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Amphibians in Movies
 
A Trip to the Moon ("Le voyage dans la lune")  (1902)
 
Spoiler Alert !

Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
 
Trip to the Moon Trip to the Moon Trip to the Moon
This is one of the most well-known early silent short films, made by the pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès. His films are full of stop motion, multiple exposures, trick shots, crazy superimpositions, animated miniatures moving props, and wacky humor. In this early short film by the pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès,

It features a group of astronomers who are launched in a bullet-shaped space ship that is shot from a cannon to the moon, where they encounter aliens. To return home, they push the ship off the edge of the moon. When the ship falls to earth, it lands in the ocean. In the ocean we see several adult newts swimming in the water.

It was filmed with the newts in a transparent glass aquarium placed between the camera and the background subjects. Some kind of bullet-shaped object representing the space ship was dropped into the water where it bubbles up and tosses the newts around in the water.

This is the earliest use of salamanders in a movie that I have discovered.