TV Reviews : ‘Satellite Sky’ Unveils an Irreverent Montage of the Space Age

David McCullough, American public television’s answer to Alistair Cooke--learned yet never intellectual, folksy yet never cute--usually provides wonderful, pithy introductions to each edition of “The American Experience” (he was also our vocal guide through “The Civil War”).

For the latest edition, Robert Stone’s film on the birth of the U.S.-Soviet space race, “The Satellite Sky,” tonight at 9 on Channels 28 and 15, McCullough’s preface couldn’t be a worse indicator of what is to come.

He waxes nostalgic about John Glenn and the bygone era of the ‘50s, and marvels at the money and courage it took to go into space. You can almost hear a Sousa march rising in the background.

Stone, who also made “Radio Bikini,” has no time for such nonsense. “The Satellite Sky,” like “Bikini” and especially “The Atomic Cafe,” comes out of an acerbic, irreverent mindset: This is the Space Age as comedy, where J.F.K., pooches in satellites and flying saucers meet.

Stone doesn’t make a documentary in the usual sense. He sifts through material of the period, patches snippets together, and unreels an impressionistic, historic montage without narration. Perhaps because of the extraterrestrial nature of his subject, “The Satellite Sky” exudes the weird feeling of having been put together by an otherworldly intelligence who came across footage in a time capsule.

The film doesn’t merely proceed from the initial jolt of Sputnik I and II to the several failed U.S. rocket launches (Stone has lots of fun with these botches) to the neck-and-neck competition between astronauts and cosmonauts. It inserts show biz (Glenn on “Name That Tune,” Soviet sci-fi movies), Cold War paranoia (especially from Lyndon Johnson and Sen. Henry Jackson) and a brilliant yet understated commentary on how, even then, the media directed the space show--and became the show itself.