I recently had some time and used it to rewatch one of my favorite shows from when I was growing up, From the Earth to the Moon.
From the Earth to the Moon is a twelve-part miniseries produced by HBO and originally aired in the spring of 1998. It tells the story of the Apollo program’s race to the moon, from the first one-man Mercury launch to the last moon landing, Apollo 17. I was in fifth grade when the show premiered, and I was very excited to see it. My family didn’t have HBO, but I prevailed upon my parents to rent episodes of the show on VHS from the Boulder Video Station. After years of this, I ended up buying the DVD box set of the show with high school graduation money. I watched my DVDs repeatedly in college before eventually losing interest. I hadn’t touched them since college when I decided to revisit the show recently.
The twelve episodes of From the Earth to the Moon were directed by different directors and written by different writers, and the show does not have a central storyline. Each of the episodes is a self-contained story, and the show is more a series of twelve one-hour TV movies than a single twelve-hour movie. Tom Hanks, the executive producer, appears at the beginning of each episode to introduce it (except for the final episode, in which he appears as a character). Nick Searcy as astronaut chief Deke Slayton also appears in each episode, but otherwise the cast changes from episode to episode.
Episodes of From the Earth to the Moon originally aired in pairs, with one opening sequence at the beginning and one set of credits at the end for both episodes. That is how I rewatched the episodes, and it is how I will review them here. I will share my overall impression of each episode, and what I noticed this time that I hadn’t noticed before.
The first part of “From the Earth to the Moon rewatch” goes live here on WillyLogan.com tomorrow morning.
