National Geographic Video - Asteroids - Deadly Impact

Rating:
Summary: What's That Up In The Sky?
Review: It's astonishing that as recently as 1963 the preponderance of opinion was that Meteor Crater was not caused by an impact.

After the last lunar landing impact was established as the overwhelmingly dominant process at work on the lunar surface, but such impacts on Earth were generally still denied.

Despite the fact that the Alvarez theory gained ground from 1980 until the middle of 1994, impact as a common occurence continued to be denied. After the SL9 impact on Jupiter (well covered in this video) the last significant resistance to the K-T impact as the mechanism of extinction for the dinosaurs was swept away. That this catastrophe on another world brought about an overnight change in the sciences was appropriate.

Now there are many impact craters recognized AS impact craters found throughout the world and not just in some comfortably remote location like the Moon or Jupiter. It is now much cheaper to read constrasting views about such events since the anti-impactors' books have appeared in the remainder lists.

Oddly enough, there's still the occasional attempt to deny impacts, such as the 12th century impact on the Moon observed from England, and the attribution of Martian impact craters to volcanism. Perhaps that odd resistance to the idea of impact will someday soon die out. When it does, good riddance.

Asteroids Deadly Impact is my favorite National Geographic video of all time, and I believe I've seen them all. Perhaps it would be a much better world if people would tune out the daytime (and nighttime) tv garbage and watch stuff like this. Certainly would be worth a try.

The video covers the history of impact geology by recounting the career (through 1994) of the now-deceased Eugene Shoemaker, including his finds in the Ries Basin (an impact crater), Barringer Crater (impact crater which we know as "Meteor Crater"), and of course the comet(s) Shoemaker-Levy 9 and his role in the Apollo missions.

This DVD version was a welcome addition to my video collection. The extra features are a bit of a dud (NG ads, and a sort of quiz about impact that eventually loops around to the beginning) and there are some slight changes in the soundtrack (if memory serves), but it's the same show as on VHS, without the degradation of picture quality.

Rating:
Summary: Very poor
Review: There are too many unrelated scenes shown in this documentary. It lacks a good coverage of the overall subject and I consider the overall quality as extremely poor, without an in depth review. I found it so bad that I did not even watch it completely and I therefore would not recommend purchase