It had majestic, lambent theme music by Vangelis, and it had Sagan, a cosmic Magellan in a tan corduroy sport coat, pretending to set the controls of his moodily lighted spaceship for the heart of the sun.
Its crew, both human and alien, faces the wonders and dangers of outer space, while also dealing with the familiar, often humorous problems of regular people in a workplace…even though some of those people are from other planets, and the workplace is a faster-than-light spaceship.
Star Trek was an obviously possible future: faster-than-light spaceships, a unified world government and the capability to transport people by unstitching their molecules and atoms, and then reassembling them, were clearly within our reach.
Forget the cartoon impossibilities of "faster than light" SF spaceships.
For instance, in his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, early sci-fi author Jules Verne presented us with "light-propelled" spaceships.
His words, stay with me, had seemed, to the boy, vaguely futuristic, a beam of light from a spaceship.
In the dark before dawn, we drive toward the shining light enveloping a spaceship that looks like an obelisk out of antiquity, waiting to be launched.
Five minutes after he walks into that light inside the spaceship he is at best being splayed open like a frog in biology class and at worst something horrible is happening to him that we can't even comprehend.
The director's lyrical view of flight was evident long before "Catch Me if You Can," his soulful, finger-popping evocation of the golden age of commercial aviation: it could be glimpsed in the flashing spaceship lights at the end of "Close Encounters"; in the soaring bicycle of "E.T".; even in the Japanese fighter planes of "1941" and "Empire of the Sun".
A spaceship lights out for the territories.
As with "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," the "Nightly Show" set borrows the look of cable news shows -- cool colors, spaceship lights, a certain pomposity of design.
