Our Mr. Sun is a 1956 one-hour American television film in Technicolor written, produced, and directed by Frank Capra, with animation by UPA. It is a documentary that explains how the Sun works and how it also plays a huge part in human life. It was first broadcast on television by CBS in 1956. The film starred Frank Baxter as "Dr. Research", and Eddie Albert as "the fiction writer", the other recurring character in The Bell Laboratory Science Series. Marvin Miller voiced the animated Sun. Sterling Holloway, who was uncredited, voiced an animated version of chlorophyll. The film is notable as the last project of actor Lionel Barrymore, who provided the voice of Father Time. The film was first broadcast on television two years after Barrymore's death in 1954. Our Mr. Sun and a companion film, Hemo the Magnificent (about blood circulation), were popular favorites for showing in primary and secondary school science classrooms from the late 1950s until the early 1980s. The film is currently available on DVD with another Frank C. Baxter film, The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays (1957).
Synopsis The film opens with Dr. Research (Dr. Frank C. Baxter) and the Fiction Writer (Eddie Albert) meeting Father Time (Lionel Barrymore) and Mr. Sun (Marvin Miller) who explain that time started a few billion years ago and that the Sun is a star. Mr. Sun explains that he was worshipped as various gods (Shamash, Mithra, Ra and Apollo) until Anaxagoras proclaimed the Sun was a very hot stone and not a god. Logic and reasoning were the beginning of the end of worshiping the Sun as algebra and the astrolabe were used to study the heavens. Dr. Research explains that the Sun is 93 million miles away and its light takes 8 minutes to reach the Earth. Light from the next closest star, Alpha Centauri, takes more than 4 years to get to Earth at a speed greater than 186,000 miles per second. The Sun weighs the same as about 330,000 Earths and is 95% hydrogen and helium gas and is not solid. The Sun is compressed by gravity so tightly that the gas at the center is more than 100 times heavier than water with a pressure of one billion tons per square inch while the surface is about one pound per square inch. The center of the Sun is 30 million degrees Fahrenheit while the surface is only 10,000 degrees, but the corona is 1 million degrees Fahrenheit though nobody knows why, so scientists study the Sun's corona during each solar eclipse. Dr. George Ellery Hale and Dr. Henri Deslandres both developed the spectroheliograph—independently—to study the Sun in different wavelengths of light related to specific atoms. Dr. Robert R. McMath of the McMath–Hulbert Observatory used a spectroheliograph to make time-lapse films of the prominences on the Sun. Using pictures from the Mount Wilson Observatory, and others, scientists have learned about sunspots first described by Galileo. Sunspots often appear in pairs and are about 7,000 degrees rather than the normal 10,000 degrees. The spots increase and decrease in a cycle of about 11.2 years. Studying sunspots has shown the equator rotates faster than the poles at around 25 and 1/3 days per rotation. Halfway between the equator and the poles takes about 27 and 1/2 days per rotation though nobody understands why.
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