Well what can you say about the science fiction film genre it was invented by a cartoonist and conjurer,Georges Melies, who delighted audiences with magical spectacles at the Theatre Houdini in Paris and turned to filmmaking in 1895 after attending a showing of the first moving pictures made by Louis and Auguste Lumiere. Melies was intrigued with this new science and decided to start to make his own brand of film, he set up his camera inside a studio and created "artificially arranged scenes" either based on fictional stories or historical events transformed into fantastic tales. He played around with such classics as Bluebeard, The Haunted Castle, The Dreyfus Case and the Seven Deadly Sins, he not only designed the sets, costumes, and makeup but developed nearly all of the photographic tricks and special effects used today in Sci-Fi films. Borrowing ideas from the novels of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, Melies made most famous and influential film, A trip to the Moon (Le Voyage das la Lune), which contains many of the basic ingredients of the Sci-Fi genre: egotistical scientists, space travel, alien creatures, bizarre plantlife and even attractive females. Melies attitude toward this unusual material is child like and playful. Most of the story contains brilliant animation and is a simple story, of a scientist and his friends who take a fantastic trip to the Moon. The entire movie was only a short film feature but it astonished the public with its wonderful effects.



When a Trip to the Moon was released in 1902, its content and inventiveness did more than any previous film to convince other filmmakers and the public that the new motion picture medium had great creative potential. The entire sci-fi genre, ranging from Metropolis and Just Imagine through the fifties monster cycle to contemporary films like Barbarella, Planet of the Apes and Zardoz. This great film had many other people trying to emulate Melies great epic, but they fell away in ridicule from the public because they tried to pass them of as Melies classics and failed. The last word on this first real sci-fi classic is that a man went out on a limb, and tried something that no other person would have ever darded and started a whole new genre of movies. When it became such a success Melies actually did another version, it was the same movie but he had painfully hand painted all the cells in colour ...."What a living genius"