Sensor Scan: Coast to Coast AM

The Long 1980s are usually seen as the era when the sweeping hegemonic counter-revolution came in and tore down all the radical mainstream institutions and media artefacts people had spent the Long 1960s putting into place. And there is an extent to which this is true, and indisputable. However, by virtue of being in many ways the high water mark of what we now call “traditional” or “old” media, the Long 1980s were also the period where people working in those structures pushed them to their limits and beyond. People have something to say in every era, and there will always be those who call for positive change, and they will make their voices heard in one way or another.

So, put another way, even though the Long 1980s can be argued to be the point where large-scale media consolidated itself to be firmly and inexorably a part of the authoritarian establishment, there were just as many people who freely acknowledged this, yet continued to use their master's tools against them. Television may have become the boot of the oppressor, but, whether you think it was successful or not, Star Trek: The Next Generation certainly strove to be a force for material social progress, as did its sci-fi colleague across the pond at the BBC (but we'll get to that soon enough). You can say the cinema of the 1980s swept away the auteur, experimentalist cinema of the 1970s, but there were still films like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Thanks to Nintendo, the video game industry was as energized, inspired and full of life as it would ever be. And, the Long 1980s were really the last time pop music was allowed to be openly radical and critical of the status quo without making a ton of concessions, with people like Siouxsie Sioux, Laurie Anderson and Nena topping the pop charts.

And on the airwaves, on the one hand you had most of the medium being co-opted into the neoconservative revolution leading to a profound shift in the essence of talk radio. On the other, you had Coast to Coast AM.

Though the pioneer of paranormal radio is widely accepted to be Long John Nebel, who for years ran a wildly successful talk show out of New York that dabbled in the supernatural and conspiracy theories, the archetypical, definitive example of the genre really can only be Coast to Coast AM hosted by Art Bell, and later George Noory. Like Nebel before him, Bell was a tremendous showman, bringing a fire and zeal to his performance and quickly gained fame and recognition for his dogged pursuit of a huge swath of different topics, from the expected paranormal gossip and hypothesizing to quantum physics, theology, philosophy, science fiction and flagrantly radical political topics from all angles of the spectrum (which was an early indication of both the strengths and weaknesses of Coast's overall impact in my opinion).

For those who might not be intimately familiar with how a show like this works, the first crucial thing to remember about Coast to Coast AM is that it's late night radio, meaning it airs between 10PM (2200) and 2AM West Coast time and, if you happen to be on the other US coast (like me), it airs from 1AM to 5AM. This is an hour that nobody in their right mind chooses to be awake for if they have a choice in the matter-It's called the “graveyard slot” for any number of very good reasons (and do please note it's almost midnight as I write this). This means Coast to Coast AM's listener base is made up exclusively of both night shift workers (namely truck drivers) and fervently antisocial people who resent the world of daylight. This first group of people are the “Rocket Man” set who I brought up in my post on that song: Ordinary people who simply for whatever reason live very solitary and contemplative lives and spend a lot of time ruminating on mystical, philosophical and cosmic things because that's what you do when you're alone with yourself at Ungodly O'Clock. As for the second group...Well, that would explain some of Coast's callers, actually.

The show's structure facilitates this as well, split as it is between guest interviews and open line segments, with every Friday night being dedicated exclusively to open lines. It's on these Open Line Fridays that the show really comes into its own, for better or for worse: Coast to Coast AM already airs in an entertainment dead zone during the work week, and pairing that up with a Friday night airdate simply compounds things by ensuring that statistically nobody is listening, and the show becomes wonderfully mad and unhinged as a result. Because of this, the show has absolute freedom to talk about things absolutely no other media outlet would dare touch-For a time, it was one of the only places actual legitimate scientists who also had an interest in Forteana, like Loren Coleman and Jeff Meldrum, were able to get a large-scale audience. However, this also makes the show frequently a mixed bag: One the one hand, it can attract extremely challenging thinkers who operate as the enemy of institutionalized power structures who genuinely want to work for radical material social progress and will never attain a traditional audience because of that. On the other hand...the show also attracts paranoid misanthropic conspiracy theorists and people who claim to be time travelling extraterrestrial messiahs.

This is what really makes Coast to Coast AM special and unique: There are plenty of radio shows on the air that deal with paranormal topics or fringe politics, especially nowadays with the advent of the Internet and podcasting. Many of those shows handle their subject matter more seriously (and more frighteningly), but on none of those other shows will you get to hear somebody call in with a panicky declaration that she's half Martian and her pickup truck is a portal to another dimension or somebody claiming to be Jesus angrily threatening to throw people into boiling pits of sewage for watching pornography. Seriously, do you like Welcome to Night Vale? That show is basically Coast to Coast AM mashed up with Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion, except Night Vale is fiction and comedy and Coast to Coast AM is real life. Truth is, as they say, stranger than fiction.

And yet Coast to Coast AM is not a parade of the bizarre put on display for our slack-jawed amusement: For one thing, the paranormal is, as I mentioned above, just one of many different topics the show tackles every night. Physicist and science popularizer Michio Kaku is a big friend of the show, as was Casey Kasem. Both Art Bell and George Noory have a strong interest in and love of science fiction, and Leonard Nimoy, Marc Zicree and Ray Bradbury have all been regular guests at different points in time. When Enterprise was going through its most turbulent and tempestuous period, Jolene Blalock, a friend of Noory's, would occasionally come onto Coast, which was the only outlet that actually seemed interested in engaging her in an adult conversation about things she was passionate and outspoken about (even things that, shockingly, didn't have anything to do with Star Trek!) instead of ogling her. Art Bell even managed some legitimate and serious acts of actual journalism: He was one of the first people to express concern about global climate change in the 1980s when nobody else in the media was listening to the climatologists, and it was Bell who broke the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center torture abuse story in 2001.

The reason Coast to Coast AM can manage all of this effortlessly lies in the quiet, gentle patience of its hosts and its foundational, unshakable promise to its listeners. From the very beginning, Coast to Coast AM has always been an absolutely open forum: Apart from overt verbal abuse, explicit threats or hate speech, pretty much anyone can call into the show, express any opinion and be given a podium completely unchallenged. That was a central tenet of the show Art Bell introduced from the start, George Noory continues that tradition, and I think it's even more evident under him. Coast to Coast AM is not a show about banter, debate or confrontation, it's a show about giving a voice to people and giving them a place to be heard and treated with the respect and attention that they might not be able to get anywhere else, which, when you get right down to it, is a basic human right. And though open lines can be a total spectacle and the show frequently books guests who are provably wrong about pretty much everything, Coast to Coast AM never, ever mocks or patronizes anyone. This isn't a talk show so much as it is a listening show.

George Noory himself gave a very moving example of this philosophy in a book he wrote a few years back called Worker in the Light, which also doubles as an extended exploration of the subject. Every year, Noory hosts a special all-open lines episode of Coast to Coast AM on Christmas Eve dedicated to people who are alone during the holiday season. Noory feels nobody should have to be lonely, especially at that time of year, and he wants to make sure people know there's at least one person who will always be there to listen if they have nobody else and need someone to talk to. And in his book, he elabourates on why he feels this is such an important thing that he must do.

Noory's book is largely about his personal conception of light magick, which apparently has a lot to to with meditation on Love and Empathy on both a microcosmic and microcosmic scale. Noory believes we shouldn't preoccupy ourselves with the grand-scale problems of the world because there's nothing we can practically do about that sort of thing as individuals, and focusing on this will only get us depressed and frustrated with ourselves. However, if we really ruminate on True Love and Empathy and try to take that into ourselves, we can help make the world a better place just by living our lives. Noory thinks he can do his part by helping provide something like Coast to Coast AM: He's merely a worker, just like all of us, but he's been able to dedicate his work to what he feels can promote lightness and good in the world.

It's good basic life advice in general, but conveying this the way he does is a reminder of how magick gains power through words and meaning: I've thankfully never found myself in a place where I've felt something like Coast to Coast AM was the only place I could turn to anymore and would need something like its Christmas Eve show, but it is comforting to know that George Noory would be there if I ever did. His sentiment touches me, and I can feel the love behind it in his words on paper and on the air.

Maybe that's a sign his magick is working.

Sensor Scan: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

My house sits on a small meadow, at different tiers owing to the craggy glacial deposits that make up this part of the country. The lower portion of the meadow is flat, tapering off from its hilly upper portions and ending in a small pond we used to swim in a lot when I was younger. We don't swim in it anymore though because a series of powerful rainstorms followed by two consecutive hurricanes in recent years, caused the pond to overflow its banks, kickstarting the process of ecological succession. It's now slowly transforming into a wetland. The children of the previous owners liked baseball a lot, and used to use this part of the meadow as a baseball field. In fact, you can still see the small piece of shale they would use as home plate, though each year it vanishes further and further into the ground as the grass grows around it. The meadow is surrounded on all sides by mixed broadleaf forest, and on certain summer days in June the wind hits the deciduous trees at such an angle that the sunlight is reflected brilliantly off the bottoms of the leaves. If you were to look up on those days, you would see towering, rolling structures of cloud drifting by in the endlessly deep blue summer sky, and might catch a glimpse of a distant plane travelling far overhead.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is not a movie. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is not a manga. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is somebody's magnum opus. This is a life's work collected to chronicle one person's metamorphosis and growth over the course of a career. The piece we get to look at today is but a tiny, tiny fraction of an indescribably, incomparably sprawling work of philosophy and emotion (as all works of art ultimately are, but this one embodies this truth better than others), and yet even so it still manages to be a crystal clear, defining statement by and about its creator, even if it only catches him at one specific moment in time.

Where can I even begin talking about something like this? I suppose with Nausicaä's medium, Hayao Miyazaki, an artist who is as acclaimed and beloved as he is misunderstood. Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli are major players in what's often called the Renaissance Age of Animation: Roughly lasting the period between 1985 and 1995 (though people do squabble over the start and end dates), this period saw animation as a medium almost completely casting aside the negative connotations it had accumulated, however fairly or unfairly that may be, over the course of the Long 1960s. For the first time since the 1940s, critics began to sit up and take notice of the work animators were doing and cartoons began to be taken seriously as legitimate forms of creative expression for what was, in retrospect, probably the last time.

(Hell, even Scooby-Doo was pretty fantastic during this period, at least as far as I'm concerned. The Scooby-Doo of 1983-1991 was more or less the best the franchise had been since 1969.)

In the United States, the Renaissance Age is usually pegged as starting with Disney's The Little Mermaid in 1989, the studio's first properly successful blockbuster family musical in twenty years. But even for Disney it's more accurate to say it really began with Adventures of the Gummi Bears in 1985 and DuckTales in 1986, two series that affirmed the studio's newfound focus on quality control and changed the landscape of Saturday Morning Cartoons: Once seen as the dumping ground for the absolute dregs of children's entertainment, shows like these made a firm statement that the medium need not be neglected, and that Disney was a studio that was now going to lavish the same amount of care and attention it was famous for giving its movies on any work that went out under its name. Gummi Bears and DuckTales set a massive precedent both within and without Disney, and would eventually be repackaged along with successor shows Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Darkwing Duck, TaleSpin and Marsupilami (based on the legendary Franco-Belgian graphic novel series) as The Disney Afternoon. And of course, one of the major architects of Disney's Renaissance Age was none other than Michael Eisner, whom readers of this blog might know as the Paramount exec who oversaw Star Trek Phase II.

But though Eisner and Disney get the majority of the acclaim for this period, they wouldn't have gotten anywhere without Hayao Miyazaki. Many of the new artists Eisner brought to Disney were enormously influenced by the work Miyazaki was doing in Japan and wanted to replicate his lushness and sense of imagination for the new Disney. However, in a curious bit of mutual fannishness, the early Japanese animation industry, which inspired Miyazaki to become a manga artist and animator himself, owed a significant debt to the Disney Animated Canon movies of the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed Miyazaki's stature in the modern Japanese animation industry, along with his influence on the Disney Renaissance, is so great that this is likely the reason Disney specifically asked his permission, practically begged, to be the official distributor of his movies in the United States in the 2000s.

As an artist and a creator, Miyazaki is frequently seen as returning to three specific themes over and over again: Environmentalism, feminism and an almost latter-day Spielbergian fixation on a sentimental conception of childhood wonder and innocence. And, while these may be loosely fitting descriptors in the broadest possible sense, they also do Miyazaki a massive disservice, stripping him and his oeuvre of almost all of the personal and cultural context necessary to properly read it. Miyazaki can do children's literature and he's arguably the most famous for his work that is, but firstly when he does it's anything but sentimental for sentimentality's sake and secondly this isn't the only thing he's capable of. And while the natural world and female perspectives do in fact run very, very deep in Miyazaki's work and it's not inaccurate or misleading to call him a feminist and an environmentalist, he is both of those things, that doesn't capture the full complexity and nuance with which he approaches these themes in his work.

Miyazaki's naturalism, and his feminism, comes from a very elemental place. When he talks about the environment and the natural world in his work, it's in neither the facile, hippieish “we're polluting our lakes and streams and we need to ask our governments for some lobbying concessions to pass environmental regulations” nor the old, familiar “folly and hubris of humanity versus the purity of the natural order” trope that even Carl Sagan ultimately succumbed to. Miyazaki actually, sincerely sees a fundamental and toxic disconnect between humanity and the rest of the universe, not just material, but spiritual, that we've built around ourselves and is trying to express this. This is not, by the way, simply because he's Japanese-Miyazaki's beliefs are grounded just as much in fervently radical left-wing decentralist politics as they are in a reverence for nature, and he is in fact so far left of left he's been deemed a “traitor” and an “enemy of Japan” a number of times throughout his career. Ironic, given the fact he is also, paradoxically, considered a beloved and iconic cultural staple.

Miyazaki explicitly blames industrialization, capitalism and globalization (at least in the technologistic and corporatist sense, part of what Manuel Castells calls the network society, which is a separate thing from cultural diffusion) for making modern society inauthentic, insincere and plastic and for creating an environment that fosters the evils of imperialism and patriarchy. This is a guy who has openly fantasized about Tokyo being wiped out by a natural disaster, not out of some kind of misplaced eschatological apocalypse pornography, but because it would be victory for the forces of the Earth pushing back against industrial capitalism’s inherent dehumanization that severs the link between humanity and the natural world. As wary as Miyazaki is of his own country, though (he has admitted he found his childhood in the Shōwa period, an era marked by Japan's rapid and unprecedented embrace of modernity, confusing and disturbing) he outright condemns the United States, actively protests its government, foreign and economic policy and refuses to visit except under very special circumstances.

In short, Hayao Miyazaki is not a person it's easy to dismiss with vague platitudes.

How interesting then that Miyazaki's masterpiece would be a sweeping war epic about love and empathy starring a warrior princess who fights without fighting and isn't really even a princess. A Hayao Miyazaki movie that isn't for or about children, yet which operates with an honesty, heart and truthfulness that all the very best children's literature has. A story about the natural world that deliberately eschews banal “man vs. nature” themes and angry polemics to cry out to us in a heartfelt and yearning plea to rekindle our understanding of one another. An action sci-fi story where all the action happens around us and where the spectacular sci-fi elements are a source of misguided tragedy and grotesque horror. And a movie considered the beginning of the Studio Ghibli Animated Canon that wasn't even made by Studio Ghibli. For, as popular and acclaimed as My Neighbor Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away may be, there's no work work of Hayao Miyazaki's that's more emblematic of his positionality, and no work that's greater, than Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

If we're going to talk about anything of Miyazaki's on Vaka Rangi, this has to be the one to do. Not only is it the most personal work of his by far, it's also one of the many import Japanese movies Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda watched in the Star Trek: The Next Generation break room and the movie that got one of the biggest nods in the show itself. And it changed my life.

Although the story takes place on an unparalleled scale and in one of the grandest and most beautiful constructed fantasy worlds in all of fiction, the true heart and soul that all of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind revolves around is nothing more or less than Nausicaä herself. Nausicaä is born of reappropriation and detournement at every level, coming into the world fully-formed through the inspired childhood dreams of a young Hayao Miyazaki. She of course inherits her name, and her title, from the Princess Nausicaä of The Odyssey, who rescues Odysseus near the beginning of the story when he washes ashore on the island of Phaecia. But this Nausicaä does not come directly from The Odyssey, but rather from the book Gods, Demigods and Demons by Bernard Evslin, an author famous for his summaries and adaptations of Greek myths done for high school students. Miyazaki had read a version of Evslin's book translated into Japanese by Minoru Kobayashi where The Odyssey's Nausicaä was said to be "renowned for her love of nature and music, her fervid imagination and disregard for material possessions", according to Miyazaki biographer Dani Cavallaro. Miyazaki was profoundly moved and inspired by this description, and was crestfallen to discover upon reading The Odyssey itself that Nausicaä was nowhere near as important or memorable a character as Evslin made her out to be.

But though she shares her name and title with Homer's character, our Nausicaä is shaped just as much by “The Lady who Loved Insects”, a traditional Japanese folk tale dating to the twelfth century Heian period about a princess who rejects court etiquette and her expected social role by refusing to marry, much preferring to spend her time in the field studying insects. The princess does not understand why people only see beauty in a butterfly and don't also appreciate the beauty of a caterpillar, which is the same creature, just at a different stage of its life. Miyazaki enjoyed this story greatly as a child and often tried to imagine what might have become of that princess, but both he and Japanese literature scholar Donald Keene caution that while we as modern readers immediately want to sympathize with her, the short story was likely originally written as a work of satire meant to criticize those who do not follow proper societal conventions and expectations.

From this congress of idea and memory came Nausicaä, clad in sky-blue garments and adrift upon the wind.

Summarising what Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is about is an utterly pointless and impossible feat: This is an epic continuing serial that lasted fourteen entire years between 1982 and 1994, boasts a level of worldbuilding detail that makes The Lord of the Rings look phoned in and actually changes its entire philosophical ethos and message at several points as Miyazaki's own views shift and mature. It is nothing short of one person's true life's work, with every panel of its four volumes written and drawn by Miyazaki and Miyazaki alone with just a pencil. The bare basics of the story and setting are that following the end of the last age, civilization destroyed itself in a great cataclysm called the Seven Days of Fire, where industrial radioactive engines known as God Warriors were set loose to salt the Earth, rendering much of it a lifeless desert and marking the end of the Old Universe. In the centuries since then, a corrosive jungle inhabited by fantastical species of insects and fungus known as the Sea of Corruption is spreading across the land, wiping out the last vestiges of humanity for some unknown purpose. Meanwhile, two ancient and bloated empires, the Torumekians and the Doroks, spar with each other to consolidate the rapidly shrinking tracts of inhabitable land.

There remains one province independent of both imperial rule and the Sea of Corruption, the verdant and pastoral seaside periphery kingdom called the Valley of the Wind, where Nausicaä rules as princess. But, as the Valley of the Wind comprises under a thousand people, there's no real royal family to speak of (save Nausicaä's father) and she doesn't live noticeably above the means of her “subjects” it's more of an honouray title bestowed upon her because of her people's love for her leadership and the admiration they hold her in. Nausicaä, unlike the empires or the rest of her people, does not fear the Sea of Corruption: To her, all life is sacred and all life is deserving of love, respect and understanding. Nausicaä is in fact an animist, and this philosophy defines her to her core. Nausicaä travels the world upon her jet-propelled glider Mehve (though giant airships and jet fighters still exist in Nausicaä's world, she prefers to use a glider to ride with the natural currents of the wind instead of against it) to deepen her understanding about the Sea of Corruption and the rest of the natural world she lives in.

Something that I've always loved about the ocean is how, on really clear summer days, the sea reflects the blue of the sky above, becoming a glittering, sparkling liquid mirror of the sky above it. Sometimes at night, if the conditions are right, the phosphorescent plankton and the bioluminescent creatures from the deepest parts of the ocean will mirror the celestial sphere above, giving lucky travellers the feeling of being surrounded by stars. Water takes on many formes and has many moods: It is gentle and strong, and though it naturally follows the channels and curves of the Earth, it is also mighty enough to reshape the Earth beyond recognition. Many writers and artists have said the ocean has many emotions and is powerful and lovely in all of them, but to me, when the clear ocean waters meet the bright clear summer sky it's the most beautiful of all.

The 1984 anime movie, which I'm technically trying to write about here, is a hyper-condensed adaptation of the story arc from the first volume and about three quarters of the second, which hadn't been finished at the time of production (to give you an idea of *how* condensed, every single character in this movie, even if they only appeared onscreen for a few moments, has a fully fleshed-out backstory and character arc in the manga). The story as depicted here follows a Torumekian airship crash-landing in the Valley of the Wind, carrying a top-secret military detachment led by Princess Kushana and her Machiavellian second-in-command Kurotowa. The crash kills another princess, Lastelle, of the Torumekian annex Pejite which has been sparring with its imperial occupiers. With her last breath, Lastelle begs Nausicaä to burn the airship's cargo, which is ultimately revealed to be the last remaining God Warrior, which Kushana's superiors want her to use to expand the frontier boundaries of the Torumekian empire and wipe out the Sea of Corruption. It is later revealed Pejite provoked the Sea of Corruption to attack Torumekia by arousing the ire of the Ohmu, mammoth, trilobite-like insect guardians of the forest with whom Nausicaä shares a special bond, and will do the same to the Valley of the Wind to prevent Kushana from activating the God Warrior. Nausicaä takes it upon herself to put a stop to the fighting and to help soothe the anger and wounds of a world at war with itself.

There is a *lot* more to even this abbreviated version of the story, but I can't go into any more detail as it would spoil the movie and the manga for those who haven't read it yet, and I adamantly refuse to do that. This is something you absolutely have to experience for yourself. I can't even give it a proper analysis, because this story defies critique. In spite of being a condensed adaptation of an unfinished manga, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is perfect. I have no other words for it than that. Somehow, Hayao Miyazaki took an infinitesimally small sliver of what would become his magnum opus, a manga that was perfect already, and turned it into a film that was every bit as perfect in its own way. In the world of mass media entertainment, that's unheard of. Literally. I can't think of it happening anywhere else. To paraphrase someone far more talented than I, it is an un-reviewable work. Cannot be done justice.

I mean, what do you want me to say? Do you want me to talk about how clever it is that Nausicaä's telepathic powers are conveyed purely through the character's movements and intrusive flashes of psychedelic editing and how that contrasts with the manga's use of exposition speech bubbles to take advantage of film's ability to use visual symbolism and also codes Nausicaä as a narrative outsider who denies the audience's desire to voyeuristically see into her inner thoughts? Or how about the music and art direction, which are so legendarily breathtaking and evocative by virtue of being Hayao Miyzaki's work it's almost a cliche to bring it up at this point?

Do I credit the acting, which is possibly the single most brilliant and talented cast of actors I've ever seen? Hell, even the English dub by Disney, which I don't recommend as your first exposure to the movie, is incredible: If you can get past Shia LeBouf as Lastelle's twin brother Asbel, you might find that cast to be equally as brilliant as the original Japanese one. Patrick Stewart is perfectly cast as Lord Yupa, Nausicaä's fellow-traveller and sometimes-mentor, as is Edward James Olmos as her uncle Mito. Uma Thurman is a wonderful Kushana, and nobody could have done an English language version of Kurotowa better than Mark Hamill, with Tress MacNeille filling out the main cast as the wise woman Obaba. There's even an unexpected and truly heart-wrenching cameo by Jodi Benson, the voice of Ariel in The Little Mermaid, who appears at a crucial moment near the climax, serving as a wonderful and moving tribute and passing of the torch by the Disney Renaissance to the person who allowed it to happen.

Or perhaps I should just continue to stress the gentle strength and maturity of Nausicaä herself, who is not so much a character as a free agent. She is the embodiment of empathy and acceptance, yet is a masterful fighter and the protagonist of one of the most spectacular action sci-fi movies ever made. And this, not to understate the matter, turns everything on its head. Nausicaä does not triumph over anyone or anything, she listens to everyone and everything, and tries to promote understanding, both within herself and within those she meets. According to Miyazaki, this is intrinsically bound up with her being female: Men try to fight and dominate. Women love and understand. This means it's easier for women to come to an animist worldview, because they don't seek to conquer. You plug Nausicaä into one of those online “Mary Sue” tests they throw at beginning writers and she'll catastrophically fail every one: She is absolutely someone who exists on a higher plane of existence, possesses singular and ill-defined mystical powers and is beloved by everyone she comes into contact with. Miyazaki even flatly said Nausicaä is not a “consummately normal” person. In the “mythic/mundane” divide, Nausicaä is mythic all the way.

And it absolutely doesn't matter. Nausicaä has attained a state of cosmic and spiritual awareness the rest of us don't have. She has a life and will of her own. This even extends outside of the world of fiction with Miyazaki himself saying that he felt he needed to apologise to Nausicaä if he ever drew her out of character, and that there were times she would seem to change her visage by her own volition. She possesses and exudes an uncanny power, but it all stems from her empathy and sincerity. She doesn't even have a character arc, not growing or developing once in fourteen whole years (as Miyazaki has also said, she doesn't change, we just get to understand her better). Nausicaä was not created, she willed herself into existence. She is utterly her own person, and she is transcendent. But as an animist, she also knows that she is part of the larger natural and cosmic whole, and she finds this the most beautiful feeling of all. And as a shaman, she has a love for this world as much as any other (this actually becomes the key to the manga's final moments, but like hell if I'm going to tell you what those are), so she knows her purpose is to somehow help make life better for us in the world we live in now.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is meaningful to me on so many different levels. I'll be perfectly honest: I first saw the movie all the way through a little over a year ago as of this writing when I was researching this project. I watched it with my sister, whom I was trying to introduce Star Trek: The Next Generation to as part of a kind of prologue to the main event, as I knew this was a movie that show's creative team had been influenced by. I was already familiar with Hayao Miyazaki's other, much more famous work, having seen Spirited Away, Kiki's Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke beforehand (the latter movie, by the way, is essentially the film adaptation of the second half of the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga as it goes over many of the same themes. Princess Mononoke's main characters, Ashitaka and San, can even be read very easily as the two halves of Nausicaä's personality split into different people). But even so, Miyazaki had always been someone whose work I tended to appreciate more than I was a major fan of it. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind changed that. I was blown away.

And yet, although I was totally unprepared for how wonderful this movie was and it quickly shot to the top of my list of favourite movies, I still don't think I fully comprehended why it was so important to me until later on. I decided the film was so good I needed to read (and likely cover) the source material too. So I got the manga, and was floored once again. I read the whole thing, all four volumes and fifty-nine chapters, in one night. The philosophy Nausicaä expresses through Miyazaki's work, and the sheer incomparable weight of the work itself, hit very close to home to me, putting into words things I'd long thought about and clarifying a lot about my purpose and beliefs for me. I was in awe of the accomplishment I had just witnessed. And even so, it still didn't register with me precisely how much this story, and Nausicaä herself, meant to me. That, at long last, happened a week ago as of this writing when, in total, hopeless frustration over how to get this essay to work, I decided to rewatch the movie, by myself this time.

I don't want to come across as putting my sister down, she's my best friend and probably my favourite person to watch movies and TV with, but there's something about being alone with art and the thoughts and emotions it stirs in you. Something clicked with me that night, and though I'm still not sure what, I do know watching that film a second time brought emotions to the surface I hadn't felt in a very long time and spoke to me in a way no other work of fiction is capable of. I was immediately reminded of memories, images and dreams that have been with me for as long as I can remember, and I saw in Nausicaä, for the first time, so much of the person I was years ago and the person I still want to be. The feelings, visions and ideas the movie awoke in me were not necessarily new ones, in many cases they were things I remember feeling in many of my other favourite works of art, but Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind captured every single one of the moments that were the most important and precious to me, and conveyed them better than I think anything else ever has. It was genuinely overwhelming for me. I feel at once like the humble farmers in the Valley of the Wind in awe of their princess' utter goodness and utter genuineness and Nausicaä herself, ready to take off into a vast and wondrous world.

I can't even begin to articulate how indescribably powerful Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is for me. I've come this far, written all this and I still don't think I've even begun to say anything useful or analytically interesting. This is all just words, meaningless words. I feel like I've done Nausicaä a disservice and shouldn't have even attempted collecting my thoughts like this. It might have been better just to link to this Amazon review of the Blu-ray release, which works just as well as an analysis as anything else. What more can I say, other than to call it my favourite movie and the single greatest science fiction movie of all time? It resonates with me on a level that nothing else is capable of doing, and as a constructed work of action sci-fi it will never be topped because it can never be topped. You can't take the genre any further than a princess who ends humanity's war with itself and the natural world by not fighting, and, given what we know of the ultimate fate of the cinematic spectacle method of storytelling, there's simply no way something of this grandeur, magnitude and quiet, intimate power can ever happen again.

Please, if you take nothing else away from this project and ignore my opinions about everything else, please at least watch the film version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. It is without question the greatest work we're ever going to look at on this blog, and I doubt I'll ever find something else that means quite as much to me.

Across the meadow there is an old jungle gym. When we were young, my cousins and I sometimes used to spend our summer afternoons on it, imagining it as the seat of any number of different fantasy scenarios. You used to be able to stand on it and look across at the pond, but the forest has been slowly encroaching over the years and that's no longer possible. And, while the jungle gym is weathered, beaten and missing many pieces, it still stands out in the field and every time I visit it I still recall the memories we shared there long ago. And if you stand on it looking up on summer days, you can still see the endless blue of the sky and dream.

Sensor Scan: Reading Rainbow

Talk about Roots all you want, it definitely deserves it. But from my perspective, if you want to get a handle on LeVar Burton's personality, style of acting and overall legacy, there's only one place to look.

It doesn't get commented on anywhere near enough that Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation were on the air at the same time. Having started Reading Rainbow four years before being cast as Geordi La Forge and continuing an additional twelve years after the television voyages of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D came to an end, Star Trek was LeVar's night job, quite literally so in some cases. This makes him somewhat unusual among the Trek pantheon, and also means that between 1987 and 1994 he was arguably one of the busiest, most hardworking people in Hollywood. And consider what that was like for an entire generation that was at the age where they would have been familiar with both shows: Imagine how cool it felt to see one of your childhood heroes in costume onboard the Starship Enterprise on one of the highest rated and most talked about shows of the time.

One has to wonder if there wasn't some element of design in this. Patrick Stewart's later phenomenal acclaim tends to eclipse the historical reality that he was by no means intended to be the main attraction of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the beginning. He was hired because he's a gobsmackingly brilliant thespian, of course, but, just like everyone else on that cast, he was an unknown in the United States and any fame he came to was the *result* of Star Trek: The Next Generation's success, not a cause of it. Well...When I say everyone was an unknown, I mean everyone except LeVar Burton, that is...who *was* already well established thanks to both Roots and a beloved and award-winning children's television programme he hosted. Yes, believe it or not, LeVar Burton was the one bit of celebrity casting Paramount allowed themselves, was wildly more known and popular than any of his co-stars at the time, and was likely somebody who was the main draw for Star Trek: The Next Generation to a lot of people in its early days, be they skeptical OG Trekkers, mainstream audiences, or kids who were fans of Reading Rainbow.

I know he was for me. I was one of those people who came to Star Trek through LeVar Burton, being a big admirer of his other work. In fact, the very first piece of Star Trek merchandise I ever got was the reissued Wave 1 Playmates Geordi La Forge figure. That's not to say there weren't other things that caught my attention about Star Trek: The Next Generation, there definitely were, but LeVar was a *major* contributing factor in my becoming a fan and as a result, when I first started watching, Geordi was the character I focused on almost exclusively. I mean, I liked everyone else just fine: I enjoyed the sense of dignity Patrick Stewart exuded as Captain Picard and I really enjoyed how dynamic and commanding Jonathan Frakes was as Commander Riker. But I'll be honest, a big motivator to sit through the plots of those earliest episodes I saw was watching LeVar Burton run around doing awesome LeVar Burton things in space on a starship. Perhaps this is why I'm inclined to make the claim that Geordi remains the true heart and soul of Star Trek: The Next Generation for me.

Like all of the Star Trek: The Next Generation characters, there is a great deal of LeVar Burton himself in Geordi La Forge, and this only becomes more prevalent and pronounced as the series goes on. But the way this manifests is interesting, because in many ways the LeVar we see on Star Trek: The Next Generation is actually the LeVar of Reading Rainbow. This is worth taking note of, because, as LeVar told Mister Rogers last time, what he does on Reading Rainbow is “play a version of [him]self”. This means we're seeing the same kind of recursive artifice that William Shatner has already dabbled in to some extent and will eventually become famous for: We're watching LeVar Burton the actor playing LeVar Burton the character and host of Reading Rainbow playing Geordi La Forge.

And it's LeVar Burton's persona that is, to me at least, really the most memorable thing about Reading Rainbow. It's fairly trivial to explain how this show worked on a functional level, it's not like with Mister Rogers' Neighborhood where we really did have to do some unpacking: Reading Rainbow is straightforwardly about teaching kids how to read and fostering a lifelong interest in reading, and the way it does this is by drawing parallels between the book of the day and various real world topics, be they about emotions, imagination and different kinds of people like Mister Rogers focused on, or more quantitative things like how objects are made and facts about the natural world. That's not to diminish what it did in the slightest-Reading Rainbow was a tremendously noble television programme and there's no way to legitimately, soberly argue it didn't have an overwhelmingly positive effect on society or touch countless lives for the twenty-three years it was on the air.

But it does mean that I, someone who already loved reading and didn't need any extra incentive to pick up a book, was likely not the target demographic of this show and that for me the big draw was LeVar Burton himself, because LeVar is an unbelievably charming, charismatic and inspiring stage presence. He practically bubbles over with enthusiasm and finely honed, targeted energy every time he's onscreen, and that turns out to be precisely what Reading Rainbow needs. After all, if your whole goal is to inspire kids and get them excited about reading, you want to not only emphasize how much it opens you eyes to the rest of the world, but you want to make it seem as cool as possible, and LeVar Burton is very, very cool.

Where Mister Rogers was the embodiment of gentle kindness and inquisitiveness and felt like the kind of person you could spend an afternoon just sitting together and talking with, LeVar felt like a fun travelling companion who could take you on all kinds of amazing adventures all over the world. Mister Rogers took you on trips too, but he always took care to remain a deliberately low-key presence-LeVar makes constant asides to the audience, has a very easygoing and jokey sense of humour and positions himself as an intermediary between us and the people he interviews. Where Mister Rogers signed off each episode with the reassuring promises that he'll “be back tomorrow!”, LeVar told us with a wink and a smile “I'll see ya next time”. Neither Mister Rogers nor LeVar Burton were paternalistic figures, but LeVar did, I think, play a very different sort of friend: No more or less approachable, but perhaps a bit more casual and outgoing.

And that of course is the mark of a truly brilliant teacher: Someone who recognises themselves as an equal of their students and isn't afraid to admit it. Both Mister Rogers and LeVar Burton did, and if it sometimes wasn't always clear on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood thanks to minor misconceptions in recent years, it definitely was on Reading Rainbow. It also helps that LeVar's passion for books and promoting literacy is so clearly palpable: It allows him to articulate the joys of reading through incredibly stirring and poetic speeches he somehow managed to deliver at least twice an episode. It's hard not to get excited and inspired just watching him with enthusiasm that infectious. It's the combined effect of those two elements is the heart of Reading Rainbow to me: LeVar brought the same enthusiasm he had for reading to travelling, and through that managed to convey a truly breathtaking sense of giddy wonder at the world.

There's an atmosphere I associate with this show a lot too: It always gives me a very sunny, summery feeling, and that makes me very happy. The original version of the theme song sets the mood from the start, putting you in a relaxed groove with that minimalist synthesizer beat playing as the butterfly flies over those children reading on the steps outside their house on the street corner. This is the kind of feeling you get on early summer afternoons when you're outside looking into the day in front of you, dreaming of what might be and what you might do. On Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, the music compliments and accentuates the show, like an old-fashioned film score played live in a real orchestra pit (and indeed, it was recorded live). On Reading Rainbow, the music *defines* the show and generates a mindspace all its own, and that's as clear a signature of the Long 1980s as anything else we've looked at. How fitting that a song this dreamy open a show meant to nurture the imagination. It's perfect meditative trance music, and I openly use an instrumental remix of it to inspire me and help shape my mental and emotional states of being even to this day.

I am expected, of course, to talk about the episode where LeVar takes us behind the scenes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Because of Nerd Culture, it's retroactively become the most iconic episode of the series, and it is a very good one, especially from a Star Trek perspective (you can find it as a special feature on the Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2 Blu-ray box set or on iTunes if you've not seen it-It's called “The Bionic Bunny Show”, after the book of the same name). Though incorporating shots from multiple first season episodes, it was primarily filmed in tandem with “Symbiosis”, which also doubled as Denise Crosby's last episode as a regular, so man, that must have been one hell of a crazy week on set.

LeVar talks about how TV shows are filmed, likening it to an elabourate form of make believe that people do for a living. For Star Trek fans, this episode is a goldmine because LeVar shows us stuff about the making of The Next Generation you simply can't see anywhere else, like how the Enterprise model was filmed at Industrial Light and Magic (Reading Rainbow also gets major props from me here for focusing on the VFX shots for “The Last Outpost” and “11001001”, two episodes that rank at the top of Star Trek: The Next Generation's most evocative, imaginative and emotionally stirring images for me). We even get a rare interview with VFX supervisor Rob Legato, who shows us how the team did composite images on VHS and how the the transporter was glitter water that they would stir with a spoon, film, and then overlaid with some postproduction filters. It's fascinating.

There are also a great deal of really clever and subtle postmodern cinematography tricks the Reading Rainbow team pulled off here: LeVar spends a lot of time on the bridge and engineering sets, and while he always takes care to point out that they're precisely that, sets, these scenes are still *shot* in every bit as cinematic a fashion as they are on Star Trek: The Next Generation: They even have all the little lighting composite shots worked in. For a behind the scenes episode, Reading Rainbow is surprisingly coy about showing us what the soundstage looked like raw.

What we get then, is something that's as much an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation about Reading Rainbow as it is the other way around (or perhaps it's a case of Reading Rainbow somehow “invading” Star Trek: The Next Generation and thus distorting both narratives), but yet is completely unafraid to point out its own artificiality. This is same kind of overblown, chaotic recursion Animaniacs gets praise for, and Reading Rainbow pulled it off five years before Tom Ruegger and his team did. And then, just to top it off, after spending a full thirty minutes explaining how Star Trek: The Next Generation is just a TV show and showing us how it's made, LeVar beams down just like he does on the show normally even after showing us quite clearly how the transporter effects are done.

(And by the way, while you can't see it on the Blu-ray release, I have to say the Star Trek: The Next Generation-esque remix of the Reading Rainbow theme that closes this episode is utterly charming and endearing and makes me grin like an idiot. It's the absolute perfect microcosm of the weird, fun sense of mash-up and mixing that characterizes this episode. It should have been The Next Generation's actual theme song.)

That said, and I know this is going to come as a complete shock, but this was never the most memorable episode of Reading Rainbow for me. It was definitely one of them and it was great fun to see the two shows crossover, of course, but given the stature they both had at the time it was kinda expected that it would happen eventually. I personally have just as vivid memories of, for example, the Humphrey: The Lost Whale episode, which was set on Cape Cod, a place of which I know quite intimately and is very special to me, and dealt with a subject that's I care a lot about: The ocean and marine life. I was also a huge fan of the coral reef episode, for the same reasons. I really enjoyed it any time the show talked about animals in general, like in the Duncan and Dolores episode set at the San Diego Zoo (I also just really, really like San Diego, especially 1980s San Diego). Other memories that stick out in my mind were the books Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain, Abiyoyo, Caps for Sale, If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, the book Kate Shelley and the Midnight Express and the accompanying episode, where LeVar took an overnight train ride with us and “Tar Beach”, an episode about inner city rooftops and that used The Drifters' “Up on the Roof” as a reoccurring musical motif.

But the main reason the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode may not be my favourite is that I actually think LeVar makes a minor, but troubling, intellectual misstep with it. There was a very divisive and utterly unnecessary war in the Long 1980s between television and books of which the bloodiest and most violent battles were fought on children's television. The standard opinion was that kids watch too much TV and that we had to drive the point home to them that books were objectively better than television because you have to use your imagination, whereas television supposedly spoon-feeds everything to you and is inherently mindless. This message was, of course, hilariously ironic and counterproductive because it was in fact being delivered through the medium of children's television.

Now, I have problems with television as a medium that I'm going to elabourate more on as we go through the 1980s, but this isn't one of them and I've always felt it was an intellectually hollow argument that assumed kids had zero visual literacy. Obviously television, just like all forms of media and art in general, is capable of inspiring our imaginations. Just think about how many times you've tried to think ahead of a showrunner to guess the Big Reveal in the season finale of a modern arc-based character drama, or the incalculable amount of reparative and transformative fanfiction that exists for something like, oh, I don't know, Star Trek, for example. No artistic medium is mindless if it inspires you to imagine, dream, think or create. Mister Rogers knew this, and even despite his misgivings felt television had a tremendous potential to bring people together and communicate.

(And hey, Mister Rogers was also a fan of Night of the Living Dead and Donkey Kong, so as far as I'm concerned this round goes to our favourite neighbour.)

But, this was the 1980s and Reading Rainbow had to take a stand, and you can probably guess which side it picked. Though LeVar never out and out says books are better than TV in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, he *does* say on more than one occasion that books are special and closes by saying “when you read a good book, you're the producer, the director, the actor, even the special effects magician. You bring the book to life, in your imagination”. He compares this to watching a TV show made by “experts” who “do the work for you”, and the way he emphasizes his parts of speech, he sounds like he's comparing it unfavorably to the experience of reading a book, and that does sort of leave a bad taste in my mouth. The episode doesn't quite manage to shoot itself completely in the foot, but it ends on a more sour note than it really needed to.

Speaking of Star Trek, perhaps owing to LeVar's connection to that franchise's futurism, Reading Rainbow has commendably managed to remain on the cutting edge of technology. Though the series itself was canceled in 2006 due to having its funding cut by the No Child Left Behind Act, LeVar acquired the rights and spent the next six years thinking of ways to bring the concept back somehow, and eventually, in 2011, Reading Rainbow finally returned as an interactive tablet app to be met with wild acclaim. LeVar is one of the first people I've seen to notice that television is a dying medium these days, practically dead already for the newest generation of digital native children, and I think he's right here. The way we think of entertainment is in the process of changing, and I really think things like longform scripted dramas (at least network-supported ones) and even linear nonfiction documentaries will soon be a thing of the past.

You can already see it in the modern television climate which, apart from a few odd stragglers and the runaway hit genre fiction and drama shows that everybody watches (and you all know what they are) is a homogenous sludge of identikit reality TV shows and police procedurals, because that's the only thing that garners any kind of worthwhile viewership numbers anymore. The first casualties have already happened, and it's the children's television programming like, well, the original Reading Rainbow: PBS Kids these days is a desert, the few people desperately clinging on to the medium either kept afloat through the grandfather principle or rapidly finding themselves in an echo chamber with other children's television nerds. Somewhat ironically, this means Reading Rainbow is the sole survivor of its kind, because it learned to adapt with the times and the changing media climate.

LeVar is absolutely right: Television is not the way to reach people anymore. It's perhaps appropriate that something so emblematic of, iconic from and embodying the best elements of the Long 1980s would revive them in a time when we need them again the most of all.


It's perhaps worth mentioning that as of this writing, Reading Rainbow is in the middle of a large-scale Kickstarter to fund its expansion to a platform-agnostic web model and to create a specialized classroom version of its system for underprivileged schools. Considering it raised its initial $1,000,000 goal in eleven hours and then doubled it the next day, it likely doesn't need a signal boost, least of all from me, but here it is anyway.

Sensor Scan: Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

If I need to explain to you who Mister Rogers is, this can only mean one of two things. You either hail from somewhere that isn't North America or Hawai'i or something has gone badly wrong with the universe. Because the only thing that needs to be said about Mister Rogers is that he was one of the greatest television personalities, if not one of the greatest human beings period, to ever live. For almost forty years, he asked generations of children and children-at-heart to be his television neighbour for a half an hour each day. And, anyone who took him up on his invitation knew that for that time they would feel welcome and safe and enjoy sharing the company of someone who truly cared about them and was interested in what they were thinking and feeling.

The more pertinent question is why now? I could have looked at Mister Rogers' Neighborhood at literally any point in this project, that's how important Fred Rogers was to our collective memory and for how long. But I wanted to take just a little time to talk about him, his show and his legacy here, in the mid-1980s for a number of reasons, one of which is because in an era so deliberately and self-consciously steeped in artifice and performativity, it's important to keep in mind that all this spectacle isn't just for its own sake. There are real, genuine truths we're trying to talk about here, even if we're approaching them from odd angles, and we must never lose sight of that. Performativity and artifice do not equate to vacuousness and falseness, and nobody understood that better than Mister Rogers.

The Neighborhood only ever existed on TV, and Mister Rogers was well aware of this. There's a reason he always called us “television neighbors”, after all. It clearly operates by televisual logic, and most certainly hails from a time when television was seen as disposable theatre. The show always opened with an aerial pan over the Neighborhood, which is very obviously conveyed through miniatures.We then cut to inside Mister Rogers' house, where he hasn't arrived yet. Then we pan over to the front door, and Mister Rogers comes in singing “It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, taking off his coat and shoes and putting on his sweater and sneakers. Likewise, the show always ended by doing the opposite, panning away from Mister Rogers' house and retracing the steps in reverse.

I always got the sense that the show's intro was meant to depict each one of us coming to the Neighborhood from different places: Mister Rogers probably hitched a ride on the Neighborhood Trolley, which you can always see making the rounds in the street, and then walked the rest of the way. As for us, perhaps we flew because we exist on the other end of the television and can travel via camera angles. Each episode then is a different visit to the Neighborhood, which is a place we all come to from somewhere else at the same time, even Mister Rogers himself. This also means idea of “reruns” or “home video releases” of this show, though they obviously existed, feels a bit...weird, even knowing Mister Rogers himself was an early advocate for the VCR. Maybe that's part of the reason this show was able to last as long as it did.

As a kid I found it really fascinating that Mister Rogers seemed to have two houses he split his time between, the one in the Neighborhood and another one somewhere outside of the television world. I would always wonder what his life was like away from the show and would try to imagine the sorts of things he did and the places he went to when his show wasn't on the air: It was probably my first exposure to the idea of larger worlds and histories that existed within the subtext and beyond the reach of the media artefacts we could see. As it turns out, Mister Rogers' life outside the Neighborhood wasn't too different from his life inside it, and I find that marvelous and inspiring.

Even though Mister Rogers knew he was only communicating to us through television, he also didn't see this as an excuse to treat his viewers any differently than if he met them in real life (he made a point of personally responding to every piece of fan mail he ever received, which was a considerable amount) as he considered everyone his friend, and nor did he feel the need to play an exaggerated caricature of himself. Mister Rogers only ever showed us specific facets of himself on his show, but all of those facets were absolutely, honestly who he really was, and anyone who did get the chance to meet him in real life said that he was instantly recognisable and approachable, and that he was every bit as you'd expect him to be based on how he appeared on TV (No, he never flipped off the camera on air, at least not intentionally. Although, for that matter, nobody ever stole his car either).

Look at this episode, for example, when LeVar Burton comes to visit the neighborhood to share a book with Mister Rogers. The episode is from 1998 and thus way after the period we're talking about, but it's relevant to us for obvious reasons, and the whole segment is just a perfect encapsulation of what made this show so good and so important (and I really do apologise for the quality, but this is sadly all we have of this series anymore unless you want to shell out for Amazon Prime or iTunes). After going through his iconic daily routine, Mister Rogers talks about how he and LeVar became friends because they both like making TV for children. He's openly acknowledging and calling attention to his own artifice, because he believes in honesty and sincerity above all else. Then, he shows us a series of pictures of LeVar in different roles (Kunta Kinte in Roots, Geordi in Star Trek: The Next Generation *and* Reading Rainbow), pointing out how LeVar is an actor who likes to play many different people. Then, when LeVar eventually shows up, Mister Rogers shows the pictures again, and LeVar even explicitly says that on Reading Rainbow he plays “a version of [him]self”.

But what's equally as wonderful is the actual conversation they have together: Mister Rogers asks LeVar about his love of books, what it's like for him to be an actor and prompts him to share why the book he's brought is important to him. It's a TV moment, but it's in no way a fake one: This is a real, authentic conversation where two real people share positionalities, and its a truly revealing character moment for both men. LeVar's passion, zeal and enthusiasm is palpable, and Mister Rogers has an unmistakably gentle, inquisitive tone that's as much a testament to his genuineness as it is to how good a listener he is, which can be a rare thing to find in this world. Mister Rogers never wavered from this either in real life or on television, and the people who talked to him responded to that. If you met him on the street, he'd talk to you the exact same way he does to LeVar here. It's not that he treated everyone like children, but rather that he treated children as people and saw every person as valuable and worthwhile.

Furthermore, Mister Rogers wasn't just willing to listen to you, he wanted to listen to you because he had an unyielding sense of curiosity and imagination. He was always looking to learn more about the world and other people and perspectives, and this shines through in his show as clear as the sunlight that always streamed in through the window in his house. The Neighborhood was as big as it needed to be to accommodate all sorts of people, and Mister Rogers would regularly take us on walks around town to see factories, gardens, workshops, bakeries, and any place people gathered to do different things that helped us understand the world better. Many, many episodes would open with Mister Rogers talking to us about something he's been thinking about lately, and he always took care to remind us that we never stop learning and growing throughout life. He once said “There's so much in this world we can learn, no matter how young or how old we are” and asked us “Are you discovering the truth about you? I'm still discovering the truth about me”.

These are lessons and ideas that I think everyone would do well to think about. I know for me, Mister Rogers sets an example that I constantly strive to follow, not just in his work but in the way he lived his own life.

That Mister Rogers was a firm believer in the power of imagination is obvious, especially in the “Neighborhood of Make Believe” segments that used storytelling to highlight the themes of every episode. But even though Mister Rogers on the one hand took care to clearly delineate the parts of his show that were “real” and that were “make believe”, this is ultimately another recursive artifice because, of course, even the supposedly “real” segments were still part of a game of pretend Mister Rogers played with the audience and he was never ashamed to admit that. But this wasn't an artifice designed to obfuscate reality, instead, it was intended to accentuate it, and this means that Mister Rogers never shied away from complex and confusing topics other children's television would never touch, like death, divorce and war. He believed, rightly of course, that imagination helped children deal with things that confused or scared them.

But all of this also means that Mister Rogers was never unaware of what the real world was really like outside of both of his make-believe neighborhoods. What he did was create an environment that was on the one hand happier and safer than the real world, but that still acknowledged all the problems and issues of the world outside. Yes, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was an idyllic utopia, but that didn't mean people coming to it through television were supposed to forget what life was like outside it. That's actually the opposite of what Mister Rogers, who spent a not-insignificant amount of time talking about negative emotions on his show, would have wanted: He wanted to to provide a space where people could talk freely about all different kinds of things and to help them find ways to deal with their troubles in a positive, constructive and healthy way. The Neighborhood may be a conflict-free utopia, but that doesn't mean we weren't allowed to talk about conflict. Conflict is a thing that exists in the real world, and the Neighborhood exists to help us talk about the real world. To paraphrase Mister Rogers himself, it's all make believe, but it's still something to think about.

I mean, after all, we're talking about a person who endorsed his own Saturday Night Live parody. The somewhat famous "Mister Robinson's Neighborhood" sketch starred Eddie Murphy as a down-on-his-luck inner city Mister Rogers analog constantly on the run from slumlords and rent collectors and forced to take on various licit enterprises to get by. Though he tries to remain positive and chipper, Mister Robinson's lessons tend to be more cynical than Mister Rogers', and he tries to instil in his television neighbours a distrust of authority figures, the class structure and capitalism, which I mean come on, that's only fair. Mister Rogers thought this was just delightful, calling the parody “amusing” and “affectionate”. The underlying joke in the Mister Robinson's Neighborhood sketch isn't targeting Mister Rogers himself, it's actually doing the exact opposite-It's pointing out the tragic humour inherent in how hard it can be to live up to Mister Rogers' ideals in the real world. It's not skewering those who try (after all, we're supposed to sympathize with Eddie Murphy), indeed it glorifies those people. What the sketch is actually trying to do is criticize a society that all too often makes living like Mister Rogers feel like a hopeless endeavour.

And this touches on one of the surest signs of the positive effect Mister Rogers' work has had on people: Even comedians parodying him can't bear to make fun of him. He's one of the most universally beloved people who ever lived.

You can see the same sense of love for what Mister Rogers accomplished in a more recent work of satire, Saints Row, a video game series that alternately has you waging citywide gang wars, overthrowing a multinational crime syndicate, fending off hordes of men in hot dog suits with a dildo bat and avenging the destruction of the planet from within a virtual reality simulation by distorting the rules of reality and fighting aliens with electronic superpowers. In between the cartoonishly nonsensical bouts of ultraviolence, you can take some time off to dress up your character in a variety of outfits, and a few of the wardrobe options are clearly modeled off of Mister Rogers' signature sweaters and sneakers. Which, in a video game that is, when you get right down to it, actually about staying true to a neighborhood and the importance of friendship, seems oddly appropriate. If Mister Rogers had lived to see Saints Row, I'll bet he would have smiled and called it “a lot of fun”, which is, incidentally, the same reaction he had to Night of the Living Dead, a film by his dear friend George A. Romero.

(Actually, I think Mister Rogers would have liked video games a lot in general: They're built around the same sense of shared imagination and creativity he always seemed so inspired by. In one episode he even visited an arcade and learned to play Donkey Kong.)

One thing I find really interesting about Mister Rogers is how he got involved with television in the first place. Namely, the fact that he thought the entire medium was frightening and dreadful and wanted to help show how it could be used as a force for good. And this was in the early 1960s, so nobody can pull the excuse that TV was just “so much better back then”. This reminds me a lot of some of the things Avital Ronell, my favourite theorist, has said about television; that it's a medium that, at its very core, has an obsession with trauma, death, voyeurism and surveillance. Ronell talks about how television's fixation on crime (police procedurals, courtroom dramas and lurid, sensationalized hyper-violent representations of current events on the news) “frustrates” it, because it simultaneously feeds on sensationalism, needs to prop up authority and order and satisfy its viewers' demand for neat, tidy and instantaneous solutions to things. And, since no problem in the real world has easy solutions, television violence becomes stripped of its symbolism and complex dilemmas are “effaced”. So, we see grotesque depictions of violence that are handily resolved at the top of the hour and never addressed again.

And it's hard not to see Mister Rogers' Neighborhood as an out-and-out rejection of not Ronell's theory, but precisely that which she criticizes in television. Mister Rogers doesn't sensationalize negativity, and nor does he run from it when his daily thirty minutes are up: He understands it as a part of life and keeps returning to it time and time again because he has ideas about how we can work through it he'd like to share with us. Mister Rogers isn't an authority figure either: I know some people have seen him as a surrogate parent, but that's never how I saw him. I saw him as, I think, the way he tried to portray himself: A neighbour and a friend who enjoyed spending time and talking with me, just as he did with anyone else. He may have had experiences I didn't, but that's true of everybody in the world, and that's exactly the sort of thing Mister Rogers liked to talk about.

Perhaps ironically, perhaps not, this leaves Mister Rogers' Neighborhood feeling a bit ill-suited to its medium in the end. On the one hand, it feels like definitive blueprint for how television can do good in the world, but at the same time, it's hard to shake the notion that Mister Rogers may have pushed the boundaries of television too well and too far, and that Mister Rogers' Neighborhood might in fact be a prototypical proof-of-concept of a far different, and far superior, form of media. I mean, well, even The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has different imaginary neighbourhoods of fantasy and make believe full of neighbours with different lives and schedules who I can visit with and talk to. Mister Rogers' true strength lay in his boundless empathy and his faith in the generative power of communication to help us lead better lives. And I think true art can make it easier for us to see the world around us a little clearer, and maybe to leave it a little kinder and gentler then we found it, just like Mister Rogers' Neighborhood did.

Well, that's all make believe. All make believe. But it's still something to think about.

(If you want to learn more about the real Mister Rogers, Cracked's Brendan McGinley has written the definitive tribute to his life and work here.)

Sensor Scan: Blade Runner

People are going to argue with me, but I think it's a pretty safe bet to say Blade Runner marks the beginning of cyberpunk in Western science fiction, at least in terms of mass mainstream pop consciousness. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say Blade Runner is likely the film that codified at least the visual style and iconography associated with the genre and is even probably what most people think of when they think of science fiction in the 1980s (well, this and Tron).

And although the anime, which defined much of the look and feel of the franchise, wouldn't debut for another two years, the fact is we've already covered a great deal of Blade Runner's most important innovations by introducing Dirty Pair in the last post. Yes, Dirty Pair owes a great deal to Golden Age science fiction too, but by virtue of the specific tradition it comes out of it is very much what we'd now call cyberpunk. Which means that, from my perspective at least, going from “The Case of the Backwoods Murder” to Blade Runner does feel like something of a rather large step backwards. But this is not entirely fair, given the fact that even though they're in some sense comparable, the fact is these two works ultimately come out of two different cultures and traditions.

Blade Runner is of course loosely based on Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but I'm going to leave Dick's work out of the analysis here for the most part largely because it has nothing to do with it. Dick's stories were famously extensively altered before they were adapted into movies, and Blade Runner is no exception: The original novel was an exploration and defense of empathy, while the movie, well, isn't, mainly. The one major theme of Dick's the movie leaves more or less intact is his exploration of the Self and personal identity theory-We talked about this a bit in the context of “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, but as this is pretty much the single thread Blade Runner's entire plot hinges on, it's worth talking about again here. Breaking the issue down into its component parts, we get two horns: “The Self” refers to theories about what, if anything, we fundamentally, essentially are, which is oftentimes liked to the idea of consciousness, while “personal identity” refers to more to how these said essential personalities persist over time and how that can be used to categorize and describe us.

None of the works we've looked at so far that have tackled personal identity have handled this exceptionally well: Gene Roddenberry's big rebuttal to the persistence of the self argument and why the androids in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” (namely Doctor Korby, who beamed his consciousness into an android body) shouldn't be considered sentient extant beings basically amounted to “because robots”, but thankfully Blade Runner gives us something a tad more nuanced-The Tyrell Corporation's main argumentative premise, and the one Deckard initially holds to, is that Rachael's memories are inauthentic; implanted into her positronic matrix to maker her more human-like and thus more controllable (this, incidentally, brings up another interesting train of thought in regards to both corporatism and transhumanism, but I honestly don't think the writers thought the ramifications of these motifs all the way through).

(Blade Runner also adds the additional twist of attempting to define what it means to be “human”, which is an issue Star Trek: The Next Generation itself will eventually grapple with on more than one occasion. We'll come back to that another time.)

So, in regards to personal identity theory, the argument would go like this: Rachael cannot be Tyrell's niece despite sharing her memories because she did not physically experience them, she only “remembers” experiencing them and thus these memories are “false” as they belong to “someone else”. Since the main ethical quandary Blade Runner raises (whether or not the Replicants should be considered living beings) is pretty easy to resolve (of course they are because they very clearly have emotions, experiences and consciousnesses, and even if we couldn't prove that we still consider things like cells to be alive, so why the hell wouldn't we do the same for beings so much like us?), let's extrapolate on this in a way the film never does. I don't recall the movie mentioning Tyrell's niece in any context aside from the source of Rachael's memories, so let's presume for the moment she's dead and her life experiences were transplanted into Rachael, who was in turn modeled after her.

If this were the case, could the argument be reasonably be made that Rachael is not Tyrell's niece? I submit that it couldn't. For associative, categorical and social purposes, she would still be the same person with all the same memories, personality and positionality, just in a not-dead physical form. Now, the key that I think trips people up here, as I think it is in any thought experiment where minds and consciousnesses are transplanted into different bodies, is something we could call the experiential Self. What people tend to be afraid of in this sort of situation is that their sense of Self, that is, the combined set of experiences that give you the feeling that you presently exist as a conscious entity experiencing things, wouldn't persist. In effect, that in that moment “you” (meaning your sense of conscious awareness) ceases to be, replaced by a “different person” who just shares your memories. But there's a distinction we need to make between that worry and “personal identity”, which is more concerned with signifiers and labels other people use to describe you.

Also, assume another scenario: What would happen if, at the end after Roy gives his big famous monologue about memories disappearing into the void forever, Deckard, Rachael and Gaff were able to get him back to the lab and transplant his mind into a new Replicant body? Wouldn't that person still be Roy, except now he's still alive and his big Epic Villain Speech looks silly and irrelevant because his memories did in fact live on? There is, again, the issue of the experiential self to consider, but that's still a *separate* issue and Blade Runner doesn't even go this far, stopping short of full transhumanism by stumbling a bit on a personal identity theory problem that seems maddeningly simple to resolve. All we'd need is to introduce the additional wrinkle of the persistence of the experiential self and Blade Runner's already shaky conflict ceases to be a conflict and its entire plot is rendered sort of pointlessly irrelevant.

One other note worth mentioning about the Replicants: Edward James Olmos, who plays Gaff and who we're naturally going to be talking more about as this project goes on, said in a 2009 interview that Blade Runner works particularly well when seen as a sequel to Battlestar Galactica, and that Gaff is a descendant of the character he plays in that series. Obviously we have to address Battlestar Galactica in some form once we reach the 2000s, but, as is the case with speculation about endings and extrapolating beyond them, here there be spoilers, so if you haven't seen Battlestar Galactica's finale “Daybreak” and are for some reason really paranoid about spoiling it for yourself, you may want to skip the next few paragraphs.

For the rest of us, what's interesting about this claim is how downright cynical it is. Battlestar Galactica ends with the Messengers departing this plane of existence, cautiously optimistic that they've broken the endless cycle of revenge and conflict between the humans and the cylons. If Olmos is correct, than in just a few decades' time the humans are right back to their old tricks and treating the cylons as slaves, implicitly meaning the whole damn thing is going to happen all over again. Which, well, I guess is fair enough given that this is Battlestar Galactica.

But this actually brings us back to the posthumanism issue: One of the reasons we might want to transplant our minds into android bodies someday is to improve the human condition, to in effect allow humans to become better. And we can see this in the way both the Replicants and the cylons are depicted: They are generally superior to humans (except for the Replicants' self-imposed four year lifespan, of course), and in both cases the humans tend to react with fear and disgust and flatly reject the possibility of any such improvement. Gene Roddenberry wrote a whole story with that exact moral, after all. There are of course further discussions to be had here: From my perspective, one thing that worries me is how much we don't know about consciousness and how its related to the larger cosmos (from an animist or Buddhist viewpoint this kind of transhumanism is somewhat challenging to get a functional conception of), but I certainly hope the discussions we have are more mature and intelligent than the ones the humans in Blade Runner and “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” have.

Speaking of plot, Blade Runner's is about as stock film noir as it gets. I mean, it's so by-the-book and hits so many of the requisite beats and cliches (especially if you're watching the original version and get to hear Harrison Ford's bored grizzled private eye narration) it would almost come across as a parody were it not for the fact everyone involved is playing it so obviously straight, making it all the more stupefying that the studio thought this film was too heady and confusing for audiences to follow. There's also the accusation of slothlike pacing, which is something Blade Runner shares with other landmark works of cinematic science fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Another thing it shares with them is that Douglas Trumbull did the special effects and the accusation is completely unfounded (well, except in the case of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which *did* have slothlike pacing, but that was Gene Roddenberry's fault, not Trumbull's).

It's Trumbull's effects, along with Ridley Scott's direction, that really make this film. Blade Runner is the first work we've looked at that really works purely on the level of aesthetics (well, except for maybe Star Wars, but let's not go there): Like all of Trumbull's work, the Los Angeles of Blade Runner is an absolutely magnificent and unforgettable series of images that evokes a unique and distinctive atmosphere from the very first shot. You can glean all you need to know about this film and its world simply by looking at the lingering, imposing shots of the city. It tells you every single story, both grand and humble, mythic and mundane, you could possibly think of telling in this setting silently and implicitly through the power of imagery alone. Helping this, and frustratingly nowhere near commented on as much as it should be, is Vangelis' soundtrack, which compliments Trumbull's and Scott's visuals with a score that blends the meditative electronic fusion of Cosmos with melodies and refrains that hearken back to the days of Humphrey Bogart. Blade Runner is one of a handful of movies that I think is more effective if you cut out all the dialogue and watch it set to a soundtrack like a kind of feature-length music video.

Blade Runner's true successes and legacy lie not in its philosophy or speculative elements, but in what it contributes to the unmatched power of Long 1980s visual media. By being a spectacle that not only symbolizes and conveys so much but actually manages to tell stories without any dialogue, it becomes the necessary link between the “spectacle for spectacle's sake” filmmaking of the Golden Age of Hollywood and the postmodern, self-aware and self-critical spectacle that will come to define the rest of the era. We're entering a period where visual media has a sense of meaning and purpose the likes of which it hasn't had since Weimar Berlin and, quite possibly, will never have again. Works will soon have the power to dynamically interact with their readers on a *textual* level and our shared myths and legends will gain free will and seize lives of their own. Moments won't be lost in time, they'll be recorded forever in our minds and on our VCRs. And they'll live on.

Sensor Scan: Cosmos

There are, in the history of television, extremely few moments like this one, where the heart and soul of an entire generation is swept up in the rapture of a shared experience that becomes the defining memory of an era.

Cosmos, which opens declaring itself to be standing “On The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean”, is on its own a watershed. This is the series that not only made PBS, but codified the documentary as at least I remember it and changed the face of not only the popularization of science, but of science itself. It really is astonishing to look back and see how so much of the discourse we now associate with science can be linked directly to Carl Sagan's ethos and positionality. Because this is what makes Cosmos so special and why it remains relevant and valid over thirty years later when the world it came into and spoke to now belongs to some long-distant and half-forgotten mnemolic time-spacescape: And even though his perspective has been frequently misunderstood and his name invoked in vain by the many, many people to come in his wake, the fundamental and provocative radicalism of his voice still resonates, and is what allows Cosmos to remain so powerful.

Carl Sagan is a fascinatingly marginal figure, and in retrospect it's sort of odd that he was the one to break out in the way he did. Famously too speculative, imaginative and spiritual for the scientific establishment, yet too grounded in hard science for UFOlogists and true believers, Sagan occupies a curious, and unenviable, no-man's land in scientific discourse. But yet in many ways it's this nomadic isolationism that helped him reach such a staggeringly huge audience: Sagan wrote and spoke with the voice of a poet and a mystic, yet fiercely committed to the scientific method, he was in many ways the only personality positioned to take science education in this direction. He's of course far from the first to fuse science and mysticism: John Muir did it, and J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallée and Steven Spielberg accomplished it masterfully quite recently with things like Passport to Magonia and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Going all the way back, what were the ancient navigators if not science mystics?

But Carl Sagan was the first to take this approach and apply it to science education, at least on such a grand scale. Carl Sagan wasn't just a science popularizer or even the greatest science popularizer-He was the science popularizer, all stop. Nobody who has tried to follow in his footsteps has come remotely close to emulating what Carl Sagan did. In some ways Robert Burnham, Jr. is Sagan's anticipation in this regard, but, let's face it, try as he might (and he did, mightily) Burnham's Celestial Handbook was never going to be embraced outside of an extremely small subset of amateur astronomers. No, what Sagan understood was the power of television as not just a forum for teaching and learning, but as a medium where communal images could be experienced together. Riding both the Fortean wave of the 1970s and the mainstream concern over technoscience dating back to the immediate postwar era, and posessing the further good fortune of landing right at the time the landscape of television was metamorphosing, Cosmos became a deft blend of media trends both old and new.

But Cosmos is not merely a triumph of timing and good luck: Yes, it is in many ways perfectly suited to its moment, but this is a show with a truly staggering scope and powerful message to deliver. Even once you get passed the achingly heartfelt poetry of Sagan's introduction and thesis statement and into the meat of the series itself, which is where the cracks in Cosmos' central premise start to become apparent, its breathless love of and commitment to this message and the ideas it deals with is enough to sustain is thirteen episode run all on its own. Cosmos confidently declares that it tells the story of “all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”. This is not just a show about teaching astronomy, or physics or stroking NASA's ego (though it does do all of those things), nor is it even a history of scientific experimentation and knowledge (though it tries, commendably, even if it seems to have bitten off a bit more than it can chew in this regard). This is a show that's trying to tell us that we are one with the rest of the universe, and that understanding this is the key to unlocking enlightenment and discovering our role within it.

It's this simple statement that I think is what I take away from Cosmos most of all. When Sagan describes life as “a way for the Cosmos to know itself”, it sends chills down my spine because it's so true and so elegantly phrased. This is the sort of thing I remember the most about this series: I can't say that Cosmos was particularly life-changing for me, in that it completely changed the way I looked at things and permanently shifted my worldview. No, Cosmos works on a much subtler level for me: It gave a voice to ideas, concepts and images that I had always kept in the back of my mind and articulated them in ways in never could. I think all good art does something like this, and while I don't quite consider Cosmos my model for nature documentaries, I do think it works stunningly well as a work of art and an expression of Carl Sagan's positionality. Despite its foibles and flaws (which the show does, unfortunately, have its share of), Cosmos hits at a solitary kernel of truth that transcends even the show's own status as a landmark in science popularization to convey something not quite “human” (or at least not entirely) but, well...cosmic.

What strikes me as the most interesting about Cosmos as a material television programme is its structure: It's obviously divided into different chapters, with the first serving as a kind of abstract (much like an academic paper or, appropriately enough, a clock). The thing about this is, I've always felt the show starts to lose focus after a few episodes and than doesn't actually manage to reclaim it until very near the end, and this, to me, has the uncomfortable consequence that only the first episode, “On The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean” is actually required watching: It summarises everything the show is trying to say succinctly without going off on tangents and makes its point so successfully and memorably that in my opinion it frankly overshadows the whole rest of the series. And actually, to be really blunt, you really only need to see the first half hour. And, of that, the opening seven minutes are seven of the most utterly perfect and indescribably moving and powerful minutes ever put to film.

(Seriously, don't take my word for it, stop reading this and go watch them right now if you haven't. You can skip Ann Druyan's opening narration that accompanies every version of Cosmos released since 2000-We'll talk about her later.)

It's after this initial seven-and-thirty minutes that, sadly, “On The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean” goes a bit off for me. Which is fitting, given that this episode is such an effective microcosm for Cosmos itself. After making one of the most profound and beautiful statements in the history of television, Carl Sagan then proceeds to spend the remainder of his runtime trying to recount the Epic Narrative of Science, and his Western bias is painfully noticeable. There's a great deal of time spent lionizing the Classical era, in particular the ancient Egyptians and the Hellenistic Greeks, namely Alexander the Great and the Great Library at Alexandria (and the requisite Orientalist shot that modern Alexandria “shows little trace of its former greatness"), which then dovetails into a frustratingly textbook account of the teleological March of History. Sagan tells of the burning of the library, symbolizing the loss of knowledge and the regression of the Dark Ages, which isn’t even historically accurate, and a glorification of the European Renaissance for rediscovering said lost knowledge, which is even less historically accurate. And naturally, it all leads to the wonderful future promised by NASA where we'll all take our next steps out into the stars. And this is as far as Sagan ever gets, either in this episode or in the rest of the series.

Astronomy as we know it is, of course, an extremely Western field and has a worrying track record of erasing the contributions of nonwestern peoples (in particular the pre-Christian Europeans, Native Americans, aboriginal Australians and the Polynesians), but Cosmos' Eurocentrism really stings because it's in every other respect so universal and makes incredible strides elsewhere: Sagan's repeated use of the phrase “great men and women” is a godsend in and of itself, and his segue out of his Journey of the Imagination segment to the montage of human faces of all cultures and creeds is a lovely bit of inclusivity. But, his frustrating inability to move beyond the Great Man Theory and a teleological attitude about history does real harm to the potential impact of Cosmos as a TV series. It's hurtful not just because of its obvious hegemony, but because it's a tragic and needless squandering of potential: Cosmos was absolutely capable of painting a more diverse and accurate picture of the history of humanity's interaction with the natural world, and that it not only manifestly doesn't do this, but indeed props up the dangerous pre-existing Master Narrative about the march of Great Western Science is not only a wasted opportunity, but one that saddens me because it overlooks so much that I find fascinating about science, history and culture.

(Furthermore, just on another personal note, Sagan's constant slighting of astrology rankles me: He's right that in its modern form it's a pseudoscience, but stopping there ignores the shared history of astronomy and astrology and astrology's own unique cultural weight that's worthy of study for it's own reasons.)

And yet we should be careful not to let ourselves fall into the same trap Carl Sagan does by equating all of Cosmos simply to him. While he was the presenter and the obvious breakout aspect of the series, he was only one of three co-writers, along with Ann Druyan and Steven Soter, the former of whom is a producer and the latter of whom is an astrophysicist himself. It would be a mistake to overlook their contributions, especially given Sagan's own admission that one of the the major impetuses for him to do Cosmos was his growing impatience with hard science. Druyan, it must be said, for her part was extremely good at overseeing Cosmos the pop culture phenomenon: Aside from the show itself, there was a companion book written by Sagan, a series of soundtrack releases and even an “Official Cosmos Store” overseen by the “Cosmos Company” that sold things like the “Cosmosphere”, a small disc that emulated what the sky looks like on any day of the year at Midnight or Noon if you happened to live around 45 degrees latitude, which I suppose is only to be expected. And yes, I do own both Sagan's book and the Cosmosphere myself.

But for my purposes the two people who contributed the most valuable and memorable things to Cosmos aside from Sagan himself are not his co-writers. One is Vangelis, whose album Heaven and Hell provides the soundtrack for most of the show, including the absolutely iconic and breathtakingly poignant theme song. Vangelis' work is a revelation, effortlessly fusing classical music, 1980s electronica, prog rock, jazz and pop into a unique ambient soundscape that is not only a perfect articulation of Cosmos' underlying message and heart, but also anticipates in many ways where Dennis McCarthy will eventually go with his scores to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Speaking of Star Trek, the second person is a young, fresh-faced VFX artist by the name of Rick Sternbach, who did some of his earliest TV design work as a storyboard artist and set designer on Cosmos as the show's Assistant Art Director, for which he won an Emmy Award in 1981. During this time, Sternbach also did some work for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Cosmos was filmed between 1977 and 1980), but he's eventually going to become best known for his work as one of the chief technical advisers and design artists on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Voyager.

Sternbach is, quite simply, one of the most important creative figures of the coming era, and, given how he and Mike Okuda are responsible for a great deal of the look and feel of Star Trek from now until 2001, it's absolutely crucial to get a handle on their perspectives. Though Sternbach and Okuda didn't design the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D or its sets themselves (credit must go to Andy Probert there), they were responsible for helping realise them into a physical form and, as it pertains to Cosmos itself, it's already clear there's a lineage from the elegant, organic curves of Carl Sagan's Ship of the Imagination and the “worlds of ice and stars of diamond” adrift in the “cosmic dark” to which it travels to the new Enterprise and the images and dreams to which it too will soon voyage.

And yet even so, it feels difficult, and in some ways wrong, to try and reduce Carl Sagan's positionality fully out of Cosmos. One thing I've always loved about this series is how blatantly and upfront Sagan is about his perspective and opinions-He's not at all making any pretenses to objectivity here. Like any good teacher, Sagan can deliver and convey information, but he's more interested in making his audience think and freely offers his own take and musings on the material he's covering, with the implication we're meant to do the same. And it's the very fact that Cosmos is in truth so bound up with Sagan's personal positionality that allows us to attribute the majority of the praise, and the blame, for what the show ultimately does to him.

Much of Sagan's professional scientific output consisted of calculations concerning the viability of human space travel and hypotheses about xenobiology, which have become central to endeavours like SETI. This would explain, for example, Sagan's attitude about extraterrestrial life, which was radical for the time in establishment science, but perhaps not entirely satisfying for others. Sagan did seem to believe firmly that humanity's destiny lay in space travel, and though Cosmos does explicitly shift discourse about nature and science to an extent, it is hard to shake the feeling Sagan's fixation on this hampers the show a bit: For Sagan then, the “cosmic ocean” was perhaps not quite as the Polynesians would have seen it, as a symbol of the necessary and harmonious interconnectedness of all parts of the universe, but as literally that: An expansionist and naval metaphor for boldly going out and charting new places to be heroically discovered. And this, unfortunately, makes a good deal of Cosmos feel a bit dated and naive thirty years later.

It's also telling that Sagan chose to name his show Cosmos, that is, the opposite of Chaos (in other words, Order-he even explicitly says this in the first episode) and went with Heaven and Hell as his soundtrack, an album very much in keeping with a Dante-esque Pop Christian conception of the titular worlds. William Blake, for one, would not approve, that's for sure. Revealing as well is Sagan's frequent allusions to clock-making and “the machinery of nature”, an extremely Western conception of nature that relies upon technoscience and technofetishism alike (it's the "God the watchmaker" argument with the God bits filed off). And yet even so, there is an undeniable raw and anarchic mysticism to Cosmos that I'm not sure Sagan himself ever truly came to understand: There is, after all, a reason that in spite of everything Sagan remains beloved by the Forteans, and the visible sense of wonder he displays when he takes his ship through the “cosmic waves” and talks about how “we are made of star stuff” says it all for me. Sagan himself even mentions “the music of cosmic harmonies”.

Carl Sagan was, above all else, a technoscientist who eventually realised where the end result of his scientific inquiry would ultimately take him. And his entire oeuvre, beginning with Cosmos, is simply his way of working through these ideas and attempting to articulate what he discovered about himself and the cosmic whole-After all, the show is subtitled “A Personal Voyage” for a reason. That his work itself is as tentative and uncertain as he describes our “first steps into the cosmic ocean” to be is at the very least appropriate and unsurprising. Human art is by definition flawed and imperfect, but even so it works when it connects and resonating with people. Cosmos has managed to do just that, and the elegant truth it stumbled upon and embraced as its message earns it a place among the most meaningful statements human artists can teach.