reminds me of the 3 minute rube Goldberg machine in "this too shall pass" by Ok Go.
https://youtu.be/qybUFnY7Y8w?si=DBSqRMciDY41QPzD
I thought they really did it all in one cut but there are at least two. Still a great music video and song.
A number of their music videos are quite creative:
* in a zero-G plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWGJA9i18Co
* one-take (?) on electric unicycles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZB_rGFyeU
* 4.2s real-time scene with the footage slowed down to 4 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvW61K2s0tA
* Chevrolet-sponsored video where they use a moving car as an instrument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c
Honestly that would still be impressive if it were 20 cuts.
You see it when looking at the location of the microphone on his shirt.
This is pointless quibbling.
It's not at all pointless! (This is a joke, where I'm quibbling pointlessly, but saying it's not. It's stupid, I grant you, but it's offered in good humor.)
Yes, you are on Hacker News. Ergo...
Come now, he still managed to time the final walk scene to within <100ms of perfection. It's probably luck but still, you have to admire to feat.
You do realize he have recorded the walk at any point? The shot of the rocket launching could have been a month later.
How are you suggesting they composited the two sequences (Burke walking, rocket launching) together in 1978?
What? I'm talking the final scene where he says "...that" and the thing immediately lights up. Absent a green screen, that's damn impressive.
This is such a weird complaint. "The shot" is the one where he's standing in front of the blast off. Of course the shot before it is a different shot. Who cares?
He could have sat there repeating the same sentence over and over for several minutes.
No, because then the rocket would probably launch in the middle of the sentence. He had to start saying that sentence at the right second and pace the words and his movements perfectly.
It's not a "weird complaint" at all. The cut goes to the heart of why it's supposedly impressive. Because of the cut, all he had to do was say one sentence before the rocket lifts off (which is happening at a time that's known down to the second).
I never understood it any different, but the effect still superb IMHO.
All Paul McCartney had to was write a sequence of words to a melody beginning with the word "Yesterday".
The full series is on Archive:
https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections...
It still holds up for the most part, though of course some of the takes, being almost 50 years old, may seem a bit quaint. It's certainly worth watching the first series at least start to finish. Burke is an interesting guy.
I personally feel like _The Day The Universe Changed_ (his second documentary) is better. I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology) ends up pretty scattershot, spreading out like Brownian Motion. _tDtUC_ is much more focused. Largely based on Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ for individual stories, it traces how the understanding of time in Europe changed from the middle ages to the 1980's- the idea of time as a marker of descent from a previous golden age (1), or at best a repeating cycle, evolves into our modern conception of time as endlessly improving into a better future. And the supporting book was amazing too.
I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood: _In Search of the Trojan War_, _In Search of the Dark Ages_, _The Story of England_, _The Story of India_ they were also a staple of American PBS and informed my understanding of the world.
1: My go to example for this is imagine you walk into the Pantheon in 1000 AD: no one on your entire continent has known how to build a dome like that in 500 years, and won't again for another 500 years. The fundamental way you understand the world has to be completely different from the "newer is better" baseline that we have understood the world by for the past 150 years.
> "I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology)..."
Good grief, no. The basic thesis of Connections 1 was that humanity has become fatally dependent on technology (the "technology trap" he speaks of), that that dependence continues getting deeper and deeper, and it's hard to predict what technologies will emerge or where technology will take us, possibly utopia but just as likely a living hell, and finally that we don't even have the option to stop digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the technology trap because technological advancement can't be stopped because its emergence is unpredictable. Re-watch just the first and last episodes and they will terrify you.
Connections 2 and 3 were indeed scattershot because people liked Burke's charming mannerisms and didn't want to think about the ever more complex and ever more fragile panoply of technologies that individuals, even the technologists themselves, can neither understand nor control that is all that stands between humanity and its extinction.
Agree with your comments on Connections 1.
Better still, like a well-written essay, there is closure to the series. All the ends left about in the preceding episodes are drawn together neatly in the final one.
I just watched the first episode. The simulated nuclear attack did terrify me.
That said, his commentary about telecommuting is spot-on. At 39:49 of https://archive.org/details/the-day-the-universe-changed-s01... .
"The point about all this technological pizazz isn't the gee-whiz high-tech stuff. It's the secondary effects of using it. Take say what this chip could do to change the pattern of work. With this you could have telecommuting, that's where you work at home from a screen and you never go into the office.
Great! No more rush hour. But what does that do to the public transportation system and the taxes it uses. Or to the car manufacturers and their workers' jobs, and the rest of the economy that depends on their output?
Or to the concept of the city itself, with its support systems and businesses. Or to the downtown properties where maybe your pension fund's invested.
Not to speak of working at home day in and day out and what that might do to a marriage. And what do you get out of work when it's only you? What would be the effect of isolating and fragmenting the community like that?
From just one application of this microchip."
Second the comment re the day the universe changed, and found the episode on how Islamic Spain influenced the world quite surprising. Think it was the 2nd one, starting with two competing views of the world from African Roman scholars/clerics.
Many of these older docu’s wanted you to stop and think.
> I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood
And for Philomena Cunk's various projects…
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I first saw Connections in the late 2000s... the final scene of the last episode, "inside the British Airways computer" (an entire floor of a large building), had me standing on my couch pointing at the screen.
A year or two before I was born, James Burke wandered between mainframes and reel-to-reel tape machines, speaking with extraordinary prescience about data, communications, decision-making systems, and power:
"This is the future. Because if you tell a computer everything you know about something, it will juggle the mix, and come up with a prediction. Do this, and you'll get that. And if you have information and a computer, you too can look into the future. And that is power. Commercial power, political power, power to change things."
I'm going to watch that scene again, because it's even more important 20 years further along: smart phones, "big data", large language models, Palantir...
A fun background show (for those of us with ADHD?) I like to have on is Computer Chronicles - a weekly show that basically documented the weekly history, for the most part, of the evolution of personal computing. It basically starts out as "these things are cool and can run spreadsheets" to evolution into music, the internet, and beyond. Lots of crazy things happen in the 1980s that we're now realizing today like touch, voice, and ai that people kept saying we'd be 2-4 years away from...I guess that is marketing speak for 20-40 years, but it's still seems very relivant to today.
There is also a fourth season from 2023. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30222317
Also note that there is a book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Connections/James-Bur...
https://archive.org/details/connections0000burk/page/n7/mode...
I was so lucky to be able to grow up watching quality shows like this. Thank you PBS (and BBC).
Thanks for the link.
This clip is Season 1 Episode 8 "Eat Drink and Be Merry" and the shot starts at 48:17:
https://archive.org/download/bbc-connections-1978/Connection...
It really grinds my gears that the uploader had to ruin the "Greatest Shot in Television" by stretching the 4:3 video to 16:9.
I know I sound like a pedant but so many of these old TV recordings are uploaded this way on youtube. I was so annoyed by this infact that a few years ago I made a dumb extension that squeezes the video element back to 4:3 [1]. I'm not sure if this still works though.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/doddimnledmldclhlbf...
spite driven development is the unsung hero of so many great tools
This will fix it: https://www.stretch.site
And here's the clip with aspect ratio corrected: https://www.stretch.site/?videoUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube...
A question about aspect ratio on youtube, Does it care? or can you put whatever aspect ratio you want, I guess my complaint is that I don't see nearly enough (none) square video on the site.
I think it will show in whatever aspect ratio you upload.
It cares about overall pixel size, and for example standard 720x576 standard def 4:3 video will be brutally compressed compared to the exact same video upscaled using any non-AI upscaler (even nearest-neighbour) to 1440x1080.
I dug into this a bit a while ago, and could probably post my finding here if anyone was interested.
YouTube, as well as any decent player, plays any aspect ratio video, even portrait mode.
As an uploader you should never add black bars (if they are in the source, crop them out before uploading) and of course never distort the video. This ensures the best playback experience for all devices.
> As an uploader you should never add black bars
In an ideal world yes. In practice, the YouTube layout looks weird on aspect ratios that aren't 4:3 or 16:9. If you upload any vertical video it gets categorized as a short, so that's out of the window - and even for things like 21:9 you get a teeny tiny player on desktop since it just fits the width.
Yes, there are some YouTube-manufactured issues. However it bothers me more when I try to watch a 21:9 video fullscreen on my 21:9 display and get black bars on all four sides.
What do you do if you want to combine several sources with different aspect ratios? Surely black bars are acceptable in that case?
I don't know if YT can, but browsers do handle variable-AR videos.
https://litter.catbox.moe/1x93zdib04wu50kc.webm
Ah yes, the good old "shot in portrait mode, converted to 16:9 with added black bars, and then displayed under YT shorts in portrait mode again" category on youtube. This is almost artistic at this point. Sometimes I wonder how small can the content of a video get before people will stop watching it. Is there any research on this?
You can. I've even seen intentional 4:3 used as an "80s" signifier.
Quick googling suggested that square video under 3 minutes will be automatically classed as "shorts", which much of HN hates and may never have seen.
Not YouTube but regarding the period signifier:
Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" has every section of the movie shot in the time appropriate aspect ratio.
But the presentation format is actually 1.85:1 so the 1930s part is pillarboxed slightly and the 1960s part is heavily letterboxed.
If you buy the Blu-ray it's presented in 16:9 and 1920x1080 throughout, it's just masked to suit.
AFAIK youtube will stretch the player window to match the aspect ratio of the source media, lots of cinematic content that's a wider than normal (21:9 I think?) ratio that youtube adjusts the player window to fit around without black bars.
They won't ever squash or stretch video though, so this means the original uploader stretched the 4:3 content to 16:9 at some point before upload
I watched this show religiously as a kid (by then in reruns in the early 90s), along with Star Trek: TNG, Jeopardy, and playing Civilization for PC. The most formative years of my life were spent absorbing as much science, technology, and history as my growing brain could muster. I think that's why I'd grown up to be so optimistic about the future.
I think there's still a lot of room for optimism, despite all of the pessimism in the media, and I'm not even talking about AI. There are a ton of other things which have benefitted enormously from ubiquitous, efficient, and powerful computing that hardly get talked about anymore, we've come to take it all for granted.
The last line of the video was talking about nuking others...
The very first episode of Connections walks through might happen in New York City if power went out and never came back on. Pretty much an apocalyptic scenario for people living there!
He didn’t shy away from talking about technology for good or ill, for the ways it liberates us but can also trap us, for the ways it makes new sources of energy possible, and new weapons.
Could have just been intercontinental ballistic human transport... I can't tell you how many times I've wished to just be fired out of a cannon to Hong Kong from SF.
He's even clearer about it in the last episode of season 1, where he assembles all the inventions from the season and shows how they make the US nuclear triad.
We have the technology to do that. What we do not have is circus tents big enough to cover the area.
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Direct link to the youtube video, without this garbage ad-ridden website:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ
This comment reminded me I have an ad blocker. I reloaded the page without it, and instantly remembered why.
>this garbage ad-ridden website
And that's not Youtube?
I’d also mention the ascent of the Apollo 17 LM. The camera could be commanded to move up to follow the ascent, but the command had to be given ahead of time, from the MOCR, to coincide with the launch, which was commanded from the LM. The audio from the LM was delayed, as was the video from the camera, and the command would take about a second to reach the camera on the moon.
Personally I put the Jonnie Walker The Man Who Walked Around The World ad with Robert Carlyle as the greatest one take shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ6aiVg2qVk
Wow that was very well done!
I loved Connections so much as a kid, but I'm so tired of this clip. There's so many better clips from this show.
So he nailed a 13 second countdown. Who cares? Newscasters do this at every commercial break. Sports announcers do this without a script and they still nail the cut to commercial almost every time. Yes, there's a talent to timing your speech to a countdown in your ear, but it's a talent that people do thousands of times a day around the world on far less preparation than Burke had here.
The fact that this article calls a simple cut a "sleight of hand" just terrifies me. Does the public really not know what editing is?
> Does the public really not know what editing is?
I think most viewers would be unaware of the cut unless it was pointed out. Hence this sequence being called a "shot".
If it gets someone to watch the show for the first time then that's a win in my book. I think every young student should be exposed to Connections at various stages of their education.
I absolutely adore both Burke and the Connections series, and without a doubt this is a lovely shot, but I feel the same: I don't get the hype. It's been memefied to death for no real reason. There's no incredible feat involved. It wasn't a tightrope walk without a net live on air. You can bet they had stand-in footage done before that they could have made a montage of in case Burke stumbled a line.
I suppose it's like a magic trick. It's less impressive once you understand how it all works. But still, it's clearly effective and you can admire the artistry.
If you look at the start of that episode, there is another crazy thing in there, a device which allows you to "see" the bits on a credit card track.
Apparently something called "magnetic viewing film" can allow you to see the bits on the magnetic stripes of credit cards.
I had never heard about this before.
Link to video time: https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections...
In the 80’s I worked for a radio station in Asheville NC. That allowed us to get press passes to launches at the cape. I was in the press area for 2 shuttle launches including the very first night launch of the Space Shuttle. They launched right after an incredible thunderstorm had rolled through. I’m old now but still remember it like it was yesterday. Incredible to see in person.
I wonder if this show is the ”Connections” in “Technology Connections” [1]. I can’t find a reference on it but I wouldn’t be surprised.
[1] https://youtube.com/c/TechnologyConnections
If you haven't seen it, there was a new season of connections made in 2023 as well.
https://www.space.com/connections-with-james-burke-docuserie...
The most emblematic thing about this clip is how generally audiences are totally blind to video cuts, and how how much that allows video producers to get away with.
The "Trigger Effect" episode ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcOb3Dilzjc ) that set off Connections:I was one of the finest hours ever produced for television. It influenced my family and I in the years to come. Hope for the best, while preparing for the worst.
It begins at South Tower of the World Trade Center, and as Burke enters an express elevator (Car 6 or 7 if you must know) he says in effect, "Do I worry about ascending to the top in a steel box? Of course I don't! We take going up in the world like that for granted." When an elevator later goes dark he says. "We expect this to happen sometimes so what do we do? We strike a light and look around in the dark for an emergency button to push and if we find one, we press it." In this discussion of single takes, note what the temperature of the butane lighter must have been by the time he finishes his speech. Ouch!
Also interesting to note in the realm of happenstance: the airliner portrayed in trouble over darkened New York was flight 911.
In an episode that opened in the World Trade Center towers.
That is an awesome set of coincidences.
... or perhaps the series influenced OBL ...
James Burke is one of Earth's treasures. Connections is the best docuseries I have ever seen.
I loved this show as a kid.
Growing up in Argentina, back in the day these were all dubbed. The version I watched on tv had a voice and personality of its own - Latin American "neutral" Spanish - and for the life of me I could never find that same version, only the Spain-dubbed one.
I strongly encourage all HN readers to seek out any of his work online. Including the meta, where he tasks about being hired for the job, and the approach he took to communicating. Although some of it will look a little dated, the messages are timeless.
Connections is one of the greatest shows in television. The pilot episode is amazing, highlighting the problem with dependence on technology that we don't understand.
"Never have so many people understood so little about so much."
Even more true today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCJh5D0FCZk with the correct aspect ratio
It doesn’t compare to this shot, but I particularly enjoyed the one episode of the The Studio with Seth Rogan where it starts with him driving to a filming location where they were going to do a one shot scene and he was explaining to someone how difficult they are to pull off, etc.
The episode was funny (although cringey too) for the things that happened in it.
But what was quite clever I thought was that the episode was itself done (at least seemingly) in one-shot.
I remember on a podcast interview I listened to that he said he intentionally made every episode as close to a “oner” as possible using very long takes and hidden transitions where possible.
It’s to heighten the sense of anxiety and tension for the viewer in order to amplify the comedy.
Great show!
I just don't think it's that great? It's cool, I just don't think we should all accept it's the greatest. I mean I feel like some spacex stream segments are more awe-inspiring than this. Or some planet earth shots.
James Burke is a great man. I have a personal policy that when I write a white each paragraph has a "layperson's" explanation beneath it, which was inspired by the first and the last episode of his BBC show Connections
Wow, I've only known the Carl Sagan shot in Cosmos. I'm happy to know the original now.
I love connections but holy crap can people just not spot an edit? It's a cool shot but the bit he had to time is short and pretty simple.
really miss the time when the documentaries take the audience as audience.
Despite its editorial antics, this is one of those videos that you are randomly reminded of at 2am, watch it, and get emotional.
I grew up watching Cosmos and Connections (and a bunch of stupid prime time on the one TV in the house and something like 5 clear channel [PBS being the best]).
Hands down one of the best TV shows ever made
I miss big budget documentaries, definitely a niche that youtube/nebula small creator teams hasn't filled.
Where can I watch Connections show? What's the best place? Any episode recommendations?
archive.org has all episodes
reminds me of "Scene 113: The Bridge" in the show The Franchise when they're on location in Armenia. I won't spoil the show/episode but let's just say it doesn't go as well as the shot highlighted here.
When the wise man points to the rocket, the fool looks at the tv host.
Anyone know if the connections shows can be watched online somewhere?
Internet Archive: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48090682>.
The guy won't shutup he's just foaming st the mouth babbling on and on its like enough we've seen this a million times the show sucks!
I love this style of documentary, I feel like we had it even when I was a kid in the 90s - 00s and as an adult in the 10s, but now is totally a dead style.
Sadly, it is not produced anymore. The producers chase a style and person that no longer exist, so they get their panties in a twist and make TikTok style and "true crime" style interviews is all I see from newer documentaries sadly. Women love "true crime" so 50% of new docus are just true crime drama slop.
I used to watch all or most of our state TV ones but they are no longer as good (They do some of their own buy buy in most from BBC, Showtime and PBS.)
I have been watching World at War and The World at War and such. Should watch Civilization and How should we then live?
I love this back when we where not afraid to exhault our own virtues.
If that’s what you got from James Burke’s body of work, may be worth a revisit.
I have not seen it but compared to today I see a white man mentioning Verner Braun in a positive note.
Made today it would be a woman or MtF person screeching about it and a disclaimer in the beginning.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
The Day the Universe Changed is amazing. It combines history, science and philosophy.
Do yourself a favor, and search for the episodes.
I would not be surprised if Tom Scott stated one day that this video was an inspiration for his legendary old video format: just him walking through some random place and explaining things, seemingly completely without script.
Meh
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