Disney Movies - Day 32

Last night wasn't a good night. I rarely have headaches now since they put me on muscle relaxers (who knew I was such an uptight bitch?), but when I do have them, whoa nelly! Needless to say, I managed to stitch for approximately 20 minutes before I had to give up the goat, so I decided to try to clear off my Hulu queue because my mind wasn't clear enough to focus on animation (my mind runs like mad when I'm watching animation because I'm focusing on the art as well as the story and I just couldn't deal with that last night).

Anyway, I had three episodes of Star Talk with Neil Degrasse Tyson to watch and he finally had two of those episodes about astronomy! In the history of the show so far he had only done one or two episodes about it, so it put me in quite the space mood. I really wanted to just go to bed, but I needed to get through at least one movie or else my challenge would be kaput, so I chose Roving Mars. Before the Disneynature movies took off, there was this documentary and it's my favorite of them all.

I'm not just Disney and Duran Duran obsessed, I'm also quite gaga over astronomy. It all started back during my first trip to Disney World in 1981 because we also went to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. It wasn't much then, just a museum and the launch pad, but I have been DYING to go back ever since (alas, no one wants to go with me and I'm too chicken to go alone). I was quite young at the time and didn't understand a lot of it, but I was in awe at the thought of other worlds and that we might go a travelling one day. I'm not science-smart, so I always knew that astronomy was out of the cards for me, but every once in a while, the urge strikes me hard and I regret not at least trying, especially now.

This is a very exciting time for our space program. We're getting closer and closer to the surface of Ceres and hopefully will soon find out what those bright spots are (I'm in the ice camp), NASA announced that we're finally going to Europa and, most exciting of all, we are less than 3 weeks away from our arrival at Pluto! Every single day I spend more time than I should scouring the astronomy websites waiting for the newest updates from the New Horizons mission to Pluto and we're getting them weekly now. We've learned more about Pluto and it's largest moon Charon in the past month than we have ever known and the discoveries are increasing exponentially every single day. I almost cried when, last week at 50,000,000 km out (that may sound like a lot, but it's five times less than the distance from the Earth to Mars, so not so bad), the LORRI camera showed a hidden Mickey on Pluto! If you pay attention to the very first clip on this video, you'll see it (although you might want to pause it because it disappears in the blink of an eye):


That's why I chose Roving Mars because it's all I have that blends astronomy and Disney together. Granted, it's considered a short by IMDB, but there are also three documentaries on the disc as well and I always watch them altogether along with the movie, so I'm counting them as one movie and creating a new category, documentary. I'm not going to diversify it into live-action or animation because I have a few Disney documentary discs that are a mixture of the two or live action discussing animation and it might get too confusing to separate them.

Roving Mars is about the creation, launch, landing, and deployment of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, one of which is still quite active on the Martian surface even today, over twelve years after their 6-month tour of duty ended. Poor Spirit died about 4 or 5 years ago. Of course, Opportunity is no longer alone and it works together with Curiosity in the ongoing search for life on the red planet.


MOVIE TOTALS:
Live Action: 20
Full-Length Animation: 70
Mixed-Medium: 4
Animated Shorts: 240
Live Action Shorts: 1
Mixed-Medium Shorts: 1
Animated Series: 17
Mixed-Medium Series: 2
Documentaries: 1

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