On 2025.09.07 I went to visit a childhood memory of mine; Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side Of The Moon" show [1, 2] at Burke Baker Planetarium. It's an album audiovisualizer designed specifically for planetarium screens as the Youtube teaser doesn't do any of it justice (so if you haven't been before, everything you see is in a surrounding dome structure and you lean back to look at the ceiling for the best effect). It happens all year long at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Houston, TX.
I chose to take the footage with a Nikon Coolpix 4600 so that even if you know what's going on, it's crunchy enough to entice you to support the show for yourself. I'm a pirate, not a thief.
This sequence of the show shows off just the power of the planetarium's immersion. It starts off with a pitch-black room of clocks chiming before landing the audience in a void of spinning planes with tiled clock textures.
A charming display of The Dawn Of CGI, in complete immersion. This part of the show was the one that sent most people off to the exit because of how corny the visuals were.
Where the show might fall flat is when it uses anything resembling real life stuff, but I have to admire the boldness of animating a dollar sign spinning and jumping around a hyperrealistic ballroom.
This segment was my favorite, kindling the DSOTM show's strongest suit. If you have motion sickness, there's roughly 40 minutes of just this. The visualizer's illusion still holds up despite the graphics.
The shaders are pitch-black, many of the transitions are tacky or offpaced, and sometimes objects don't have textures. When they do, they're blown to scale in a way that the pixels can be counted on the big screen. However in the same show, you would be shot through loops of fractals until your head tilts, and skygazing as the horizon becomes submerged in black squares until there's nothing left. It's a perfect capsule of how the 90's was unapologetically and adamantly experimental. If you visit Houston, I recommend experiencing this or at least checking out the studio's website. And even if you don't care for nostalgia, it's still a really nice psychedelic event.
Despite its local unpopularity this show was completely life-changing for me. To the regular visitor this can either be an obsolete computer animated show or the most sober balltripper that $12 can pay for, but I loved it for all of that.
Something I really enjoy about TADC is the art direction, and it never falls short. I'm over the moon that people see value in older tech/aesthetics again where it didn't receive appreciation around the heart of Houston. The studio that animates TADC released a few promotional images that remind me plenty of the show as well as those stock animations that play on bowling alley screens when you strike. If the entire series had the same black-value shaders and every surface looked glossier/dead, most obsolete tech enthusiasts like me would be thrilled. Besides that the shape language of each character warms my heart in a way that brings me back to my amateur days on Maya when I'd fuse geometry presets together to make my characters.
