Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World (1980)

Everyone knows who Arthur C. Clarke is. He wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey and invented the communications satellite. Unless you happened to be watching the Discovery Channel in the 1980s and 1990s, you might not be aware of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, a 13 part series from Yorkshire Television in England from 1980 on the unexplained and paranormal.

I first watched this back late in 1986 on the Discovery Channel (in the good old days when they were actually concerned about quality programming, and when they’d go a half hour without commercial interruptions) when I was 14 years old. The British narrator and the synthesizer music provided by Alan Hawkshaw gave me the creeps then. Arthur C. Clarke expresses his opinions on the subjects covered and then gets on with the show.

In the 1990s, the Discovery Channel decided to play dumb and “Americanize” the series by replacing the British narrator with an American one and removing the original intro with newer, fancy, computer graphics, so it took away some of the mood and atmosphere. There was one episode concerning these strange stone balls that were found in the jungles of Costa Rica. Another concerned the Cerne Giant in England, and how the theories made had them believe he might have been Hercules. This one hippie believed the Cerne Giant was a Celtic god and fertility symbol (the figure does feature a large phallis) and how it does wonders for him.

Another concerned some Japanese fishermen who reeled in a corpse of some unidentifiable sea creature in 1977. Perhaps my favorite was about the Nazca lines in the Atacama Desert in Peru. They made a point that you can only see these lines and pictures while in the air, and these were made were before Man was ever able to fly.

The great news is Pacific Arts Video made this series available on videotape in 1989, 13 episodes spread out over six tapes, with the original theme song and original British narrator (which was great for those who didn’t like the way TDC butchered the series). Because the series was made in 1980, some of the subjects are a bit outdated. Don’t expect anything like Whitley Strieber’s alien abduction, or the 1997 Phoenix lights, for example. Plus the video quality is grainy, like a lot movies and documentaries you expect from the 1970s.

I have a lot of wonderful memories of watching this series, and I happened to check out one of the videotapes of this series at my local library (Journey Begins/UFOs/Strange Skies) and it gave me all the reminders as to why I enjoyed Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. Sequels of this series later appeared: Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (1985) and Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious Universe (1994), but nothing beats the original. Excellent series if you’re interested in that kind of topic.