Today, I will compare three space-related series that are about as different as you can get:
Rotten Tomatoes
Channel Reviewers Audiences My Grade
The Expanse Prime* 94 95 B
Moonbase 8 Showtime 62 61 C
The Astronauts Nickelodeon ? ? A-
The Expanse is the senior citizen of this group, with five seasons. *However, it started at SyFy, and was picked up by Amazon Prime in season 4. While the ratings are fabulous, the first year only received a 77% rating by Rotten Tomatoes Reviewers. However, audiences liked it with 94%. Then, season 2 got 95/97, followed by, seasons 3, 4 and 5 all with 100% reviewers scores, with 97%, 94% and 94% from audiences. This is about as good as it gets. However, I'm still in season one, and I stopped watching some months ago. I thought it was a bit depressing. I will return someday soon, although this will mean investing almost 40 hours of my life to see them all.
The setting is several hundred years in the future when our Solar System has been colonized. There are three competing entities in a Cold Space War:
- The United Nations of Earth and Moon.
- Republic of Mars.
- Outer Planets Alliance.
The visuals and special effects are fabulous. Unlike Star Wars, the characters are all human. The whole thing was confusing for me, as there are too many of them. By season five you will need to be familiar with 50 different people. I guess there will be a sixth season, or eight hours more to watch.
Moonbase 8 is a whole lot simpler, maybe too much so. This is rare, being a space comedy, although low-keyed. The series makes fun of NASA and space exploits. Nothing happens there, for everything occurs in California, Simi Valley and Sylmar, serving as Winslow, Arizona. However, there supposedly is a real base close to completion on the Moon, with the three sub-par astronaut candidates in poor contention to get there.
Fred Armisen of Saturday Night Live is a son of an astronaut and the lead trainee. John C. Reilly is there for comedy effect and Tim Heidecker wants to spread the Gospel into the Universe. These actors wrote the script. There will only be six half and hour episodes because the effort must have been too pathetic to continue. But you might actually like it. Here is the full first episode.
They have special guests. Travis Kelce, tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs as Travis Kelce, tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. But only in the first episode. In a later session is Adam Lambert, not as Adam Lambert, but one of Elon Musk's astronauts training for Mars.
I previously reviewed The Astronauts, so go there for details. But to bring you up to date:
- There are five young accidental astronauts, related to the real astronauts in some way, only because Matilda (voiced by Paige Howard, daughter of Ron, a producer of this show), the true star of the show, the AI computer on board, personally thought this young crew, had a better chance to succeed in her mission than trained adults.
The mission itself is cloaked in mystery. Something to do with an asteroid, possibly with extraterrestrial implications.- While The Expanse is too dark and complicated, and Moonbase 8 is lacking, The Astronauts has the right mix of intrigue and challenge.
- Oh, Matilda shows emotion, but is smarter than a human, for she can appreciate why the grudge she had against one of these young astronauts had no validity.
- There will be ten half and hour episodes.
It is too new to be rated by Rotten Tomatoes. But, as I said in my posting, surprisingly good. Especially as this comes from Nickelodeon. At least I have recorded this program, so can zoom through their commercials. You think insurance, mistreated dog and political ads are unwatchable? Those for the youth of our nation are worse.
- 8A Canon in D Johann Pachelbel
- 8B Four Seasons Antonio Vivaldi
Johann Pachelbel was born in 1653, nearly a third of century before Johann Bach. The families were close as friends, but because of movement and timing, they possibly never met. Pachelbel wrote Canon in D somewhere between 1680 and 1706. No one knows, and it remained in obscurity for centuries.
More than two centuries later, Gustav Beckmann in 1919 first published it, later leading to the first recording by Arthur Fiedler in 1940. But it took the Jean-Francois Paillard chamber orchestra's release in 1968 to make it popular. Pachelbel, in his day, was renowned for church and chamber music. But little of what he wrote survived. There should be more worthy of re-discovery, but they might be lost forever.
I first noticed this piece in an 1980 film, Ordinary People, featuring the Paillard recording. It's possible that his encounter led to my appreciation of baroque music. The movie got nice 89/88 ratings from Rotten Tomatoes. Carl Sagan's Cosmos the year following used Canon in D. Here is a whole hour from the series. Or how about two hours of relaxation with Canon in D?
It is more probable that my introduction to the baroque genre came with Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi. Here is a posting on this subject from five years ago, with tips on how to distinguish among them. My attachment to Four Seasons came on a fabulous day I had in Venice, which ended with a concert in the theater which Vivaldi used to partly write the score.
Unlike the dominance of German composers, Vivaldi was Italian, and was born in Venice in 1678. From the age of 25 he worked at an orphanage and composed most of his major works there. Boys learned a trade and girls music. His early groups were young females. He had a major influence on Johann Bach. After much travel and success, writing more than 500 concertos and 46 operas, he at the end became impoverished and died at the age of 63. He remains buried at the site of a five-star hotel in Vienna, Hotel Sacher, known for their Sachertote, a chocolate cake with apricot filling. There is a movie released in 2014 entitled Antonio Vivaldi: A Prince in Venice.
This group of violin concerti were written in the 1716-17 period and published in Amsterdam in 1725. For its day, it was a revolution, representing flowing creeks, singing birds, the landscape and so on. The first recording was made by Alfredo Campoli (but can't find FS). In 1942 came one by Bernardino Molinari. The whole quartet usually takes around 40 minutes, but here is a collection running for 10 hours in a relaxing mood.
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