a trip to the moon, for all mankind

July 20 movies: A Trip to the Moon, For All Mankind. In honor of the moon landing TCM showed movies about the moon all day. In the evening they had Buzz Aldrin introducing them, which was nice. We watched two: first, the 1902 Méliès movie A Trip to the Moon is a delight. I had seen clips of it before, like the legendary image of the man in the moon with a rocket ship crashing into its eye. But I had never seen the whole thing before.

For All Mankind was a documentary made for the 20th anniversary of the moon landing. There was no narration, not even titles or captions; just the words of the astronauts themselves, from recordings during the missions and from later interviews. I've never been overly sentimental about space travel, yet I found it genuinely moving, for instance when the astronauts are talking to mission control while seeing Earth for the first time.
My favorite incident was how the astronauts were allowed to bring one cassette tape each, so they could listen to music. One was a country music fan, and had gotten Buck Owens and Merle Haggard to record songs especially for him to listen to on the flight. The movie played bits of both songs, and in a spoken intro Haggard said "I have one request: please take me outside." And he did; they showed the astronaut tucking the cassette into his space suit. In a way, Merle Haggard got to float in space.

Tonight we also watched a half-hour compilation of Walter Cronkite's coverage of the moon landing, thanks to the History Channel. (And thanks also to Georg who noticed that it was on and recorded it last night.) It was really, really interesting to hear the live coverage, what Cronkite was saying as it happened. For one thing, he didn't catch the second half of Armstrong's famous line "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Cronkite complains audibly that he couldn't hear it and wanted to know what Armstrong had said. Also interesting was when they showed the conversation between Nixon and the astronauts, just after they put the flag up. For All Mankind eliminated Nixon from the story entirely: it showed Kennedy's speech promising to put a man on the moon, then nothing about presidents. I wonder if it just didn't fit into the movie, or if in 1989 Nixon was still too much of an embarrassment?
I was a baby during the moon landing -- I'm told that my mother held 6-month-old me up in front of the TV and told me to pay attention -- but Georg was old enough to stay up late and watch the coverage. Now I feel like I got to see a little bit of it too.