Let it never be said that sequelitis is a modern problem. Just two years after Georges Méliès had a hit on his hands with A Trip to the Moon, the French director sent another group of whimsical adventurers to the sun in 1904’s The Impossible Voyage.
Admittedly, such repetition was less of a problem when the film was released 120 years ago today, as movies that left theaters tended to vanish into the mists of time rather than into the depths of Netflix. A Trip to the Moon, now famous for its endlessly referenced and parodied image of a spaceship lodged in the moon’s eye, fell into obscurity in the decades after its debut, and it wasn’t until 1993 that a colored print was rediscovered.
