{"id":8213,"date":"2013-07-29T10:17:17","date_gmt":"2013-07-29T14:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=8213"},"modified":"2013-07-29T10:17:17","modified_gmt":"2013-07-29T14:17:17","slug":"neil-de-grasse-tyson-is-john-harrison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2013\/07\/29\/neil-de-grasse-tyson-is-john-harrison\/","title":{"rendered":"Neil de Grasse Tyson Is John Harrison"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Galileo’s Pendulum, Matthew Francis expresses an opinion that’s sure to get him in trouble with the Inquisition and placed under house arrest: Carl Sagan’s Cosmos<\/cite> isn’t all that<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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However, even taking into account the differences in TV between 1980 and 2013, the show is very slow-paced at times. I\u2019m not talking about the mellow oh-so-1970s Vangelis score, or Sagan\u2019s measured style of speech: I mean the obvious stretching of material to make hour-long episodes. I have a long attention span, so I\u2019m not saying Cosmos should be like the frenetic Star Trek reboot; I\u2019m just saying that a serious show about serious science need not be ponderous.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s been years since I even tried to watch the original Cosmos<\/cite>— I caught a bit of it a few times when I was home with SteelyKid when she was a baby, and I basically agree. I was actually surprised by how much of it was historical and Earthbound– like MAtthew, most of what I remember of it was the “starship of the imagination” segments, which I loved<\/em> as a kid when it originally aired.<\/p>\n

Of course, it’s difficult to really fully account for the differences in media expectations between then and now. My touchstone for this is the “featured image” movie poster up top, which I’ve thrown in just to thoroughly confuse everybody. That’s from the movie The Hot Rock<\/cite>, an adaptation of the first of Donald Westlake’s comic crime novels about John Dortmunder<\/a>, and one of the best. This is a caper novel where a hapless gang of thieves have to steal the same gem multiple times, in progressively more outrageous heists, and ought to be very cinematic. To modern eyes, though, it drags really<\/em> badly in places, most notably a long sequence where they fly around New York in a helicopter for what feels like ages (lots of lingering shots of the then-new World Trade Center towers, eek).<\/p>\n

That didn’t particularly stand out at the time, though, and other well-loved movies of a similar era have the same issues– the original The Italian Job<\/cite> was widely praised as vastly superior to the remake when it came out, but when Kate and I watched it, it seemed really slow and shaggy. While the modern remake has significant flaws, it conforms much better to modern expectations for plot and pacing.<\/p>\n

So, I suspect that the pace of media is subject to a rule like whichever Murphy’s Law variant it is that says projects always take longer than you expect, even when you account for the fact that they take longer than you expect. Even when you go in knowing that things were paced more slowly back then, it’s almost impossible to appreciate just how much<\/em> slower they were.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the proximate cause of Matthew’s post was, of course, the reveal of the trailer for the third Star Trek<\/cite> reboot movie at Comic-Con:<\/p>\n