There were two times in my life when I was literally brought to my knees by the beauty of the night sky. Once was on a camping trip in the Nevada desert in my late 20s, when I looked up, caught the Milky Way shining brighter and clearer than ever I'd seen, like a river of a billion diamonds. My legs started to buckle, apparently realizing their insignificance in the scheme of things. I sat down rather rapidly on the desert floor.
The other time was when I was a child and first watched the late Carl Sagan's 1980 PBS series, Cosmos, and had the exact same reaction standing in front of a TV set. Sagan's "ship of the imagination" and the galaxies it span through — well, they weren't quite state of the art special effects, even in 1980, the year of Empire Strikes Back. But it was enough, with Sagan's hypnotically confident narration, to send millions of minds spinning into the stars. Mouth agape, head shaking, barely able to stand: this was how we watched Cosmos.
See also: Eye Candy for Space Geeks: 38 Stunning Photos From 'Cosmos'
Now we have a pretender to Sagan's scientific throne in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, starring the ever-engrossing Neil deGrasse Tyson. It is bold and brassy where Sagan's show was soft and understated; it has up-to-the-minute CGI and has moved to the Fox network, with a budget to match.
This is a beautiful thing for the cause of science education, of course, but you'll forgive us old-time Sagan fans for being wary of the interloper — as wary as Doctor Who fans are every time that show replaces the lead actor they've become comfortable with.
To allay these doubts, I decided to watch both first episodes — the 1980 version and the 2014 version — back to back. Had the original aged well? Did Tyson pack more of a punch than his predecessor? How much had the science changed? Does a big budget really make that much of a difference when conveying the splendor and mysteries of the universe? Here's what I found.

Really, it's impossible to choose between these two top-notch communicators. Both knock it out of the park, employing very different styles. You might almost call it a West Coast vs. East Coast battle, since Tyson is from the Bronx and Sagan seems the epitome of the laid-back tanned California professor, but (as we discover later in the series) he actually hails from Brooklyn and spent most of his life at northeastern universities.
Sagan is more lyrical, and his slow, deliberate speech pattern was as satirized as it was beloved (I'll never forget my father imitating his "billions and billions.") Tyson seems more like he's speaking off the cuff; even though he's more muted here than we're used to seeing, he still displays a fondness for the cool flourish (who else could get away with putting on sunglasses in the face of the Big Bang?).
If anything, Tyson is too deferential to his predecessor. He spends ten precious minutes of the show reminding us what a great man Sagan was, and recounting the (admittedly touching) story of the day in his childhood when Sagan invited him to visit him at Cornell, as if assuring us old-school fans that the torch has been passed to the appropriate guy. But we knew that the moment he started talking.
Winner: a tie
The original Cosmos, as you can see in the video above, still holds up surprisingly well. It makes do with its PBS budget, and seems quieter and more meditative than its successor (as reflected in the original's subtitle, A Personal Journey). There's a beautiful moment where Sagan fakes us out and zooms in on a planet we think is Earth, but turns out to be a speculative alien world criss-crossed with lights; that still gives me chills.
The new Cosmos, reflecting its times, seems terrified that you might change the channel at any time, and packs each second with wow-inducing space scenes. There's not a whole lot of room to breathe and contemplate what we're seeing. I didn't quite feel my legs buckling, but I did keep remarking that young kids watching this must be having their minds blown.
With that in mind, I'll give the last word on this matter to two-and-a-half-year old Delilah:

Winner: 2014
Carl Sagan cavorted around the Cosmos in a craft that deliberately looked like a dandelion seed: his "ship of the imagination" was light, dreamlike, halfway between real and not. The new Cosmos gives us something that could not be anything but a heavy-duty spaceship, one rather reminiscent of Boba Fett's Slave I. That's perhaps not surprising, given that it was created by Ryan Church, concept designer on Star Wars Episodes II and II. Very flashy, but also a little distracting — this is rather too concrete to be an imaginary vessel.
Winner: 1980
I see what the 2014 show's producer, Seth MacFarlane, has done here: he went for a big Hollywood-style orchestral score in order to anchor us in something familiar while watching those mind-blowing images. But it's almost impossible to top the haunting grandeur of the original Cosmos theme, taken from the album Heaven and Hell by Vangelis.
Sorry, Seth, but c'mon:

Winner: 1980
There's no way around it: Cosmos is designed to sneak a little history of science in with its universal wonderment. It was, unfortunately, the least compelling part of the 1980 series. In his opening episode, Sagan offered the story of Eratosthenes, the ancient Greek who first calculated the circumference of the Earth, then meanders into a lament for the loss of the Great Library of Alexandria.
Tyson, with writing help from Sagan's last wife Ann Druyan, gives us the far more powerful and appropriate tale of Giordano Bruno, the 16th century Dominican friar who first proposed that the universe was infinite. Here's where MacFarlane's experience as an animator comes into full effect. Bruno's story is far more powerfully rendered as anime than it ever would be as live-action costume drama.
If the rest of the series offers anything as compelling as the scene of Bruno soaring into the heavens in his dreams, my guess is kids won't lose focus during the history segments the way I once did. For some, they may become the main attraction.
Winner: 2014
The major difference between the first episodes: old Cosmos took us from the outside in, with Sagan's ship moving from the edge of the universe to our small blue dot of a planet, which we see with new eyes. New Cosmos goes in the opposite direction, with the idea of finding our "cosmic address."
Both are utterly compelling conceits, with surprises along the way — Sagan offered the populated alien planet, while Tyson flies by a completely dark ice planet, floating in interstellar space with no sun to light it. But Tyson just about has the edge here, as he's able to use more effective bells and whistles (the universe in infra-red is much more densely populated) and more up-to-date science (sorry, Pluto).
Pulling all the way out also allowed Tyson to end on an image of the multiverse: universe upon universe, jostling like bubbles in soda. It was at this point in the show that my wife exclaimed something that sounded like "clucking bell."
Winner: 2014
And that's all she wrote: the 2014 Cosmos beats its predecessor by the slimmest of margins, 4 to 3. Which is, after all, pretty much what Sagan (who died in 1996) would have expected: that the daisy-chain of scientists across the years, each building on the knowledge that came before, will make slow but steady progress towards the stars. Naturally, it should also produce a cooler Cosmic Calendar and a shinier Ship of the Imagination.
Not all of this is progress, and my enthusiasm for the original series has only been increased by re-watching its first episode. Still, if every generation's Cosmos is a little better than the one before, and buckles more knees in its contemplation of the universe, we must be doing something right.