A Classic '90s Music Video Homages One Of The First Sci-Fi Movies Ever

Science fiction is a genre made to be filmed. Oh sure, all people of taste love a good sci-fi book, but there's nothing like seeing fantastical worlds brought as close to reality as they can be on a silver screen.

If you look in a film textbook, generally, it will say that the first sci-fi film ever was "A Trip to the Moon," a 1902 short by French filmmaker Georges Méliès. The film follows a group of adventurers who take a trip to (where else?) the moon, with their rocket blasted off by a large cannon. (Hence the famous image of the moon, with a human face, having the rocket capsule lodged in one of its eyes.) On the moon, they encounter an alien civilization. The idea of the moon having life is completely discredited these days, even in science-fiction, but this was 1902 when humans walking on the moon seemed fantastical and not a fact of history. 

Now, there's some contention over whether "A Trip to the Moon" truly deserves this superlative as the very first sci-fi movie. Earlier shorts by Méliès and other 19th-century filmmakers like the Lumière brothers feature stories that could be called sci-fi. The enduring legacy of "A Trip to the Moon" as the beginning of sci-fi cinema is an example of how winners write history. Prints of "A Trip to the Moon" have endured, and the film is still often screened for film students, whereas those earlier shorts are forgotten if not completely lost. 

It's a well-earned legacy too, and not just because the film turns 123 this year. "A Trip to the Moon" helped prove that the utterly unrealistic could appear on film. What it dared to imagine was groundbreaking, too. Its depiction of an alien world preceded Edgar Rice Burroughs and "A Princess of Mars," the original space adventurer pulp novel, by a decade. 

References to "A Trip to the Moon" show up across film... and music videos, because it's the basis of the 1996 Smashing Pumpkins video for their song "Tonight, Tonight." Georges Méliès and '90s alt-rock music? It goes together better than you might think.

"Tonight, Tonight" is the second song on the Smashing Pumpkins' third album: 1995's double-sided, 28-track epic of ennui called "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness." After the wordless piano opener sharing the album's name sets the mood, "Tonight, Tonight" cements it. It's a song about choosing to accept others' belief in you and seizing the moment no matter what may have happened to you in the past... even if it means you must "crucify the insincere tonight."

(During a 2012 appearance on "The Howard Stern Show," Pumpkins' frontman Billy Corgan said he was trying to channel the "dark optimism" of the rock band Cheap Trick with "Tonight, Tonight.")

The album cover for "Mellon Collie" (drawn by John Craig and pictured above) is a painting of a woman, presumably Miss Collie herself, sitting in a star. According to a making-of video: Corgan sent directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris "notes and set references" for the video that had imagery of stars and moons, in line with the "Melon Collie" album cover. Dayton and Faris then noticed the album cover resembled a Méliès film. So, they and Corgan decided they would make the video in that style.

The video's narrative is more or less a condensed version of "A Trip to the Moon." A couple (future "Spongebob Squarepants" stars Tom Kenny and Jill Talley, a real-life husband and wife) board a zeppelin ride. Once the ship reaches the Moon, they jump off, landing by using umbrellas as parachutes. Surrounded by Moon men, they escape in a rocket and land in the Earth's ocean. Here's where the video detours from the film's plot: They sink underwater and encounter a world as out-there as the Moon, from Greek sea god Poseidon to mermaids. The couple floats up to the surface and are rescued by a boat (the SS Méliès). The last image is the ship sailing off as the clouds open to reveal the Moon in the sky, bearing an almost identical face as in "A Trip to the Moon."

Interspersed with the couple's story are images of the band's four members at the time (Corgan, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, guitarist James Iha, and bassist D'arcy Wretzky who left in 1999) standing on clouds. They look semi-transparent and there's a good reason for that: each one was shot separately and then the footage was layered to create the illusion of them standing together in a group shot. "Each shot is about 20-30 layers of different pieces" according to Dayton in the aforementioned making-of video.

Like Méliès, the crew assembled elaborate sets out of a theater production, with painted-on depth and shadows. Though shot in color and definitely not silent, the "Tonight, Tonight" video is designed to evoke the era when "A Trip to the Moon" was made. The costuming is turn of the century (note Tom Kenny's bowler hat), the actors in the video use exaggerated physical emoting that resembles silent film acting, and Kenny and Talley even wore white face paint to look like they stepped out of a monochrome 1900s picture.

The "Tonight, Tonight" video was acclaimed, and it got six of the 1996 MTV Music Awards, including Video of the Year, Best Direction in a Video, and Best Art Direction in a Video. To this day, it's still one of Pumpkins' best-remembered songs and videos. It's got a more illustrious legacy than, say, the band's "Batman & Robin" theme song, "The End Is the Beginning Is the End." We haven't gotten "Tonight, Tonight" on the "Yellowjackets" soundtrack yet, the current barometer of '90s music nostalgia. But the show has featured other Pumpkins' songs like "Today" and "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" so I'd say odds are decent.

It's not uncommon for music videos to pull from movies. Paramore's 2009 single "Brick by Boring Brick" rocked a "Pan's Labyrinth" inspired video because it's a song all about growing out of fantasies. Ahead of "Final Destination 5," star Miles Fisher (who is also a musician) had his castmates star in a video for his song "New Romance." The music video merged "Final Destination" with "Saved by the Bell." Almost 30 years later, the "Tonight, Tonight" video and the technical proficiency of its Méliès homage holds up as one of the strongest movie-inspired music videos.