A Trip to the Moon

[sycasey 2.0 2301]

Amy & Paul set a course for 1902’s seminal space short A Trip To The Moon (aka Le Voyage dans la Lune)! They dissect it as a work of imperialist satire, learn more about director Georges Méliès, and listen to a modern score made for the film by Air. Plus: Which films will we cover for the rest of our space series?

Next week our galactic trip continues with Galaxy Quest! You can join the conversation for this series on the Unspooled Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/unspooledpodcast, and on Paul’s Discord at https://discord.gg/ZwtygZGTa6. Learn more about the show at unspooledpod.com, follow us on Twitter @unspooled and Instagram @unspooledpod, and don’t forget to rate, review & subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify. You can also listen to our Stitcher Premium game show Screen Test right now at https://www.stitcher.com/show/unspooled-screen-test, and apply to be a contestant at unspooledpod@gmail.com! Photo credit: Kim Troxall

[FictionIsntReal 79]

My understanding was that there was a consensus around Alice Guy-Blache's "The Cabbage Fairy" being the first fictional film. That was still minimal, with a length like that of Lumiere shorts and with no intertitles.

I don't buy the film as a critique of imperialism. I think it's just fun, like his other films. From what I've read, his political cartoons were caricatures of Boulanger, and Melies himself summed up Boulanger as a man who wanted to replace the republic with a dictatorship (I've seen a number of his caricatures in a paper by Matthew Solomon and none of them were about colonialism). Boulanger was not a "hard right-wing" guy, but instead someone who got a lot of support from both left* & right. His foreign policy was focused on revanchism against Germany for the Franco-Prussian war rather than colonialism (which continued under both left & right wing French governments). His political career actually began with the support of Georges Clemenceau, who was opposed to colonization (Clemenceau's split with him and the divisions within the Radicals were not over colonialism). Clemenceau actually regarded colonization as a distraction from revenge against Germany, which was Boulanger's main priority. It was also not the case that French colonies would have had slaves in 1902, as slavery was abolished in the colonies in 1848.
*Particularly, former Communards.

"Aliens" is the crowd-pleasing movie where humans get to kill the aliens while delivering one-liners. "Alien" is the real deal: an unstoppable rape metaphor kills basically everyone, leaving only one survivor (who is not singled out for "final girl" status at the beginning) barely surviving. This is much like how James Cameron dumbed down First Blood when writing Rambo as a sequel.

Normally I like to watch a number of your scheduled movies in advance. Since you are not doing that now (even though you're no longer rolling a 100 sided die), I will not have watched Galaxy Quest by next week. I figure since I never watched Star Trek regularly it would mostly be lost on me anyway.

[sycasey 2.0 2301]

I'd never seen the full film before, but I thought it was really creative and entertaining and certainly worthy of a spot on the list.

I've also always loved that Smashing Pumpkins video, one of the best of the 90s. Obviously it's not the same tone as the original, but it takes the aesthetics and does its own fun thing.

Fun fact: the main explorer guy is Tom Kenny, a.k.a. Spongebob Squarepants.