First Men (to look like they sorta were) on the Moon

Try your best to ignore the non canonical creepy music and enjoy this film. This is one of the first films ever, created by Georges Melies, back when movie editing was done by hand and good* ol' Thomas Edison had invented the first movie player. Melies is known for practically pioneering "special effects". It may look cheesy to us, with what we could call nowadays "poor quality effects". But considering the fact that we can have a movie like "Transformers" exist, where a giant robot that turns into a car beats up a robot that turns into a helicopter, and when you consider the fact that nobody is really phased by the reality that we can do that sort of thing, it isn't really fair to call this movie one of lower-quality. This guy, Melies, was a genius. When film first came out, a series of thousands of pictures on a strip, he was one of the first to realize you could edit the film to seemingly alter reality. In the beginning of the movie, some "wizards", I presume, turn little sticks and telescopes into chairs.

And that drove people nuts! It was ingenious!  And then, they decide to go to the moon by building a big gun, and having some people sit inside a "bullet", then shooting at the moon.

We realize nowadays that, just as turning sticks into chairs on film is old-hat, that sitting inside a gun is not how you get to the moon. But at this point, nobody really thought too hard about doing that because, well... The moon is far away, it's science fiction to them.

I know you're in there, Bobby Goddard...

But anywho, while I watched this movie, I was instantly remembered of Dr Robert Goddard, the father of the rocket. Do you know how he imagined space travel would look like? He imagined it, as a young boy in 1899 before this movie was released, to be like it was pictured in this movie, and because of this image of being fired out of a gun into space in, he was inspired to later grow up and invent the rocket, conceptualize going to the moon and possibly planets, almost 50 years after his death reincarnating himself into the robotic dog of Jimmy Neutron under the admittedly conspicuous alias "Goddard", and thus carried on his legacy of space travel ingenuity via an emission of brainwaves of his hidden knowledge of rocketeering and space travel technology into the brain of Jimmy Neutron while he slept.

Okay, I may have made that part up. Maybe. But really, Georges started this whole "special effects" business, the field that I secretly want a job in. And while Georges was admittedly wrong about there being mushrooms  on the moon, he was a genius and years ahead of his time.

And like all proper geniuses, he was a bit nutty. Here's a photo of the Melies family, guess which one is Georges.

Go ahead, guess.

He even played the air guitar before the electric guitar existed. Truly a marvel of a mind.


*Thomas Edison was probably not as nice of a genius as everyone thought, as revealed in the recent proTesla movement. See TheOatmeal. Discretion advised: True facts, innuendos, and vulgar language.