April 27th 2018 (yesterday as of this writing) marks the 50th Anniversary of the broadcast for episode one of The Wheel in Space. (Does it seem like only yesterday when we were at the 50th for An Unearthly Child? Why yes, yes it does.)
It’s also, more or less the 50th Anniversary for the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey. More because the film had a rolling roll-out which began in early April 1968 for the US and went into May 1968 for the UK.
Both stories at their hub (pun intended) feature a wheel-like space station upon which a portion of each takes place. This reminds us here at the Tour of a fantastic animated short made back in 2009 which mixed both to amazing effect. We wrote about this in 2010 but the date shown at the beginning of the video has now come to pass so we gave it another look. And it’s still great.