When the Moon Hits Your Eye Trivia Quiz

The subtitle of Verne's 1865 novel was "A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes", or just over four days. This is about one day more than the actual journey undertaken by the Apollo astronauts just over a century later. That's not a bad prediction!

The means of reaching the moon was quite different, however, with the novel being about the building of a giant space gun with which the Baltimore Gun Club hoped to launch three people towards the moon in the hope of landing there.

"A Trip to the Moon" (1902) was a short film with a thirteen minute running time, directed by French film pioneer Georges Méliès (1861-1938), who also starred. The film was loosely based on the Jules Verne novel "From the Earth to the Moon", already mentioned.

A mixture of live action and animation was utilised to good effect, especially when combined with hand colouring of certain elements. An enduring image, for me at least, is the smiling face of the Man in the Moon becoming sad and hurt, as the rocket pierces his eye.

Variously described as a cookie or a snack cake, the Moon Pie was first produced in Tennessee in 1917. It's a round confection, about 4 inches across, consisting of a marshmallow filling between two graham crackers, with a flavoured coating covering the whole thing. Most illustrations show a chocolate coating, but other flavours such as vanilla and strawberry exist.

"Melody Time" (1948) was a Disney movie made up of several sections, each set to music. Included were "The Legend of Johnny Appleseed", "Blame It on the Samba" and five others. The one in which we are interested is "Pecos Bill" which featured Roy Rogers, his horse Trigger and the Sons of the Pioneers.

It seems that Pecos Bill was raised by coyotes, before becoming a superior sort of cowboy until his bride to be was stranded on the moon by his jealous horse. (Remember this is a legend!) Poor Bill returned to his coyote family, who began to howl at the moon thereafter to help him mourn his loss.

Crooner Dean Martin recorded "That's Amore", the song that contains these lyrics, in 1953 and was rewarded with a hit single that peaked at Number Two on the "Billboard" charts that year, and that remained associated with him for the rest of his life.

The song also was Oscar-nominated, having appeared in the Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis comedy "The Caddy", but lost to "Secret Love" from "Calamity Jane".

Apollo 11, with a crew of three, left Earth on 16 July 1969, with the lunar excursion module Eagle landing on the moon in the Sea of Tranquility on 20 July 1969. Neil Armstrong was first to step on the surface of the moon, followed soon after by Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin.

The third crew member, Michael Collins, remained aboard Columbia (the command module) and was rejoined by the moon walkers for the journey home. If you were old enough at the time, you likely remember watching it all happening on TV, as I do.

In 1983 pop star Michael Jackson first performed a dance move that he called the Moonwalk whilst performing the song "Billie Jean" on a television special celebrating the music of Motown ("Motown 25: Yesterday, Today and Forever"). Although the move had existed since around the turn of the twentieth century under different names such as 'stepping on the puppy's tail' and 'backslide' (and others), it was Jackson's performances and the name he used that became popular around the world.

First aired in March 2009, "The Terminator Decoupling" was a season 2 episode of "The Big Bang Theory". Sheldon Cooper found that he needed his neighbour Penny's help, during the course of which she found a letter from his grandmother (Meemaw) addressing him as "Moonpie". Penny cajoled the explanation out of Sheldon, eventually, though not before he became extremely discombobulated. Oh, you want to know too? It's because he's "nummy-nummy" and she could "eat him all up"!

The Artemis Project is a NASA-led program designed to return humans to the moon for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972. The goal is to establish a base on the moon from which to venture farther into space; to Mars for example. Established in 2017, the project sent Artemis I, an un-crewed mission, into orbit around the moon in November 2022.

It returned to splashdown in the Pacific in December of that year.

"Fly Me to the Moon" (2024) was a rather fanciful tale of a fictional launch director (Tatum) working to get everything ready for the launch of the first manned moon mission in 1969. Scarlett Johansson portrayed a marketing expert employed to promote the event to the public, while Woody Harrelson's character was a rather shady government functionary determined to have some contingency plans in place in case anything went wrong.

History tells us that the launch was successful. (It was watching this film that gave me the idea for this quiz.)