ok, so A Trip to the Moon was one (the first?).
Any other early movies you can add? Doesn’t have to be the first, or close to it… just the first of it’s kind?
Just a WAG, but I think Metropolis had the first android.
I’ve heard that Aelita Queen of Mars is likely the first SF feature film (A Trip to the Moon was only a quarter of an hour long, I read). It was certainly the first Soviet science fiction film…
It becomes a problem of definition. Geoge Melies did L’Homme à la tête en caoutchouc in 1901 – the year before A trip to the Moon. It had a science fiction theme. Some of his earlier films had fantasy elements.
The first science fiction musical, though, was Just Imagine.
The first android (depending on your definition) was probably Edison’s version of Frankenstein in 1910.
Ok, what would you consider being the LAST “the FIRST” in Sci Fi?
meaning, when was the last time we a a first for Sci Fi. I would figure Sci Fi genre would be the last to run out of ideas. Most Jokes have already been told in some variation or another. Love has long been portrayed and used in story telling. War… you know, we’ve been there. Sci Fi can go on with are Sci discoveries like OXI CLEAN, the stain specialist.
Here’s a quick walk through the first chapter of John Brosnan’s Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction.
Melies also did Le Voyage A Travers L’Impossible (An Impossible Voyage) [sorry for the lack of accent marks] “in which a high-speed train takes off from the summit of a mountain, travels through space and fall into the sea before returning to dry land.” In 1907 he did a version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
The first English sf film seems to be The Airship Destroyer, "a mystery attack on London by a fleet of airships"made by the American Charles Urban in 1909. There were two sequels, The Erial Anarchists and The Pirates of 1920, both made in 1911.
Editson’s 15-minute 1910 version of Frankenstein has already been mentioned.
1913 sawA Bolt from the Sky an American one-reeler "about a scientist who is killed by a meteorite, and one of the few films in which a scientist is victim rather than instigator of catatrophic events.
Germany got into the game in 1915 with Homunculus, a six-part serial. Alraune. German, 1918, is the first film about artificial insemination.
The American version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1916 was the first one to use real underwater scenes – with a real sub since model shots were considered cheating.
Willis O’Brien’s first movie was The Dinosaur and the Missing Link whose five minutes of stop-motion animation took two months to film.
Brosnan doesn’t say whether 1924’s Aelita was the first full-length sf movie or not. There may have been an earlier one – Bosnan often doesn’t give lengths and I’, skipping a lot here – but if not, then Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1925 definitely is.
Unless it isn’t.
[I swear the preview button used to be on the left.]
Anyway, to continue, with some help from John Baxter’s Science Fiction in the Cinema.
1925’s The Lost World preceeded Metropolis, whose release Baxter has in 1927.
And the German The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was way back in 1919, but even that was after 1916’s Der Golem.
And release dates vary from book to book, making precedence difficult to determine. Not to mention the problem of defining what is a science fiction film to begin with.
Oh yes, the sequel to The Airship Destroyer was The Aerial Anarchists.
Sorry for the earlier post.