I’m going to guess that, like me, very few people have gotten far enough in the silent classic to realize that A Trip To The Moon features a battle sequence in which the parasol-toting, top hat-wearing Parisian astronauts fight off a tribe of fierce moon people! Also note the accurate prefiguring of the real lunar missions’ ocean splash downs. (In his novel, From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne also happened to have made some strangely accurate predictions about man’s first ascent to the Moon, such as that it would be Americans and that the vehicle would be launched form Florida. Why he would guess such a thing in 1865 is anyone’s guess.)
