Reddit mentions of Carl Sagan's Cosmos [DVD]

If you're up for more than just science facts but a larger look at the universe, humanity and history, you can't go wrong with Carl Sagan's original Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. As much as I love Neil DeGrasse Tyson, his new version is shinier and more up to date, but no-one has Sagan's impact. Other commenters have posted plenty of fantastic factual things too, but I'd recommend anything involving Jim Al-Khalili, James Burke, or Richard Feynman. In fact if you want historical context as well as science, there's a great drama called The Challenger about Feynman's work on the investigative team finding the cause of the Challenger disaster.

That sucks, it's available for £10 on amazon UK if you have a multiregion DVD player

$110? Holy cow!

I got it from England where it goes for ~$23 including s&h to North America. The image format is PAL but that shouldn't be an issue nowadays. As far as DVD Decrypter tells me, the discs are region-free so no tinkering is necessary here, either.

Thanks for the link to the pseudo-episode, I did not know about that.

There almost certainly would have been a VHS release back in the day (Wikipedia says LaserDiscs too) - I've got a DVD box set that I bought a couple of years back, was on special for I think $30 at JB HiFi one day so I grabbed it.

Found a couple of NZ sources for it (1, 2), but they're both special-order.

Sadly a lot of the original was shot on magnetic tape so there's never going to be an HD or widescreen re-release to wait for if you want a copy but there are at least PAL transfers; this UK-made version from Amazon is a better price too.

Scientifically the show still holds up pretty damn well, admittedly a lot of the CG is a bit period-cheesy but definitely makes up for it with Carl Sagan's narration. The 2014 Neil deGrasse Tyson Cosmos sequel includes his Pale Blue Dot speech about the Voyager 1 photo - which Sagan requested be taken - which I think captures it nicely.