From the Earth to the Moon (largely based on Andrew Chaikin's excellent book on the Apollo program, A Man on the Moon) was sort of a spiritual successor to the 1995 film Apollo 13. It was produced by the same people (including Tom Hanks, who starred as Jim Lovell in Apollo 13 and introduced each episode of From the Earth to the Moon), featured some of the same actors (albeit not playing the same characters), and, in the case of the episode spanning the Apollo 13 mission, was deliberately designed to complement rather than overlap the movie. It's one of my favorite pieces of television.

The problem with From the Earth to the Moon was that it was made just in time not to be produced in HD. This led to a few problems with the DVD release, which they cropped for widescreen rather than pillarboxing it (so the top and bottom of the scene got cut off), and made a Blu-Ray release impractical. I was hoping that for the 20th anniversary of the original airing last year, they might think it was worth making, but no soap.

(A similar thing happened to the Director's Edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the one made by Robert Wise shortly before he died. New footage was shot, new effects were added, and a new master was made for that release—on DVD, just in time to miss the development of Blu-Ray, so the source footage is all in SD, and all the new bits would have to be made over again in HD from scratch. Which is why there isn't, and probably never will be, a Blu-Ray version of that cut of the film.)

Well, it seems if the show's own 20th anniversary wasn't, the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 was motivation enough for Imagine to finally take the trouble of remastering From the Earth to the Moon in HD, because I just discovered that there is a Blu-Ray edition (with prominent "remastered in HD!" box graphics) available for preorder, with a US street date of July 16 (the anniversary of the launch). I'm really pleased about this (with the caveat that I really hope they've done the remaster correctly, and not repeated the mistakes of the DVD version).

Sadly, I found out about this by learning from a BBC report that actor Max Wright has died. He was probably best known for his role on the '80s sitcom ALF, but I think first of his performance as Günter Wendt in the third episode of From the Earth to the Moon (the one covering Apollo 8). That reminded me to check again whether the show ever had come out on Blu-Ray, and, well, here we are. Silver lining department, I guess. :/

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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