Voyage à travers l'impossible
By Jules Verne and Adolphe D'ennery
Whirling the Worlds
This entry is a little different.
It's hard to determine whether there actually is any connection between the movie by the same name (alternately titled Whirling the Worlds, Voyage Across the Impossible and Impossible Voyage) and this Jules Verne play at all.
The play is a pastiche of multiple Verne novels and includes his more well-known characters such as Impy Barbicane, Dr. Ox, Captain Hatteras' son, and so on. The final act describes how this group journeys into outer space.
Thomas Renzi in his useful book "Jules Verne on Film" speculates on the connection between play and film. In turn, he comments that the film seems to "contain fragments from several Verne novels".
Possibly the two share a common name coincidentally. Or perhaps somehow one loosely inspired the other. Events in the play occur in different order than the film. But there are some passages that * could * have triggered Melies' imagination such as "Instead of railway cars running on rails, projectiles will be attached together and launched into space".
Melies' film was released in English as "Whirling the Worlds". Maybe he was putting Verne's predictions into film reality. His "airship, automobile, submarine" concoction is linked together as a fanciful space train. A quote from the Williamson Catalog entry used to distribute and promote the film: "...the train going at full speed passes the planets, stars, and other bodies of the celestial sphere, the latter all being passed at a tremendous pace, glittering as this unique train dashes by in its progress."
(As a little aside, put yourself back in 1905 and you realize that this film is a s-p-e-c-t-a-c-le and in color too.)
written: 10/25/2001
revised: 2/7/2003, 2/19/2004