Trip to Mars

This photo is priced above my Ebay pain threshold:

Although I did get a 15% discount offer:

source: https://www.ebay.com/itm/185914151164

The listing says circa 1920s but other internet pages fix it at 1911. By that date Percival Lowell had already fired the public imagination with his drawings of Mars and had published books about Mars per the wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_Lowell

And the War of the Worlds had been published just before the 20th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds

I'm not aware of any reason for a surge of interest in Mars during the 1920s - the Orson Welles Halloween telling of that tale on the radio was in 1938.

I find it a fascinating picture raising several questions. What was it like inside ? Was it just a movie or slide show ? Where are the customers aka rubes ?

Of course here is the semi-obligatory inflated price (it won't go below 1913):

I guess it depends on the show as to whether it was worth it or not.

I did find this movie, A Trip To Mars, from 1918:

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2blVjZvq0Vc

But I doubt that a foreign movie was shown in a US carnival. And it's kind of a long, stage-y not that great of a movie, a little heavy on the preaching. But the hero does kind of cop a feel at one point: