Destination Moon (1950)

Where the decade's boom took off, and a rare one that takes the engineering seriously. Robert A. Heinlein worked on the script, Chesley Bonestell's matte paintings supply the lunar landscapes, and a Woody Woodpecker cartoon pops up to explain rocketry to the backers. It won the Oscar for its special effects. Expect sober procedure rather than monsters. Watch it as a time capsule of how 1950 imagined a Moon trip, nineteen years before the real one.