By Matt Brunson

Back in 2008, Flicker Alley released Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema, a five-disc set which contained an astounding 173 of the shorts the innovative film pioneer created from 1896 through 1913. Since then, the DVD outfit has stumbled across another handful of Méliès miracles, and it has seen fit to release Georges Méliès: Encore – New Discoveries (1896-1911), a slender volume that can either serve as a supplement to the box set or function as a stand-alone collection.

For the uninitiated, as I wrote in my review of the box set, “The story goes that Georges Méliès, a magician who saw the potential of the new medium of cinema when it debuted at the end of the 19th century, was out filming a bus when his camera jammed. He got it working again just as a hearse was driving by; thus, when he later watched the footage, he was stunned to see the bus magically turn into a hearse. With this simple accident, Méliès discovered that movies could do more than simply record everyday occurrences – they could also tell fantastic stories through trailblazing techniques such as special effects, fade-outs, double exposure and fast motion.”

Georges Méliès: Encore contains 26 more films from the prolific mastermind. The Haunted Castle (1896) is classic Méliès, a phantasmagorical yarn featuring all manner of ghosts, goblins, witches and more. Some of the other collection highlights are presented in color, including the gems An Hallucinated Alchemist (1897), The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship (1907) and The Spider and the Butterfly (1909). And while Méliès is best known for his fantasy flicks, this set shows that he was skilled at tackling all types of genres, including literary adaptations (a snippet from 1902’s Robinson Crusoe) and slapstick comedy (1907’s How Bridget’s Lover Escaped).

There are no extras on the DVD, although the set contains two films made by Segundo de Chomon but for the longest time wrongly credited to Méliès (one of the shorts, 1908’s Excursion to the Moon, is clearly patterned after Méliès’ most famous work, 1902’s A Trip to the Moon).