23-25. Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI

I watched the three original Star Wars movies back to back to back on May 4th this year, since it is Star Wars Day and all.

I watched these movies frequently as a kid, but had not seen them for the last few years up until now. So it felt like I was watching something I used to like to see if I still like it as an adult.

The verdict: Yep. Still a magical movie experience. My favorite has always been The Empire Strikes Back, but this recent viewing gave me a stronger appreciation for A New Hope. I always like the exposition part of a story, and I love how the characters are introduced in Episode IV.

I did get kind of restless part way through the marathon though, so I think I will wait a few years before attempting it again.

I'll always connect Star Wars with my dad, whose story of seeing it on the big screen is my strongest and earliest memory of movies as a transformative experience. Also, "I thought they smelled bad on the outside" is one of his favorite quotes.

1. A Trip to the Moon (1902)

A Trip to the Moon is groundbreaking for many reasons, including:

• It is longer than most other movies of its era.
• It employed then-groundbreaking creative special effects.
• It had a fantastical plot in a time when most movies focused on everyday events. Early filmmakers didn't know exactly what film was for, so they just filmed people doing everyday things. The director of A Trip to the Moon created hundreds of fantasy films during his career, but this one is the most famous and influential.

The plot is as follows:

The leader of a group of astronomers proposes a trip to the moon. Some men volunteer and they build a spaceship that closely resembles a bullet. After being shot out of a giant cannon in the spaceship-bullet, the crew lands squarely in the eye of the anthropomorphic moon.

After resting for a bit, the men discover the moon is inhabited by a hostile alien species. The creatures arrest the men and take them back to the king of their species, whom one of the astronauts kills. The astronauts then run back to their spaceship and one of them pushes it off a cliff to propel it back toward earth. After landing in the ocean, the spaceship surfaces and is towed back to shore.

Here is the version I watched:

Its score is a combination of pieces by two composers, so I'm guessing the original score must be lost. There are also versions on YouTube that have voice narration, because the original movie has no text, just action.

There is an alternate ending that depicts the returning astronauts being feted by a parade. This lost ending was found with a complete print of the film in a barn in 2002.

There's also a color version of the film that was hand-tinted, frame by frame (how long would that have taken? What painstaking work.)

Here is the hand-tinted version with music by the band Air:



I like the Air soundtrack more than I thought I would, but I still wish the original had survived so we could hear it.

Here is a list of pop culture references to this film. The one I immediately recognized was the Smashing Pumpkings video "Tonight, Tonight."

The use of dissolves and animation is pretty advanced for 1902, so I'm excited to see what the rest of the early films on the 1001 movies list are like.

Interesting fact: the director (George Melies) planned on releasing it in America, but Thomas Edison beat him to the punch by having his assistants secretly make copies of it and release it. The film went on to be a huge hit and made a ton of money for Thomas Edison, but not for George Melies (at least in America). Melies went broke later in his life, despite having been an internationally successful filmmaker....sad. What a jerk Thomas Edison was!