Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Updated review after watching the first 3 episodes and part of the fourth from this Blu-Ray release. We stopped there until we can find an older DVD release. On the question of whether this is the original 4:3 aspect full frame or not, I can confirm that the advertised widescreen aspect ratio of this release is the result of cropping parts of the original frames. This isn't greatly surprising since there aren't a lot of ways to turn video content originally produced in 4:3 into 16:9. Overall the much larger disappointment for my wife and I are the new graphics and digital effects. Many of the ones we saw in those first few episodes are so poorly done that it distracts from "just watching" the show. A couple examples -- Earth looks like a weather map in space scenes and the rendering of rockets and component modules are simply not credible -- or even the correct shape in some cases. My wife and I were both born in the 60's and I saw better images of the Saturn series of rockets and the view from space in elementary school books and color photo inserts of encyclopedias as a child. Perhaps the amateurs who were allowed to put this CGI work together for such historically significant subject matter should have taken a few trips to the library first, but that probably wasn't in the budget. It is such a shame because we both very much enjoyed watching the original series. Considering how much effort and pride was taken in the creation of the original work we are very surprised and disappointed by this Blu-Ray release. It is just sad that anyone, much less the same companies who created the original works, would take such an original masterpiece of a production -- which so well captured the essence and details of one of the greatest moments and accomplishments in our nation's history -- and turn that into THIS. They should be ashamed of themselves. Otherwise I will respectfully defer to J. Pollack's review which I completely agree with. I never owned this series prior to this purchase. We watched original episodes and streams of them more recently. My copy of this Blu-Ray release will be going back for refund and I will buy one of the older DVD releases that conveys more respect for the subject matter and pride in their work.