I believe that was imitating an ancient Chinese mythology "Kua Fu Chasing the Sun". A super fast runner Kua Fu loved the Sun, and he wanted to come close to the brightness. He ran and ran and got closer and closer, finally he was too close and melt by the Sun, but his spirit of chasing brightness (future and dream) has lasted forever. Not a best story teller, but you get the picture. BTW, the guy Li Ning, a formal Olympic Gymnasim Champion, who lit the torch, is the president (maybe still CEO) of Li Ning sport goods company. Too bad that NBC commentators didn't really get the printing part of the history - the moving blocks. It was imitating the first ever printing with integrated characters. It also explored the evolution of Chinese characters by showing different forms of the word "harmony".
NBC Commentators = Awful Who were they anyway, never caught their names, only watched a few random min or so. The German live stream we watched was extremely well done. Very few comments, and only when everything quiets down do they say things inbetween.
I like NBC's comment when the Russian team came in: "They are killing people in Georgia!" "They've been caught doping!" And nothing else was important enough to be said.
"So fella, I understand you're called Melo for more than a couple reasons." btw- NBC replay of the opening is on now..
Yeah, it's driving me nuts. Boiling down individual countries into some dubious tidbits. The thing that gets me is that many people who have no prior knowledge of these other places will probably accept these comments as their total view of that country from now on.
Awesome opening ceremony but damn I'm pissed. I totally screwed up recording it. My Tivo2 recorded the HD channel and my TivoHD recorded the SD channel!!!!
Cool, a table tennis player! We have our own local counterpart (granted, she came from Serbia): Biba Golic .
I believe they do this every morning while raising the flag in tiananmen square. I'm sure there's YouTube videos of it.
