Photos | Not Quite NASA: A retro view of Mars
Strap into your rocket and take a trip into the past, with early films that imagined life on another planet before our space missions took off in the 1960s.
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A Trip to Mars (1918): When it was released, this Danish film was called Himmelskibet, and was probably among the earliest space adventure films.
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Described as a photo play in six parts, it follows researchers who travel to Mars and find a utopian civilisation of pacifist vegetarians.
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Aelita (1924): Check out those costumes! The silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars was released in 1924 and was based on Alexei Tolstoy's sci-fi novel which had come out the previous year.
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Both tell the story of an engineer who heads to Mars in a rocket ship, where he finds a race of people who are led by a tyrannical group of elders. Russia had overthrown the Tsars less than a decade ago. The film, unsurprisingly, shows the engineer leading a popular uprising to create a better, classless society, with the support of the Martian queen, Aelita.
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