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50 free Georges Méliès trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Georges Méliès trivia quiz covers the stage magician who turned the cinematograph into a machine for dreams. The easy questions ask what he did before films, which 1902 film fired a shell into the Moon's eye, what invention he tried to buy from the Lumières, where he sold toys in old age and which Scorsese film brought him back to modern audiences. Then it works through the career: the Egyptian Hall in London, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, the Animatograph rebuilt as a camera, the jammed film that produced the substitution splice, the glass studio at Montreuil and the 500-plus films that followed. The hard end is for people who know their féeries from their actualités: the Kinétographe 'coffee grinder', the One-Man Band's seven selves, the Dreyfus Affair riots, the pre-shot coronation of Edward VII, the pirated prints that sent Gaston to New York, Edison's Patents Company, the Star Film Ranch in Texas, the ruinous Pathé contract, the army melting his negatives, the Salle Pleyel gala, Louis Lumière pinning on the Légion d'honneur, and the first key to the Cinémathèque française. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on Georges Méliès, A Trip to the Moon and Hugo before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our silent film, film history and special effects quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Before he made films, what was Georges Méliès's profession?
Stage magician
He caught the bug at London's Egyptian Hall and went on to buy the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris.
Q 02In what year did Méliès make A Trip to the Moon?
1902
It was the peak of a career that had begun with the first screenings at his theatre in April 1896.
Q 03Méliès's family had grown wealthy from what business?
Boot-making
His father ran a high-quality boot factory on the Boulevard Saint-Martin, and Georges learned to sew there.
Q 04In which London venue did the young Méliès develop his lifelong passion for magic while working as a clerk?
The Egyptian Hall
It was run by the illusionist John Nevil Maskelyne.
Q 05Which Paris theatre, founded by a famous magician, did Méliès buy and run?
Théâtre Robert-Houdin
With it came chief mechanic Eugène Calmels and the performer Jehanne d'Alcy, later his second wife.
Q 06One of Méliès's best-known stage illusions featured a professor's head that kept talking after being cut off. What was it called?
The Recalcitrant Decapitated Man
He created more than 30 new illusions in nine years at the theatre.
Q 07How much did Méliès offer the Lumière brothers for one of their cinematographs after their private demonstration in December 1895?
10,000 francs
They refused him, the Musée Grévin's 20,000 and the Folies Bergère's 50,000 the same night.
Q 08Rebuffed by the Lumières, Méliès bought a projector in London from which inventor?
Robert W. Paul
He then modified the Animatograph to work as a camera, developing his own films by trial and error.
Q 09Méliès nicknamed his patented 1896 cast-iron camera-projector his 'coffee grinder' and what else?
Machine gun
Both names referred to the racket the cast-iron device made; he dropped it for Gaumont, Lumière and Pathé cameras by 1897.
Q 10Roughly how many films did Méliès direct between 1896 and 1913?
Over 500
They ranged from one minute to forty, and 78 came in 1896 alone.
Q 11According to his memoirs, Méliès discovered the substitution 'stop trick' by accident when what happened?
His camera jammed mid-take
A bus turned into a hearse and women into men when the film resumed; Edison had used the effect earlier in a Mary Stuart execution.
Q 12In which town just outside Paris did Méliès build his glass-walled film studio in 1896?
Montreuil
Its stage had the same dimensions as the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, and everything was painted in shades of grey for the film.
Q 13Why were the sets, costumes and even the actors' makeup at Méliès's studio done in shades of grey?
Q 21How was the deep-ocean splashdown at the end of A Trip to the Moon achieved?
A superimposed fish tank
The capsule is then towed ashore and the astronomers are fêted by the townsfolk.
Q 22Who played Phoebe, the goddess on the crescent moon, in A Trip to the Moon?
Bleuette Bernon
Méliès had discovered her singing at the cabaret L'Enfer, and she was his 1899 Cinderella.
Q 23The apparent tracking shot toward the Man in the Moon reused a trick from which 1901 Méliès film?
The Man with the Rubber Head
Instead of moving the heavy camera, the actor sat on a pulley-drawn chair on a ramp and rolled toward the lens.
Colours photographed unpredictably in black and white
Selected prints were then hand-coloured frame by frame by the Thuillier workshop.
Q 14Who acted as Méliès's primary camera operator when he founded his production house at the end of 1896?
Lucien Korsten
Korsten had co-patented the Kinétographe with him; Reulos was the business partner in Star Film.
Q 15In The One-Man Band (1900), Méliès used multiple exposure to play how many characters at once?
7
He said such shots demanded remembering exactly where he stood at each moment of every previous pass.
Q 16Méliès's 1899 film about which political scandal caused fights at screenings and a police ban on its final part?
The Dreyfus Affair
He was pro-Dreyfus and showed the captain as falsely accused and unjustly imprisoned on Devil's Island.
Q 17Méliès's 1899 Cinderella, six minutes long with a cast of over 35, was his first film to feature what?
Multiple scenes, or tableaux
Its US success prompted Edison and others to make illegal duplicate negatives.
Q 18Which novelist's books were the loose basis for A Trip to the Moon, along with H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon?
Jules Verne
From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel Around the Moon supplied the cannon-launched capsule.
Q 19What character does Méliès himself play in A Trip to the Moon?
Professor Barbenfouillis
He is president of the Astronomers' Club; Mabouloff was his role in The Impossible Voyage two years later.
Q 20Who played the Moon aliens, the Selenites, in A Trip to the Moon?
Acrobats from the Folies Bergère
They were named after Selene and exploded when struck.
Q 24An original hand-coloured print of A Trip to the Moon was rediscovered in what year, before its 2011 restoration?
1993
The film itself had been forgotten until Méliès's rediscovery around 1930.
Q 25Widespread US piracy of A Trip to the Moon led Méliès to open a New York office run by whom?
His brother Gaston
Its charter warned pirates: 'We will not speak twice, we will act!'
Q 26Méliès's 1902 film of the coronation of Edward VII was unusual because it was made when?
Before the actual event
He was denied access, so he re-enacted it in Montreuil; the postponement let him splice in real footage of the procession.
Q 27In The Impossible Voyage (1904), Méliès's explorers accidentally travel to which celestial body?
The Sun
It has a face like the Man in the Moon and swallows their vehicle whole; a submarine brings them home.
Q 28Which 1903 film did critic Jean Mitry call 'undoubtedly Méliès's best film, and in any case the most intensely poetic'?
The Kingdom of the Fairies
Prints survive at the British Film Institute and the Library of Congress.
Q 29Thomas Edison's 1908 cartel, which Star Film joined and had to supply with 1,000 feet of film a week, was called what?
Motion Picture Patents Company
Méliès made 58 films that year to meet the quota, including the pessimistic Humanity Through the Ages.
Q 30Gaston Méliès's Star Film Ranch, opened in 1910 to make Westerns, was in which city?
San Antonio, Texas
He produced over 130 films from 1910 to 1912 before losing $50,000 filming in the South Pacific.