By April MacIntyre Nov 26, 2008, 2:31 GMT
History will air an amazing documentary that should be mandatory viewing for all students and historical and political buffs to view.
Sputnik Mania narrator: Liev Schreiber - New York City, NY, USA © Sylvain Gaboury / PR Photos
1957 was a culturally and scientifically bumper crop filled-year that generated many firsts and icons: West Side Story, the Frisbee, the classic Chevy, Leave it to Beaver, IBM selling their first computer, Bridge on the River Kwai is released and Sputnik is launched.
Director David Hoffman and producers row us back to this important year when the good middle-class life was abundant and consumer confidence and optimism was at an all-time high, until the USSR pulled an end-run to outer space on us.
“Sputnik Mania” will air Saturday, November 29 at 10:00 pm ET/PT. The film is based on Paul Dickson's bestselling book Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. Hoffman is a thoughtful documentarian who has carefully compiled long-lost news footage from various sources and signed on Liev Schreiber to narrate this compressed emotional time period when the fifties came to a close, and the Cold War heated up.
Many historians believed that there have been three great shocks to the American psyche: The bombing of Pearl Harbor; the launch of Sputnik, and the tragedy of 9/11 – in the last 100 years.
In l957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite. Sputnik marked the beginning of the Space Age, as well as a turning point in the Cold War. Man had entered the "Space Age" -- and for a just a fleeting moment, all earth citizens were united by a common sense of possibility.
That sentiment didn’t last.
It thrilled Americans, until the media aired many politicians verbalized fears that ICBM nukes, missiles and other horrors could be dropped on us from the little silver Russki antennae-ed ball that drifted above.
Then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gloated over the Soviet’s capabilities and success, especially when our initial rocket trials ended in embarrassing public failures. Americans were beside themselves that such a “backward” country where most people didn’t even have refrigerators, (as they had been led to believe), bested them in the race to space.
Khrushchev and the Russian media were relentless in mocking the USA’s lack of a viable space program, and calls at home were deafening for our military to step up the pace and get the space program established. It was notable that while the US and Soviets were working in secret on their Space programs, the International Geophysical Year was underway and represented a great collaboration and sharing of scientific discoveries by the International scientific community for the betterment of mankind.
Hoffman’s film vividly shows us how we responded to the shock of Sputnik over days, weeks, and only months, when after its launch, 60% of Americans thought that nuclear war was imminent and that 50% of the American population would likely die according to Hoffman’s research.
The second Sputnik launch was especially worrisome and had an added drama: Laika the space dog, sent up on the one-way mission on November 3, 1957. The little dog’s plight superseded the worries that the Soviets were ramping up their world domination plans and threats to the USA mainland.
Dog lovers were horrified when they realized the Soviets had no intention of bringing her home; Soviets were in a hurry to prove they could send a dog into space, and they didn’t have time to figure out how to get her back.
Laika’s slow, lonely death was front page news the world over. The little dog’s sacrifice deeply affected the Western world.
Hoffman’s film takes us on a compelling and well produced timeline that also showed how a generation of young boys became fixated on science, especially rockets, and how a whole swath of young men were motivated to enter aerospace engineering and other science disciplines thanks to the spark of what the Soviets had accomplished with Sputnik.
American kids were dotty for rockets, and towns across the nation had kids constructing “pipe bombs with fins” as one scientist put it in the documentary.The birth of NASA is a direct legacy of the Sputnik year, the result of a U.S. Congressional mandate issued through the Space Act of 1958, whereby NASA was formed. Since 1958, over 1,500 documented NASA technologies have benefited U.S. industry, improved the quality of life, created jobs, and rewarded the taxpayers.
There are frightening parallels from this time period to today’s news, as if history wants to repeat itself so soon; the old egos of the great superpowers are still posturing in the media.
The film takes you through all the ramifications that Sputnik was responsible for.
In 1958, a nuclear weapon was tested in the atmosphere by either Russia or the United States every three days. The space race created an intense academic army of scientists and engineers in both countries. This led to massive reforms in our education system, NASA’s creation and then the discoveries that many of our consumer technologies are built on today: The Internet, cell phones, global positioning systems, credit card verifications and more.
Hoffman said of his film: “My goal when making the film was to inevitably present and package a historic film with wonderful archival footage set to great music - but telling an even greater story. In the end, we see a film that is both dramatic and worthy of presentation to a theatrical audience…In the end, I hope audiences will walk away thinking about the present.”
Hoffman presents the film with an eye to the present and future: "With our education system again in dire need of reform, the renewed focus on nuclear testing, and NASA's plans to build a moon base by 2024, the cosmic frontier has reopened to a new generation of scientists, engineers, and soldiers."
His film's epilogue asks: what will be our next "Sputnik moment" -- the event that drives us to address these and other challenges?
This was one of the best documentaries I have seen this year. An absolute no miss.
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