Promise that Aladdin sings to Jasmine / TUE 8-24-21 / Gossip that gets spilled / Vehicle with Vatican City registration plates / A grand slam nets four of these for short / Computer program that blurs out military installations

Constructor: Jessie Bullock and Ross Trudeau

Relative difficulty: somewhat harder than the typical Tuesday, but this will vary widely based on your familiarity / non-familiarity with '90s animated movie song lyrics

THEME: "I CAN SHOW / YOU / THE WORLD" (32A: With 39- and 44-Across, promise that Aladdin sings to Jasmine (and a hint to the answers to the starred clues)) — theme answers are things that "show you the world":

Theme answers:

• POCKET ATLAS (17A: *Miniaturized reference)
• GOOGLE EARTH (11D: *Computer program that blurs out military installations)
• PLANETARIUM (23D: *Facility where things are always looking up?)
• "PALE BLUE DOT" (60A: *Iconic photograph taken by Voyager 1 at the request of Carl Sagan)

Word of the Day: "PALE BLUE DOT" (60A) —

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of that day's Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System.

In the photograph, Earth's apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight reflected by the camera.

Voyager 1, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan. The phrase "Pale Blue Dot" was coined by Sagan in his reflections on the photograph's significance, documented in his 1994 book of the same name. (wikipedia)

• • •

Is this what Millennial Nostalgia feels like? I think it's fine, but no more complaints about boomer nostalgia, or puzzles built entirely around Beatles lyrics, OK? "Aladdin" was probably the last animated Disney film I saw in the theater. I remember seeing it with friends early in grad school, just as I remember seeing "Beauty and the Beast" the year earlier and "The Little Mermaid" with my girlfriend in college a few years before that. By the time "Lion King" hit, I was done. The wall-to-wall Elton John-ness of it all just did me in. Animated movie fare is kind of a haze after that. We're so used to ubiquitous animated movies / series now that people forget what a still-unusual thing animated fare that appealed to adults as well as children was in the late '80s / early '90s. "The Little Mermaid" appeared at roughly the same time as "The Simpsons" did on TV, and though they're wildly different, they both exploded into a culture that was not used to seeing animation that wasn't solely for kiddies. "Wait, they make cartoons for grown-ups now?" It was a somewhat joyous time. And now (and for years now), it's adult animation saturation. So yes, "Aladdin" was a huge deal, as that whole first wave of Disney films was, and all of those movies have of course had second lives on Broadway, or in remakes, or what have you. I do think asking for the lyrics (rather than the song title) is a bit specific for a Tuesday puzzle. But otherwise yeah, this theme works. All those themers do, in fact, show you the world. I had no idea what "PALE BLUE DOT" was—that is, I'd heard the term, but had never seen the photograph. It's something else. The point of the picture is we barely exist. You wouldn't know we were there if you didn't have someone out where we are.

[the titular dot is roughly half way up the rightmost color bar]

This is a good puzzle for demonstrating how theme density affects fill quality, in that the very worst (in the sense of most preposterous) answer, TWO TO, occurs *precisely* where the theme is densest. It is the nail in the stack of answers that form the revealer, in the dead center of the puzzle. Faced with -WOT-, yeah, there is not a lot a constructor can do with that letter combination. In fact, I'm not sure there's *anything* a constructor (or two constructors) can do besides put TWO TO in there. It's an absurd answer, in that no one is ever likely to actually say it (TEN TO, sure, TWO TO, come on, just round up). But if the only answer you'd chuck is the one holding the whole theme together, I guess you can look the other way. Besides, the answer does give us the "2" trifecta, so that's fun—the answer reads like an echo of the Across answer just above it ("I DO TOO ... TWO ... TO ...").

The themers were the most challenging part of the grid by far (made slightly more challenging by the fact that one of them, PLANETARIUM, had a "?" clue) I had RED OAK before RED ELM (?) (24A: Tree with durable wood), and AHA before AHH (61D: "I see now"). Gotta go. First day of Fall teaching today, and I am, uh, less prepared than I'd like to be. Also, haven't taught in person since Mar. 2020, so this should be ... interesting. Fun, I hope. Enjoy your day!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

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