Light Subject

Ordinarily the hucksters gobble down the prime cuts of television time, while the experimenters, the educators and the innovators have to pick at the spare and bony hours when nobody is looking, or everybody is dozing from too much Sunday dinner. Last week the salesmen risked a little experimenting themselves and alloted one of TV's choicest hours to a program devoted to science and scientists. It was a pleasant and nourishing dish. With CBS's Our Mr. Sun, the first of a seven-part, hourlong Bell Telephone series, TV proved that though there is nothing new under the sun, there is a good deal about it that is not generally known. Although it is 93 million miles from earth, the sun is a limitless source of the earth's food and power. It is so close that its light reaches earth in only eight minutes, whereas light from the next-closest star, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, takes four years. Every day it sends earth as much energy as mankind uses in a year. It would take 340 earths strung together like beads in a necklace to girdle the sun.

Bright Shuttle. Sun displayed a rare (but spotty) propensity for leavening facts with fun, and pre-empting the hour ordinarily filled by Studio One, it edged rival NBC's popular drama show, Robert Montgomery Presents, in the ratings.

To get a mass of solar information across to a mass audience, Bell's show used live action, patches of stock film (shot in Japan, Australia, France, India), and animated gimmickery. As a bonus, it spared viewers interruptions for commercials. Often Sun was dulled by some too-precious UFA (Gerald McBoing Boing) cartoons, and the interplay between big, brash Mr. Sun and Father Time (spoken by the late Lionel Barrymore), Dr. Research (U.S.C.'s Shakespeare Scholar Dr. Frank Baxter) and a usually superfluous Fiction Writer (Actor Eddie Albert) was too often embarrassingly labored. But the photography, much of it shot through high-powered telescopes, was illuminating, especially on color TV, and it proved--once more--that the wonders of nature are far more effective than man-made TV wizardry. Choice shots: the seething surface of the sun, sunspots in action, the aurora borealis, the sun, in eclipse, with its corona. Given a straighter, less condescending narrative and less self-conscious showmanship, Bell's slick new series can prove a bright shuttle between TV's need to entice and its assumed obligation to inform.

Grand Scheme. The high sheen on Sun was due largely to one man, Hollywood's Oscar-winning Producer-Director Frank Capra, 58, who spent four years making the show. "It was a labor of love," he says. "I just wanted to prove science could be diverting." To Italian-born Showman Capra, a chemical-engineering graduate of Cal Tech, Mr. Sun is no documentary but "a show, with accurate physical facts--a fresh attempt to glamorize science." So are his three upcoming TV ventures for Bell: Hemo, The Magnificent, the story of blood and circulation; The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays, treated as "a detective story"; and The Unchained Goddess, on weather and meteorology. Like Sun, each will bear the endorsement of the nation's most eminent scientists, be released at three-month intervals. The human spirit, Capra explains, has three main outlets: the artistic, religious and scientific. "They are all after the same truth. The artistic tries to find it in laws of harmony, the religious in moral laws, the scientific in physical laws. But science has never been given the right shake in the grand scheme of things."

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