It’s been 50 years since Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon,
but the moon has fascinated us—as in all of humanity—for millennia.
One of the oldest pieces of artwork of the moon dates back to 1600 BCE.
And as long as there have been cameras, we have photographed our little lunar buddy.
In 1840, just one year after Louis Daguerre perfected his process for making photographs,
scientist John Draper employed the same technique to capture the first-ever images of the moon.
One of the earliest films ever made, “Le Voyage dans la Lune,” or “A Trip to the Moon,”
was released in 1902.
So it’s no surprise that when we got there for real—with the ability to send images
back to Earth as it happened—
(ARMSTRONG: “That’s one small step for man”)
humanity was watching.
(ARMSTRONG: “one giant leap for mankind.”)
Broadcasting the moon landing was a technological marvel.
It required the use of classified technologies as well as the creation of new cameras that
could survive rocket launches and weightlessness, not to mention adjust to the extreme light
contrast of the lunar surface against outer space.
NASA estimates the audience was 650 million people— 18 percent of the world’s population at the time.
If everyone who watched Apollo 11’s lunar landing decided to form their own country,
it would be the third largest on Earth...today.
On the British broadcast, the BBC had the band Pink Floyd improvise a kind of soundtrack
to the moon landing live.
Four years before the release of their iconic album The Dark Side of the Moon,
the lunar set later became known as “Moonhead.”
It’s never been officially released, but versions of it exist online.
When MTV launched in 1981,
it used NASA videos in its branding to associate the network with “claiming unchartered territory.”
That’s why the statue for the MTV Video Music Awards is the moonman.
In more recent years, Homer remembered definitely paying attention to the moon landing on “The Simpsons,”
and Don and others watched Walter Cronkite’s broadcast of the event on “Mad Men.”
There have also been several films about Apollo 11 in the last few years,
most recently First Man, starring Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong.
Not all depictions of the moon landing are so realistic though.
British sci-fi show “Doctor Who,” which also recently celebrated its 50th anniversary,
had its time-traveling hero splice subliminal footage into the moon landing broadcast to
help humans fight an invading alien species.
And, in an early episode of “Futurama,” the Moon becomes a tourist destination in the future,
with amusement park rides depicting oddball memories of how humans got to the moon—
for example, animatronic whalers singing sea shanties
about how there are no whales on the moon.
(LEELA AND ROBOTS: 🎵“but there ain’t no whales, so we tell tall tales and sing our whaling tune” 🎵)
Though this scene may sound particularly absurd, it’s not the only fictionalized take on
the origins of the Apollo program.
In the film Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon, the space race occurred not because
of some Cold War competition, but because Americans and Russians realized that Transformers
technology had crashed landed on, well, the dark side of the moon.
Armstrong and Aldrin are portrayed in that film, and can also be found in the likes of
multiple TV mini-series, Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, even Men in Black 3.
And sometimes the astronauts aren’t played by others, but by themselves.
(ALDRIN: “And from a fellow space traveler, it’s a true honor.”)
Aldrin made a cameo in Transformers, introducing himself to “fellow space traveler” Optimus Prime.
(ALDRIN: “Would you like to yell at the Moon with Buzz Aldrin?”)
A year prior, he yelled at the Moon with Liz Lemon on 30 Rock.
(ALDRIN: “I walked on your face!”)
(LIZ LEMON: “Don’t you know it’s day?”)
Without the moon landing, we wouldn’t have any of the subsequent stories that stemmed
from it, be they documentary, film, or sitcom.
When President Kennedy challenged NASA to put a man on the moon before 1970,
(KENNEDY: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,
not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”)
it took some of the world’s brightest engineers, mathematicians, and human computers to meet
the deadline.
The directive sparked not only their imaginations, but so many around the world,
and its legacy has continued to do so for five decades.
Happy 50th anniversary, Apollo 11.