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"Cosmos" Back for a second season

auntiehill

auntiehill

The Blooness
Premium Member
*cue hallelujah choir*

from The Verge:
In 2014, Fox rebooted Carl Sagan’s classic documentary series, Cosmos: A Personal Journey, with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as host. Four years later, Fox and National Geographic have announced they will be bringing the series back for a second season, titled Possible Worlds.

The networks made the announcement today during the Television Critics Association winter press tour, and deGrasse Tyson and producer Seth McFarland confirmed the news on Twitter, saying that the season will air in Spring 2019 on Fox and the National Geographic channel.

Sagan hosted the original Cosmos in 1980, which was at the time the most successful US public TV series of all time (it was later overtaken by Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War). The rebooted version, titled A Spacetime Odyssey, covered a broad range of topics, such as the scale of the universe, the history of science, and climate change, and was well received by audiences and critics.
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This is such wonderful news! I love the first season and really missed it when it was over. The bad news? It's not returning until Spring of next year. CRAP.

I love Neil deGrasse Tyson. His gleeful exuberance for knowledge, paired with an amazingly reassuring voice, make me want to sit and listen to anything he wants to say.
 
I never finished the first season, which is a bit of disappointment for me. I don't know why but I never felt really engaged by the show. I love Tyson's interviews as well as his podcosts, but on a scripted level, I found him less engaging (and sometimes more pretentious than usual). The animation asides annoyed me, too.

A shame really considering how much I loved the original Cosmos. I guess I should give the season another go. The premise for the second season sounds very promising.
 
I'm absolutely thrilled by this news! AMAZING!

I'm curious about how much they'll change and keep from Season 1 in terms of content, style, framing, etc. Also the soundtrack. Definitely looking forward to that, too.
 
Owain Taggart said:
Awesome news! I loved the cartoon animations. We ended up buying the series on BlueRay.
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Gah.

I hated the cartoons. I recently rewatched one of the old Carl Sagan originals... you know, with real people acting out the parts of historical figures. It's far more palatable than Disneyfied cartoons with a piano plunking away in the background.

Will they at least get a different composer, so it doesn't sound like the Contact movie? I love that movie, but not so much that I want to listen to the soundtrack to it in a science documentary with children's cartoons in it.

I suppose it's too much to hope that NDT has cured his problem with uptalking.
 
Timewalker said:
I hated the cartoons. I recently rewatched one of the old Carl Sagan originals... you know, with real people acting out the parts of historical figures. It's far more palatable than Disneyfied cartoons with a piano plunking away in the background.
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People acting things out is fine too, but I felt the cartoons made it a bit more special . I think they may have done things that way to make it stand out from the rest of documentaries that tend to do that, because honestly Cosmos, both new and old, is unique.
 
Owain Taggart said:
People acting things out is fine too, but I felt the cartoons made it a bit more special . I think they may have done things that way to make it stand out from the rest of documentaries that tend to do that, because honestly Cosmos, both new and old, is unique.
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I think they did it because Seth MacFarlane was producing and he started out in animation. I believe the animation studio for Cosmos was the same one that makes his animated shows.
 
They never did get around to releasing the full soundtrack for the original Cosmos on CD/iTunes, did they? IIRC, they were going to do a deluxe set of the complete Vangelis soundtrack (around the time the original series was released on DVD) but it got canned at the last minute.

Now that's the "new Cosmos" I'd like to see...
 
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Christopher said:
I think they did it because Seth MacFarlane was producing and he started out in animation. I believe the animation studio for Cosmos was the same one that makes his animated shows.
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That'd certainly makee sense. I found them to be pretty entertaining and well done. I mean, if the goal was to get a new generation interested, I don't think doing it that way is a bad thing. Part of how to get them interested is by being entertaining.
 
Owain Taggart said:
That'd certainly makee sense. I found them to be pretty entertaining and well done. I mean, if the goal was to get a new generation interested, I don't think doing it that way is a bad thing. Part of how to get them interested is by being entertaining.
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But did it have to have people looking like Disney characters?

As for the music, I have the LP of the first series (pre-update, when some of the original music was replaced). I don't think everything is on it, but I'll check.

Not that I have anything to play it on, at the moment.
 
Well, the animation style is closer to the modern Saturday Morning cartoon style, rather than specifically Disney. They used a darker template for one thing, with lots of blacks and browns. I didn't feel there was anything particularly wrong about it.
 
Owain Taggart said:
Well, the animation style is closer to the modern Saturday Morning cartoon style, rather than specifically Disney. They used a darker template for one thing, with lots of blacks and browns. I didn't feel there was anything particularly wrong about it.
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That's close enough for me to wonder when the princess with the doe-eyes and floaty dress was going to turn up.

Why do remakes have to be dumbed down so much?
 
Owain Taggart said:
Dumbed down? It's stylistically different, yet conveys the same content.
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I don't mean the content. Of course the content is as up-to-date as possible. I do mean the style. Sure, there were times when Sagan's Cosmos used animation... to help illustrate a condensed timeline of the Cosmic Calendar, black holes, or how gravity works. Those are things they couldn't show any other way, 35+ years ago.

But NDT's version has cartoons in it. And they remind me of Disney cartoons, which is not what I expect from a science documentary series.
 
Alan Silvestri also shared on Facebook of a video announcing the new season, so barring any conflicting assignments, we should also get the same composer back.
 
Timewalker said:
But NDT's version has cartoons in it. And they remind me of Disney cartoons, which is not what I expect from a science documentary series.
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And maybe that's exactly why they did it that way. To a younger generation, a documentary might have the reputation of being "stale". By going with animation, they have the advantage of shaking things up and making things more fun in the process. Learning is fun, and that's how it should be. Documentaries don't have to all follow the same template.
 
Owain Taggart said:
And maybe that's exactly why they did it that way. To a younger generation, a documentary might have the reputation of being "stale". By going with animation, they have the advantage of shaking things up and making things more fun in the process. Learning is fun, and that's how it should be. Documentaries don't have to all follow the same template.
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The original certainly didn't follow any template. People watched and discussed it partly because it was a different, more interesting way to do a science documentary.

But I guess you had to have been there at the time. I was in high school, and people who knew I was into astronomy would ask what I thought of Cosmos. That always led to a conversation about it; there were more people around town watching it than I had thought would be interested.

You can't tell me these people weren't having fun with it, learning lots of new things. After all, keep in mind that this wasn't long after the Voyager probes had reached Jupiter and sent back all kinds of fascinating information. I really get the impression that people nowadays see it as a "ho-hum" kind of thing, but it was really fresh and exciting back then.

I loved it that when he was talking about Kepler there were actors - not only Kepler himself, but also his family. The portion of the second episode that used the Samurai legend of the crab shells to explain natural selection had real actors, not cartoons. Ditto numerous other parts of the series.
 
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