This site is made possible by member support. ❤️
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Star Wars was a film that literally couldn’t be made; the technology required to bring the movie’s universe to visual life simply didn’t exist.
So George Lucas did what any enterprising young director who was destined to change the movie business would do. He invented a company to invent the technology. Wired’s Alex French and Howie Kahn take you inside the magic factory with the untold story of ILM.
Watch all the way to the end for some sounds that didn’t make it into the movies.
From an alternate universe in 1985, a Star Wars crossover with Star Trek that never happened in which Lord Vader has the Genesis Device.
Paging JJ Abrams. Mr. Abrams to the white courtesy phone please. (via @khoi)
When the first trailer for JJ Abrams’ new Star Wars movie came out, we all assumed the rolling ball droid was CGI (and perhaps based on this 2008 xkcd post). Then an actual working model of the droid, called BB-8, showed up on stage at Star Wars Celebration. Minds blew. Industrial design student Christian Poulsen figured out how to make his own version of BB-8 by hacking a Sphero:
Update: It looks like Sphero will be manufacturing an official BB-8 droid toy, which will likely be a massive success.
Update: Sphero is selling a smartphone-controlled BB-8 droid. This is the droid you’re looking for.
Authentic Movement: Guide your BB-8 with a smartphone or tablet
Listens & Responds: BB-8 recognizes and reacts to your voice
Holographic Messaging: Record and view virtual holographic videos with BB-8
Autonomous Behavior: BB-8 has a mind of its own - explore the Star Wars galaxy together
Adaptive Personality: Your BB-8’s unique attitude and actions evolve as you interact
It’s also available at Amazon, although they are currently out of stock.
In 1977, only a few months after the movie came out, a hour-long television special called The Making of Star Wars aired on ABC. It was the first documentary about Star Wars.
LOL to the rehearsal shot at 4:10 of Han going “bang, bang, bang, bang, bang” while shooting his blaster, the reaction of Luke, Han, and Leia to a boom mic blowing the 18th take of a scene at 34:20, and the description of Princess Leia as “royalty of a very liberated kind”. (via kung fu grippe)
Ok, this one gave me goosebumps. I hope this is good.
These crayon sculptures by Hoang Tran are amazing.
Select sculptures are available on Etsy. (via ignant)
Quick three minute video about how they made the Millennium Falcon hyperdrive malfunction noise for Star Wars.
Favorite detail: one of the sounds is from the clanking pipes in the studio’s bathroom. (via df)
SWAPI is a new web service will use a RESTful interface to return JSON about the “Planets, Spaceships, Vehicles, People, Films and Species” from all six of the Star Wars movies. This API would be really useful if Disney would have done as Matt Webb suggested and turned Star Wars into a genre rather than a franchise.
Imagine, imagine if Disney had said: Star Wars isn’t a franchise, it’s a genre.
The legendary galaxy, a long time ago, far far away, is well understood: What’s true is what’s in the Holocron continuity database.
Open the Holocron. Show everyone what’s in it. Let it become history.
Then let anyone make movies and books that share the Star Wars world. Not like all those other franchises that argue about what’s canon and what’s not… rise above it, become a new shared set of conventions, formulas, history and myth, just like the western but for the 21st century.
My friend David suggested something similar with Harry Potter a few years ago…open it up and let any director take a shot at making Potter movies. Open source franchises.
What if George Lucas was making the new Star Wars movie instead of JJ Abrams? This recut trailer offers a glimpse of the cheesy CG madness.
So so good.
Here it is, the very first look at JJ Abrams’ new Star Wars movie.
Not ashamed to say I felt chills down my spine when the music kicked in. Please please please let this not suck.
Update: From the teaser, it’s a little early to tell whether Abrams is following these four rules to make Star Wars great again (1. The setting is the frontier. 2. The future is old. 3. The Force is mysterious. 4. Star Wars isn’t cute.) but there are hints of 1&2 in there…they’re still driving those old rust-bucket X-Wings and wearing beat-up helmets.
In his recent book, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, Chris Taylor tells the story of how avant garde cinema fan George Lucas built one of the biggest movie franchises ever.
How did a few notes scribbled on a legal pad in 1973 by George Lucas, a man who hated writing, turn into a four billion dollar franchise that has quite literally transformed the way we think about entertainment, merchandizing, politics, and even religion? A cultural touchstone and cinematic classic, Star Wars has a cosmic appeal that no other movie franchise has been able to replicate. From Jedi-themed weddings and international storm-trooper legions, to impassioned debates over the digitization of the three Star Wars prequels, to the shockwaves that continue to reverberate from Disney’s purchase of the beloved franchise in 2012, the series hasn’t stopped inspiring and inciting viewers for almost forty years. Yet surprisingly little is known about its history, its impact — or where it’s headed next.
(via mr)
Rex Sorgatz wonders what sort of robots we’ll build, R2-D2s or C-3POs.
R2-D2 excels in areas where humans are deficient: deep computation, endurance in extreme conditions, and selfless consciousness. R2-D2 is a computer that compensates for human deficiencies — it shines where humans fail.
C3-PO is the personification of the selfish human — cloying, rules-bound, and despotic. (Don’t forget, C3-PO let Ewoks worship him!) C3-PO is a factotum for human vanity — it engenders the worst human characteristics.
I love the chart he did for the piece, characterizing 3PO’s D&D alignment as lawful evil and his politics as Randian.
In a local Chicago TV segment from 1980, here’s film critic Gene Siskel reviewing The Empire Strikes Back.
Interesting that he spends most of his time commenting on the special effects. At the time of this review, Siskel had been doing a show with Roger Ebert called Sneak Previews, but they seemed to have missed reviewing the original Star Wars or Empire on the show. Ebert reviewed Empire in 1997, giving it four stars and calling it “the best of the three Star Wars films”.
“The Empire Strikes Back” is the best of three Star Wars films, and the most thought-provoking. After the space opera cheerfulness of the original film, this one plunges into darkness and even despair, and surrenders more completely to the underlying mystery of the story. It is because of the emotions stirred in “Empire” that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. This is the heart.
The film was made in 1980 with full knowledge that “Star Wars” had become the most successful movie of all time. If corners were cut in the first film’s budget, no cost was spared in this one: It is a visual extravaganza from beginning to end, one of the most visionary and inventive of all films.
(via devour)
Amidala friendzones Anakin, Obi-Wan hunts for drugs, and Jango Fett pumps the bass in this hilarious Auralnauts reimagining of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.
You may have also seen their recent video of the Throne Room scene at the end of Star Wars without John Williams’ score (reminiscent of these musicless musicvideos) or Bane’s outtakes from The Dark Knight Rises. Still champion though: bad lip reading of NFL players. (via @aaroncoleman0)
A remastered copy of the original 1977 Han-shoots-first version of Star Wars is out there and you can watch it but it’s probably illegal. But Disney is never going to show it to you, so maybe it’s ok to find it on Bittorrent?
The Despecialized Edition is the years-long work of a diverse group of people who have taken elements from many different sources and created the ultimate version of the first Star Wars film. It has also been upgraded to display properly on high definition screens, with high-quality sounds and a near perfect image.
The latest Blu-Ray release of the film serves as the skeleton for this edition, but elements of the 2006 bonus DVD that included the unaltered version of the film was also used to remove special effects and edits that were added by Lucas.
Here’s a short feature on the video sources used:
And here’s how to get the full film.
Update: Here’s an extensive side-by-side look at how dozens of shots were modified to make The Despecialized Edition.
Physicist Andy Howell recently gave a talk about the science of Star Wars and wrote up a summary of it for Ain’t It Cool News. Topics covered include binary star systems, droids, the Death Star, and lightsabers:
Of course, we still don’t know how to make a lightsaber. One big problem is confining plasma (if that is even what it is), into some tube. But a bigger problem is the amount of energy required. We can actually calculate this from clues in the movies!
In Episode I, Qui-Gon jabs his lightsaber into a door, and melts part of it. That’s just basic physics! To melt something, you have to raise its temperature to the melting point, and you can calculate how much energy that takes using the specific heat capacity of a material.
(thx, greg)
Hi, everybody! Tim Carmody here, guest-hosting for Jason this week.
Not everybody gives their computers, smartphones, or wireless networks distinctive names. You’re more likely to see a thousand public networks named “Belkin” or some alphanumeric gibberish than one named after somebody’s favorite character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
But many, many people do name their machines — and ever since we slid into the post-PC era, we’re more likely to have a bunch of different machines of every different type living together on a network, each needing a name. So, how do you decide what to call them? Do you just pick what strikes your fancy at the moment, or do you have a system?
About three years ago, I asked my friends and followers on Twitter this question and got back some terrific responses. I don’t have access to all of their answers, because, well, time makes fools of us all, especially on Twitter. But I think I have the best responses.
Most people who wrote back did have unifying themes for their machines. And sweet Jesus, are those themes nerdy.
As for me, I’ve switched up name systems over the years, mostly as the kinds of devices on my network have changed. I used to just have a desktop PC (unnamed), so I started out by naming external hard drives after writers I liked: Zora, after Zora Neale Hurston, and then Dante. The first router I named, which I still have, is Ezra.
Years later, I named my laptop “Wallace”: this is partly for David Foster Wallace, but also so I could yell “where the fuck is Wallace?!?” whenever I couldn’t find it.
Without me even realizing it, that double meaning changed everything. My smartphone became “Poot.” When I got a tablet, it was “Bodie.” My Apple TV was “Wee-Bay,” my portable external drive “Stringer.” I even named my wi-fi network “D’Angelo” — so now D’Angelo runs on Ezra, which connects to Dante, if that makes sense.
As soon as it was Wallace and Poot, the rules were established: not just characters from The Wire, but members of the Barksdale crew from the first season of The Wire. No “Bunk,” no “Omar,” no “Cheese.” And when the machines died, their names died with them.
The first one to go, fittingly, was Wallace. I called the new machine “Cutty.” I was only able to justify to myself by saying that because he was a replacement machine, it was okay to kick over to Season 3. Likewise, my Fitbit became “Slim Charles.”
Now, for some reason, this naming scheme doesn’t apply at all to my Kindles. My first one was “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and its replacement is “Funes the Memorious.” I have no explanation for this, other than to say that while all my other devices commingle, the Kindles seem to live in a hermetic world of their own.
In the same vein as the Zinn/Chomsky Lord of the Rings commentary is A People’s History of Tattooine, a Twitter conversation that Jacob Harris kicks off thusly:
What if Mos Eisley wasn’t really that wretched and it was just Obi Wan being racist again?
Some other highlights:
“more civilized time?” Check your privilege, Obi Wan
the Tusken People. Raiders presumes some malevolent intent
all I’m saying is that I don’t blame the Tusken People for steering clear of the racist, violent and armed old man
like anybody forgets what Luke and his friends did to native womp rat populations at Beggars Canyon Park
In 1976, 20th Century Fox released a teaser trailer for a little film called Star Wars…aka “the story of a boy, a girl, and a universe”.
No James Earl Jones voiceover for Vader, no John Williams score (which wasn’t finished until just two months before the film premiered), but those visuals must have impressed.
Here’s the first teaser trailer for Empire Strikes Back, which features no film footage at all, just concept art drawn by Ralph McQuarrie:
And for the sake of completeness, the teaser trailer for Return of the Jedi, which appeared in theaters before Lucas changed the name from Revenge of the Jedi:
Rian Johnson, director of Brick and Looper (both of which I really enjoyed) and one of the best episodes of Breaking Bad, is rumored to be the director of the 8th and 9th episodes of Star Wars.
Johnson will take over the core film franchise, and he’ll get started quickly and this will be his preoccupation for quite awhile. Technically, he’ll write that second treatment but the intention on both sides is that he direct the two installments.
First Abrams and now this…Disney seems to be doing a much better job shepherding the Star Wars franchise than Lucas did. (via df)
Yesterday I posted a video looking at the influence of Akira Kurosawa on Star Wars. Well, Michael Heilemann has posted an amazing feature-length exploration of Star Wars and the films that influenced it.
It’s not Heilemann talking about anything…it’s a sort of meta-Star Wars comprised of dozens of elements from other films that influenced Lucas in making it. For instance, here’s the opening crawl from Forbidden Planet (1956):
Heilemann also includes a crawl from a 1936 Flash Gordan serial. For more, check out Kitbashed, particularly the extensive ebook on Star Wars sources.
This video looks at the influence of Akira Kurosawa and his films (especially The Hidden Fortress) on George Lucas and Star Wars.
How are Samurai films and a car crash responsible for Star Wars? How did World War II affect the global film industry in the 20th century? Why are Jedi called Jedi?? Give us 8 minutes, and we’ll explain it all…
(via devour)
So, this showed up on Vimeo last night and will likely be pulled soon (so hit that “download” button while you can), but here’s the deal. In 2012, actor Topher Grace showed an edit he’d done of episodes I-III of Star Wars to a bunch of friends, trimming the 7 hours of prequels down into 85 action-packed minutes of pure story. This Vimeo edit is longer (2:45) and is “based on the structure conceived by actor Topher Grace”, which you can read about here.
Grace’s version of the film(s) centers on Anakin’s training and friendship with Obi-Wan, and his relationship with Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman). Gone are Trade Federation blockades, the Gungan city, the whole Padmé handmaiden storyline, the explanation of midichlorians, the galactic senate and the boring politics, Anakin’s origins (a backstory which never really needed to be seen in the first place), the droid army’s attack on Naboo, and Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best) appears only briefly for only one line of dialogue, used as a set-up to introduce us to the Queen.
(via @bursts)
In an item on Ain’t It Cool News about the working title for Star Wars VII (The Ancient Fear!), a pair of comments list fourteen things about the Star Wars movies as bad as or worse than Jar Jar Binks:
1. Dance number added to Jedi
2. CGI Jabba added to A New Hope
3. Han/Greedo scene changed in A New Hope
4. Horrible acting in the prequels even by the good actors
5. Obi-Wan riding around on Yoshi in Revenge of the Sith
6. Anakin/Padme love story
7. Jake Lloyd
8. R2-D2 flying
9. Hayden’s ghost added to end of Jedi
10. Rick McCallum
11. Midichlorians
12. Virgin birth of Anakin
13. Vader as C-3POs maker and R2’s buddy
14. Han/Jabba scene added in ANH
Meesa agree with most of this list.
Denis Medri illustrates scenes from Star Wars as if Luke, Leia, Han, and the rest of the gang were teenagers in an 80s movie like Back to the Future, Karate Kid, or Breakfast Club.
Great Scott, the Force is strong in these two.
I can’t stop watching this…watch Imperial AT-AT’s attack Olympic mogul skiers on Hoth:
Those skiers are not going to make it past the first marker. (via devour)
Roland Deschane took a few paintings by cheeseball artist Thomas Kinkade and incorporated Star Wars characters into them.
(via @Coudal)
A blooper reel from the original Star Wars…looks like this hasn’t ever been seen before.
Nestled in the midst of Matt Zoller Seitz’s video essay on Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is this bombshell: the movie contains a Star Wars reference no one seems to have noticed. Seitz synced the scenes for us:
There have to be others, right? Many of Anderson’s films end with all of the characters gathered together like at the medals ceremony in Episode IV…someone even synced up the end of the movie with the closing credits music from Zissou and it works really well:
And of course, there’s Conan O’Brien’s take on what a Star Wars movie directed by Anderson might look like.
Stay Connected