Three floors devoted to, well, to moving images. Or, as they sum it up "educating the public about the art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media." The museum is one of the buildings in the 15-acre studio complex in Astoria, Queens built during the 1920s as a production facility. Hundreds of films and TV shows were made in the studio itself, and tours are available during the week.

The $8.50 price of admission includes all the exhibits and demonstrations as well as admission to screenings of old movie serials and full-length feature films. There is one exception to the "free movie" policy and that's when they offer the film as part of a lecture. The extra charge is usually worth it – film stars and/or directors come to discuss the movie.

Silent Pictures Start to Talk

If old equipment is your thing, you'll love their collection of projectors, television sets, cameras and more. The exhibits come with lively and complete explanations of the history and process of creating movies both silent and with that grand new invention … sound! Even the stairwell has artifacts to amuse and amaze, including an old projector as large as a walk-in closet. But you couldn't really set it up in that space; the projector generated so much heat that it needed its own venting system.

An Alphabet From Animation to Zoetrope

There are also demonstrations on computer animation, film editing, and computer generated imagery as well as one on kinetoscopes (a coin-operated movie viewer in a box showing an early film for a single person). There are films and exhibits on how special effects are created, like the amazing running herds of dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. Exhibits explain how live events (such as baseball games) are edited on the fly, switching from camera to camera. There are also several do-it-yourself stations to edit in sound effects, dub dialogue, and more.

We confess to being delighted with the interactive system that allowed us to create our own mini-animations using props provided by the museum staff. As we worked making the head of a monkey lift up to smell flowers we could look up and see old cartoons. Betty Boop was playing when we visited and she was as funny and charming as ever, this time as Cinderella. Not enough? What about the history of animation and even making your own flip book? A video camera allows you to create a series of images, and even to play director with the camera. The images are turned into a flip book available in the gift show for $2.00. Being somewhat camera shy, we elected to do a flying bird shadow puppet.

Computer and Video Games

Yes, play as much Pac-man as you wish. Reminisce about Pong. Then, move on to the games and programs of today and experience the dislocation of shifting from old text-based role-playing games (Text-based? Yep, not a graphic in sight) that was once state of the art, to the current graphic-rich, technologically sophisticated games and simulations.

Old Movie Serials and Current Films

And still there was more. We watched an episode of the movie serial Zorro in a screening room done up in an early Egyptian theme. In fact, there was so much to see and do we never quite made it to the theater for one of the three movies that were being screened that day. But, we plan to come back. Perhaps we'll make a new flip book while we're there too.