I thought that The Matrix had shown me the pinnacle of DVD cool. Then the Star Wars prequel DVDs raised the bar. The Doctor Who DVDs set a high water mark for TV on DVD. Babylon 5 sure didn't hurt either. But get this: the Spacecraft Films archive releases are in the same league as all of the above, at least - and the closest approximation of any specific category that I can imagine is that of "documentary."

Put simply, Spacecraft Films' DVDs are digitally remastered, unedited archives of all of NASA's existing footage from a given mission or series of missions. Apollo 8: Leaving The Cradle is a breathtaking archive of the first manned mission to leave Earth's orbit and swing around another body in our solar system. Books and TV shows, including the excellent From The Earth To The Moon, have done their best to portray the momentous nature of Apollo 8. But the real footage doesn't do bad in that regard either.

The first disc consists entirely of all the footage acquired from the ground: crew preparations, multi-angle views of the launch, and footage of the post-splashdown recovery of the capsule. The various views of the launch - nearly a dozen different angles in all - not only finally justify the multi-angle button on your DVD remote, but are quite simply breathtaking. Broken down into three categories - fixed launch cameras, tracking launch cameras, and fixed pad cameras - every possible angle of the blastoff is nothing short of spectacular. In some ways, the fixed pad camera angles are the most interesting. Intended to keep an eye on vital parrts of the launch structure, these cameras stay focused on the launch pad long after the Saturn V is airborne. These are views the public hasn't necessarily had ingrained into its collective consciousness, because how exciting is a launch pad after the rocket's gone? Plenty exciting, actually. The sight of the pad being cooked in the blasting engines of the Saturn V is unearthly - fire envelops every gantry, every surface, bubbling and flowing like a viscous liquid in a wind tunnel. Boring as it may sound to watch angles where the rocket's already left the frame, this stuff is absolutely engrossing.

Another thing that hit me with the first disc's lengthy compilation of footage showing the "crawler" transporter slowly rolling the assembled rocket to the launch tower is that we're racing toward 40 years of having used essentially the same launch hardware, on the ground end, to get into space. As awesome as it is to see enough footage to truly get an idea of the crawler's scale, it's also a bit worrying on a certain level, especially considering that Columbia's final flight was, for all intents and purposes, doomed on the pad. It had nothing to do with the crawler or the launch tower, but considering that these things have been around since the Johnson administration, it gives one enough pause to think that maybe the vehicle isn't the only thing due for replacement. That has zero to do with this DVD set, but it's just a thought that occurred.

The second disc consists entirely of television transmissions from Apollo 8 to Earth, all in rather low-resolution B&W (remember, it was 1968 - live TV from something moving that fast through space was a miracle in and of itself). This includes the famous Christmas Eve 1968 broadcast to Earth, in which the three-man crew read from the book of Genesis while the camera sent back live video of the surface of the moon unfolding beneath the spacecraft. As blurry and monochromatic as these images are, think of it this way - this is probably how most of the human race first saw the Earth from space, as the Apollo 8 astronauts pointed a camera out the window back toward their home planet as they raced toward the moon. In the proper perspective, it's still a humbling thought. Many a documentary has run the audio portion of the Genesis broadcast over film that wasn't even developed until the crew returned to Earth, but this is how everyone truly saw it.

Disc three takes a few more liberties, combining the magazines of 8mm film that the crew shot from inside the spacecraft with selected audio from the mission records. The audio and the video don't necessarily correspond with each other time-wise, but it is interesting to finally hear such things as the official audio record of who was the first human being to photograph an Earthrise. (Hazy memories and the occasional friendly jab at fellow crewmen during public appearances have, shall we say, obscured the truth a little bit over the years.)

So, all this glowing praise - is there anything, in fact, wrong with this set? I've got some minor quibbles with how long it takes the menus to play out, but this disc - perhaps more than any I've seen before - requires an elaborate menu tree; a little bit of lag may be unavoidable. Each disc's main menu opens with a slow montage whose necessity I question a little bit. On the one hand, this is a documentary - I wouldn't have been surprised to find...well... austerity. But Apollo 8: Leaving The Cradle is also a mass-market product now, re-released by 20th Century Fox (previously, the Spacecraft Films DVD sets had been available only by special order directly from the company), so some concessions to mass-market sensibilities are to be expected.

One place where I didn't find such a concession was in the price tag: at the time I picked this up, it was one of the priciest 3-disc box sets I've ever seen (naturally, the price has dropped by nearly $30 since that purchase - good news for you, though I feel a bit silly now!). But for the space buff, it's beyond the point of merely being worth it. This is video manna from heaven. Other releases in the series include similar box sets covering the Apollo 11 and Apollo 15 missions (the latter being an unexpected treasure trove of video since it was the first mission with a lunar rover), as well as more general releases covering the Gemini missions and the development and testing of the Saturn rocket series. I ache for Apollo-Soyuz, Skylab I, and the early space shuttle launches to receive this same treatment, and pricey though they are, I'm supporting the Spacecraft Films releases to do my part to make sure these might come about.

It's impossible for me to recommend this highly enough. It almost makes up for the fact that I didn't even exist in 1968, didn't get to see these things with my own eyes as they happened. This is the next best, and most historically accurate, thing.

Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com webmaster / editor-in-chief