One of my favorite restaurants at Disneyworld is the Sci-Fi Dine-In. The food is pretty ordinary but the ambiance....well, it's pretty amazing. You sit in a fake car inside a restaurant that looks like a drive-in theater at night....and they show all sorts of goofy sci-fi clips on the giant screen as you eat.
So what does this have to do with "Mars and Beyond"? Well, quite a few of the clips they show in this restaurant were originally made for this episode of "The Magical World of Disney" back in 1957. And, I wanted to see the rest of the episode...not just the clips used in the restaurant.
The episode is essentially about the history of human concepts of the Earth, the solar system and the universe. Paul Frees narrates and takes you in the first portion of the show from pre-history through the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance to today...all accompanied by weird and minimalistic animations. While the quality of the animations are only fair (with a relatively low cel-count and simplistic backgrounds), they are effective and occasionally amusing. Following this is a lecture on evolution which is a bit boring by comparison and didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the show. Then, the show focuses on Mars during the final segment of the show.
Overall, it's a very uneven episode--very fun and interesting at times and a dull lecture at others.
By the way, the ex-history teacher in me objected to the narrator's assertion that the Middle Ages was 'a stupid period'! This is actually a bit of a myth. While knowledge wasn't as sophisticated as it was in the Renaissance, it wasn't as if NOTHING happened for this thousand years period and that folks were totally ignorant!