Vangelis

When I was in middle school, what was then called junior high school, I watched a PBS series called Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan. Sagan was an astronomer from Cornell, who had a peculiar, punctuated way of speaking. There were about a dozen episodes of this series that talked about the universe and man's place in it.

For a science show, it was almost a religious experience. Sagan famously believed that there were alien beings on some faraway planet, and spent his life trying to find life elsewhere. His show also chronicled scientists who sought to understand the universe including people that were not well-known to me, such folks as Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Christian Huygens, astronomers that eventually showed that the planets did not revolve around the earth but around the sun instead (though to be technically accurate, then two bodies revolve around one another with the foci at the center of mass).

Though some of his stories were a bit hokey, such as his bicycle ride at the speed of life, it was still a key memory in my formative years.

As important as the visuals and Sagan's narrative was the music, which created an otherworldly sound. I was only to discover, many years later, that the music was composed by Vangelis who famously composed the music to Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner. For as distinctive as his music was and still is, and for as steady a work as he's managed, he hasn't penned music for many other films of note.

Indeed, Blade Runner, as visually fantastic as it is, becomes a complete experience because of its music.

The visual effects, crude by today's standards, have a painterly quality, not like the CG effects that have become commonplace among today's shows about space and the stars.

The poetic words that described a universe, the music that lifted the sights above the ordinary, which seemed awfully silly when I was in college, now seems quaintly nostalgic, some 20 years after going to college.