- Actors: Stephen Hawking, Eugene Babaev, Jeff Rawle, Gregory Benford, Frank Langella
- Producers: Laura Sobel
- Format: Box set, Closed-captioned, Colour, DVD-Video, NTSC
- Language English
- Subtitles: English
- Region: Region 1 (US and Canada DVD formats.)
- Aspect Ratio: 4:3 - 1.33:1
- Number of discs: 3
- Classification: Unrated (US MPAA rating. See details.)
- Studio: Pbs Home Video
- DVD Release Date: 14 Nov 2000
- Run Time: 339 minutes
- ASIN: 0780631315
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 270,610 in Film & TV (See Top 100 in Film & TV)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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31 reviews
82 of 90 people found the following review helpful
3 stars for information content, 1 star for replay-ability
15 Oct 2002
Format:DVD
Let me start out by saying that I read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and really enjoyed it. But, then what a sad disappointment this series turned out to be. One could turn off the picture and just listen to the audio and get about as much interesting information. I realize that Dr. Sagan raised the bar pretty high but the makers of this documentary didn't even seem to care. Watch video sequences repeated over and over - sometimes not even relating to the narration that drones on in the background. Squint hard to see what is going on in the darkly lit sets as the camera super-slow pans into something that is supposed to be significant...but really isn't. I watched the entire series just waiting for a sequence that would capture my imagination. It never happened. As for replay-ability? I defy anyone who have made it through the entire series to watch it again. Dr. Hawking deserves better.
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Good Narration, Shame About the Visuals
21 Jun 2001
This video series covers all the basic ideas of cosmology in an interesting and easy to understand manner, with a strong historical focus. The narration, describing this, is very interesting and well thought out. However, the visual aspect is appalling. Most of it consists of out of fucus shots of things that have nothing to do with the program, irrelvant images of star fields, shots of people walking around, shots of empty rooms and other irrelevances. When people are interviewed, they are often shown in very dim surroundings, making their faces hard to see. All in all, the visual elements are just hopeless and add nothing to the video. Towards the end, I didn't even bother looking at the screen but just listened to the audio. I lost nothing by doing this. All in all, Professor Hawking might as well have written another book.
29 of 32 people found the following review helpful
Lack of Visual Aids
11 May 2001
Format:DVD
Stephen Hawking's Universe covers all the important points in Cosmology, but when one buys a video documentary on the subject, one expects more than just lucid explanations by talking heads (or even a head that uses a computer to talk). I was disappointed that for all the good work put into the making of SHU, the visual component was so poor; why not just make it into an audio book instead? Most of the time, throughout the entire series, the same set of bland, information-free starfield images and lame optical tricks (we're not even talking cheap computer animation!) accompany narration of (relatively) deep, conceptual scientific ideas. The rare instances in which camera footage is included -- say, to show a scene at an earth-based telescope -- quench the viewer's thirst for visual aid only long enough to underscore the series' basic dearth of such resources. Better luck next time, Stephen.
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