From The Earth To The Moon (TV Miniseries) - Production Information

Production Information

• Many of the actors had opportunity to interact and form friendships with the real life astronauts they were portraying. Brett Cullen, who played Apollo 9 Command Module pilot and Apollo 15 commander David Scott, was invited to the Scott family home each time an episode he appeared in was first televised.

• Two short clips from the final scenes of Apollo 13 were used in "That's All There Is"; a splashdown sequence, and a view of the recovery ship USS Iwo Jima (portrayed by USS New Orleans).

• The original series was shot in 1.33:1 aspect ratio, intended to be viewed on standard television sets. The series was released on DVD as a 4-disc set. With the proliferation of widescreen flat-panel TV sets the series was remastered in 1.78:1 aspect ratio and rereleased in 2005 as a 5-disc DVD box set. New framing causes loss of top and bottom parts of the frames from the original movie. This is not always noticeable because of careful transfer process, but in some scenes important details are lost. For example, in Disc 1, when the Gemini 8 / Agena assembly is tumbling around the sky with a stuck thruster, the thruster is not visible in the new widescreen version as it is cut off by the top of the frame. Some captions have also been compromised.

• To simulate Moon gravity, weather balloons filled with helium were attached to the backs of the actors playing the astronauts in the Lunar Extra-vehicular activity scenes, effectively reducing their Earth-bound weights to that of on the Moon.

• The score of "Spider" prominently features an imitation of the main title theme from the 1963 World War II movie The Great Escape, and Tom Kelly jokes about having a crew digging a tunnel out of the Grumman plant. The episode also featured a real Lunar Module (LM-13), which had been built for the Apollo 19 mission but was never used due to budget cuts.

• Parts of the mini-series were filmed at the Disney-MGM Studios (now Disney's Hollywood Studios) in Orlando, Florida.

• Blythe Danner, who narrated the final episode, had previously worked on location at the Johnson Space Center for the 1976 movie Futureworld, filmed in the same buildings where Apollo moonwalkers had recently trained.