An early setback had come when Melies planned to release A Trip To The Moon in America, only to find that Thomas Edison’s representative Al Adabie had secretly copied a print of the film after bribing staff at a London cinema and had already released it in the US without permission – an early and particularly devastating case of film piracy.
Amazingly, a colour print of A Trip To The Moon was unearthed in a French barn in 2002 in which each frame had been meticulously hand-painted by a large female work force a century earlier.
Specialising in horror and steam punk science fiction, taking inspiration from the fiction of late Victorian visionaries Jules Verne and HG Wells, his most famous film remains A Trip To The Moon, which starred acrobats and dancers from the Folies Bergere and the Chatelet ballet.
French filmmaker Georges Melies (1861-1938) is the subject of today’s Google Doodle, the first ever presented as a 360 degree VR animation.