Apollo 11 in popular culture

• 1. Introduction

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  Apollo 11 carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the Moon in July 1969. An estimated 650 million viewers worldwide watched the first steps. That was roughly one in five people then alive on Earth. In America, over 53.5 million households tuned in across the two weeks the mission aired. Nothing on television had reached so many eyes at once. In the years that followed, that moment spread into stamps, sculptures, films, and song. What drove that reach? And in what strange, unexpected forms did the world's fascination resurface across the decades?

• 2. Around the World in 38 Days

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  Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins began their post-mission tour in Mexico City. Locals placed sombreros on the astronauts and gave them a second parade. The tour was officially called the "Giant Leap" tour. It covered 23 countries in 38 days. Their route took them through South America, then to Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, England, and Vatican City. After a rest at the US embassy in Rome, the tour pressed on to Turkey and Africa.

  In Zaire, Buzz Aldrin leaped over the barricade separating him from a group of entertainers. He joined in their dancing.

  Hungary was absent from the tour by its own choice. The country had declined the United States's invitation to host the astronauts. Relations between the two nations were strained. Hungarian crown jewels had been taken into American custody after the Second World War. They would not be returned until 1978.

• 3. The Stamp Story

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  Paul Calle designed the 10¢ Apollo 11 stamp, issued on the 9th of September 1969. It showed an astronaut descending a ladder from a lunar module. The United States issued a commemorative stamp for the 20th anniversary in 1989 and another for the 25th anniversary. A 33¢ stamp followed for the 30th anniversary in 1999. Calle's son designed the 1989 anniversary stamp. Both father and son collaborated on the 1994 anniversary issue.

  The 1989 stamp created a legal complication. US postal law forbade depicting living people on stamps, and the image showed two astronauts planting a flag on the Moon. The US Postal Service never officially stated that the figures were Armstrong and Aldrin. They remained, on the record, generic astronaut figures.

  Ireland's postal service issued a 50th anniversary stamp in 2019. During its design, a single letter transposition changed "gealach," the Gaelic word for Moon, to "gaelach," which means Irish. The error passed through the proof stage undetected.

  Stamped envelopes called "insurance covers" were signed by the crew before the mission launched. Family members could sell them as memorabilia if the astronauts died. The practice continued through Apollo 16.

  While standing on the lunar surface, Armstrong and Aldrin cancelled a commemorative stamp. NASA had originally planned a formal scripted ceremony for the occasion. The Washington Post described the proposed script as long enough to last "for the better part of one orbit of the moon." The paper also predicted it would generate "a veritable barrage of phone calls from a flabbergasted public." NASA dropped the ceremony. For the 50th anniversary, the USPS issued two stamps under its "Forever" collection. One showed the Moon with the landing site marked, and the other reproduced one of Armstrong's photographs of Aldrin on the surface.

• 4. On Screen

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  CBS news coverage of the 1969 landing included a full-scale model of the Lunar Module Eagle. Grumman engineer Scott MacLeod portrayed Neil Armstrong descending its steps so viewers could follow the action before the live Moon transmission began. Tom Sylvester portrayed Buzz Aldrin in the same broadcast.

  MTV launched on the 1st of August 1981 using footage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing as its signature opener. Alan Goodman and Fred Seibert, the producers who made that choice, selected the footage because it was in the public domain. They wanted to link the new channel to what they described as the most famous moment in worldwide television history. The statuettes handed to winners at MTV's annual Video Music Awards have carried that association forward. They are known as Moonmen.

  The 1996 docudrama Apollo 11 filmed some scenes in the original Mission Control Center. The 1998 HBO mini-series From the Earth to the Moon revisited the landing in an episode called "Mare Tranquilitatis." The 2018 film First Man depicted Armstrong and Aldrin preparing for and then carrying out the mission. Todd Douglas Miller's 2019 documentary used restored footage from the original event.

  In 2011, the Transformers film Dark of the Moon reimagined the Apollo program as a cover operation. In this version, NASA's purpose was to investigate an alien crash on the Moon's far side. Buzz Aldrin appeared in the film in a brief cameo. In the 2012 film Men in Black 3, the three astronauts witnessed a battle outside their spacecraft during the flight. Aldrin warned that reporting it would abort the launch. Armstrong replied that he "didn't see anything." The 2024 film Fly Me to the Moon followed a marketing specialist hired to produce a staged Moon landing. The staged footage was intended as a backup in case the real mission failed.

  The 2000 film The Dish dramatized a series of mishaps at Australia's Parkes Observatory in the lead-up to the moonwalk. Parkes had been scheduled as the primary station to receive video footage of the landing.

• 5. Broadcasting the Moon

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  Australia's ground stations supplied the highest-quality footage of the moonwalk. When Neil Armstrong descended the ladder, the Parkes dish in New South Wales did not yet have a clear view of the Moon. For the first eight minutes, the signal came from Honeysuckle Creek instead. Once the Moon moved into the Parkes dish's line of sight, that station carried the broadcast for the rest of the moonwalk.

  New Zealand had no satellite link to the outside world in July 1969. To bring footage to Wellington, a Royal New Zealand Air Force English Electric Canberra jet carried a videotape from Sydney. The tape had been recorded at the Australian Broadcasting Commission's ABN-2 station. From Wellington, the NZBC positioned one of its first outside broadcasting vans near Cook Strait. The van beamed the signal to a receiving dish on the far side, from which it traveled through the recently commissioned South Island network.

  Colombia's two television channels had no ground station for receiving satellite signals in 1969. That infrastructure would not arrive until 1970, at a station in Chocontá. The Moon landing signal traveled from Houston through Cape Canaveral, then to Caracas and Maracaibo. From there it reached a relay point near Ábrego in Norte de Santander before arriving in Bogotá. The landing fell on the 20th of July, already a national holiday in Colombia as Independence Day.

  India's All India Radio service in Madras was relaying Voice of America commentary for the Apollo 11 launch on the 16th of July. At exactly 7 pm, the service cut off its relay. The rocket launched at 7:02 pm. The radio service switched instead to Thirai Ganam, a program of film songs.

  The Soviet Union did not broadcast the landing live. Four hours after the launch, its main evening television news program showed footage of it. Among communist countries in Eastern Europe, several did broadcast the landing live: Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Radio stations in Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw interrupted their regular programming to announce the liftoff.

  A 1970 US congressional hearing concluded that every country with the technical capability to broadcast Apollo 11 live had done so. Coverage, the hearing noted, had been overwhelmingly positive.

• 6. In Stone and Song

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  The United States declared a national day of celebration on Monday the 21st of July 1969. All non-emergency employees, in both government and the private sector, were given a paid day off. The last comparable national pause had been Monday the 25th of November 1963. That was the state funeral of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy had set the goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s and returning him safely.

  A decade after the landing, Tranquillity Park was dedicated in Houston, Texas, in the summer of 1979. A replica of the footprint Neil Armstrong left on the Moon is located there. Jon Hair's statue of Armstrong was unveiled at the University of Southern California in 2013. The Eagle Has Landed, a 2019 sculpture by George Lundeen, Mark Lundeen, and Joey Bainer, stands at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

  The Byrds included the song "Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins" on their 1969 album Ballad of Easy Rider. The track is built around the mission's countdown sequence. The British group Public Service Broadcasting wove actual audio recordings from the Apollo 11 flight into their song "Go." That track appeared on their 2015 album The Race for Space. Thomas Bergersen's 2021 album Humanity, Chapter IV contains the track "Apollo." It includes two voiceover clips from President Kennedy's 1962 speech "We choose to go to the Moon." The track closes with Neil Armstrong's words "The Eagle has landed."

• 7. Folklore and Legend

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  The 1978 film Capricorn One depicted a fictional NASA attempt to fake a landing on Mars. That film may have broadened the reach of a theory that had circulated since the mission returned. The theory held that the Apollo 11 landing was itself a hoax. Historians and scientists have widely discounted the claim.

  In 1995, comedian Buddy Hackett told a joke in California, and Neil Armstrong was in the audience. Armstrong said afterward that it was the first time he had encountered the story. The legend involves a childhood neighbor of the Armstrongs named Gorsky. According to the story, Mrs. Gorsky had ridiculed her husband's request for a sexual favor. She told him it would happen "when the kid next door walks on the Moon." The legend then claims Armstrong, decades later on the lunar surface, quietly said "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky." A short film based on the legend was released in 2011.