Where does cinema's famous rocket in the Moon's eye come from?

From Georges Méliès's 1902 film A Trip to the Moon, and the shot itself is a remix. In the film, astronomers are fired from a giant cannon in a bullet-shaped capsule that hits the Man in the Moon in the eye, a moment that remains one of the most iconic and frequently referenced images in cinema history. Méliès said in 1930 that Jules Verne's novels From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon inspired him, and the first half of the film, up to the launch, does follow Verne.

Historians see more sources. H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon came out in French a few months before the film was made, and the historian Georges Sadoul argued that the astronomers' adventures on and inside the Moon come from Wells. Other scholars point to Jacques Offenbach's opera-féerie Le voyage dans la lune, itself an unauthorised parody of Verne, and to a 'Trip to the Moon' ride at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo: one hypothesis is that Méliès took the film's structure from the ride and many gags and its parodic tone from the opera.

It was his most ambitious work so far: his longest film yet, using every trick he had learned or invented, with a lavish budget of 10,000 francs and three months of filming. In the United States it was a hit, and, to Méliès's chagrin, widely pirated by Edison, Lubin, Selig and others, which gave it wide distribution. The film later fell into obscurity after Méliès retired, was rediscovered around 1930, and an original hand-coloured print found in 1993 was restored in 2011. The Village Voice ranked it 84th among the 100 greatest films of the 20th century.