We’ve heard stories of how some folks involved witH the original Star Wars were convinced it would flop as soon as it hit theaters. We even read about how George Lucas was willing to hedge his bets by trading out some of the film’s profits. But there were those who saw something special in the production.

Peter S. Myers was the vice-president of domestic distribution for 20th Century Fox in 1976. In November of that year, he heard reports from people involved with the movie Star Wars and those who had seen rough footage of the film in progress. Myers then sent a four-page telegram to his underlings, outlining an unprecedented distribution plan for the movie.

I AM SAYING THE PICTURE SHOULD GET BETTER TREATMENT THAN GODFATHER, KING KONG, JAWS, POSEIDON, OR TOWERING INFERNO.

You can read all four pages of the telegram at Vulture. -via Uproxx

(Image credit: 20th Century Fox)

We are about two weeks away from the premiere of the seventh episode in the Star Wars saga, The Force Awakens. How long has it been since you’ve seen the six movies leading up to this point? Years? To prepare for The Force Awakens, you could sit down and watch all 13 hours 17 minutes we have so far (plus five more minutes if you’re watching the special editions). Or you could watch this.

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Master remixer Eclectic Method edited the most essential clips of all six films into three minutes to tell the story up to this point. It’s very quick. I wouldn’t recommend this as a substitute for watching the full movies, in case you haven't seen them all. For one thing, there’s no Han Solo. Is he really that superfluous to the story? But on the up side, there’s no Jar Jar, either. There are no Ewoks, no Chewbacca, no Wampa, no Cantina band, no hints of incest, and no wretched hive of scum and villainy. But it will remind you of what happened, in a hurry. -via Tastefully Offensive    

Kyle Shearrer didn’t just put his Christmas tree up. He and his father pulled out the Stormtroopers and gave them the job! In a series of 27 pictures, they unpacked and assembled the tree almost completely before Darth Vader arrived to inspect the work.

But like most projects, the real work was done by a small contingent, while the others goofed off under the pretense that they were “guarding” the work site. Keep your eye on the background, as one particularly dense Stormtrooper experiments with a fork in the electric outlet, while another gets in trouble for sleeping on the job. The background provides several subplots for the main tree chore. What they left at the top for the crowning ornament is a surprise you’ll have to check out for yourself.

You can click through larger pictures slideshow fashion at Facebook starting here. Shearrer said they tried to put a subtle joke into each image. -via reddit

Hanukkah is still a week away, but it’s never to early to cook! Or at least get your recipe for latkes.

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The Maccabeats have unveiled their annual holiday parody song for the occasion. This year, it’s set to the tune of “Shut Up and Dance” by Walk the Moon. The lyrics are at the YouTube page. This is from their new album A Maccabeats Hanukkah. -via Viral Viral Videos

A snowman in a store window is not all that uncommon at Christmas time. This one is firmly in the 21st century, with a smartphone and a text conversation. He’s obviously conversing with another snowman. I like the way the glass itself is used as a medium for captions. The scene has nothing to do with the clothing being sold in the store behind him, but this would get me to stop and look, and that’s what counts. -via reddit

Queen’s song “Bohemian Rhapsody” was a hit in 1975, and then was introduced to a whole new generation in 1992 when it was included in the movies Wayne’s World. I was quite surprised to hear the song in such a Gen-X movie. How did that happen? Rolling Stone assembled some of the people behind Wayne’s World to explain how the scene was conceived.   

Mike Myers (writer, "Wayne Campbell"): I grew up in Scarborough, Ontario of British parents. I'd gone to England in '75 with my family and heard "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the radio. We were obsessed with it. Me and my brother, our friends' car was a powder blue Dodge Dart Swinger that had a vomit stain on the side of it that someone chiseled in the shape of Elvis Presley. We'd drive down the Don Valley Parkway, listening to Bohemian Rhapsody. We would time it to enter the Toronto city limits when the rocking part would kick in. I was "Galileo!" three of five. If I took somebody else's "Galileo!" or somebody took mine, a fight would ensue. It's just something that I always back-pocketed. Wayne's World was my childhood. I knew only to write what I knew.

Penelope Spheeris (director): All of us, it was our first studio movie.

Myers: I wanted it to sort of reflect a kind of spirit, a time in your life before you had to do adult things and pay taxes and all that stuff. If the TV show was restricted to the basement, I wanted "Wayne's World" the movie to be as cinematic and in the world as possible. I thought "Bohemian Rhapsody" would be a great way to introduce everybody.

Spheeris: I thought it was an odd choice because if you are headbangers that wouldn't be your first choice to slam to in the car when you're cruising.

The guys who played Garth, Phil, and Terry all joined in to give their recollections of the BoRhap scene, as you can read at Rolling Stone. Oh yeah, Brian May is in there, too. (Link contains autoplay video) -via Digg

The poor tortoise got himself high-centered on a rock. What can he do? He can’t get enough leverage on any side to walk himself off.

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But a larger, and probably older and wiser, tortoise comes to save the day. Tortoises look out for their friends, after all. And a wise tortoise knows he might need to call in that favor someday. -via Tastefully Offensive

It’s that time of year, when video artists, list makers, and bloggers look back over the previous year to bring us the highlights and lowlights. Here is the first of what will be many film tributes to 2015.

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Benjamin Zuk edited together clips from 164 films for an overview of the year in movies. They aren’t ranked or critiqued in any way, but the one-second clips are arranged artfully in an order that makes the video flow nicely. -via the A.V. Club

Will lightning strike twice for PSY? His new album 7 Things You Need to Know is out today. Two videos have been released from the album, and they both have some elements that made “Gangnam Style" so popular. A catchy tune, an overly complicated video, and a goofy dance. First, there's “Daddy,” which is mostly in English. The video is pretty funny, with PSY appearing at all different ages from childhood to old age.

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The other song released today is "Napal Baji," which resembles "Gangnam Style" in some aspects, especially the goofy dance.

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As of now, “Daddy” has twice the views of “Napal Baji” on YouTube. Even if either one achieves only a fraction of the success of "Gangnam Style," that's pretty good.

Olivier Bernard is a pharmacist in Quebec with a popular blog, Le Pharmachien. That’s where he posts comics that take complicated medical subjects and breaks them down into everyday language. Usually, that everyday language is French. This explanation of cancer treatments is available in both French and English. First, there’s the analogy that compare cancer to dandelions in your yard. If that’s not clear enough, the analogy is explained in more cute comics. Then he goes into the details not covered earlier.

My initial idea was to write a cartoon entitled “5 toxic beliefs about chemotherapy”. The goal was to take 5 myths about chemo and deconstruct them. In doing this, I wanted to challenge the false notions about chemotherapy that are perpetuated over the internet.

However, along the way something became obvious: it’s absolutely pointless to attack false beliefs on chemo… when the majority of people do not know what cancer really is.

Then, by pure chance, two oncologists appeared out of nowhere and proposed to help me make a comic on cancer! It’s great how things work out.

The result is a lesson that starts out simple, and then gets more in-depth. If you were sharing this with children, you’d find an appropriate place to stop depending on their understanding. For adults, the more you read, the more clear cancer treatment gets. Read the entire comic in English or in French. That’s where I found out that the French word for dandelions is pissenlits.  -Thanks, Yan!  

The Third Amendment to the US Constitution gets less respect than the other amendments in the Bill of Rights. It has been used in Supreme Court cases fewer times than the rest, and on the surface, seems hopelessly antiquated. It says, "No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." Now, that was a problem when we were a colony in the British Empire, but no one regards it as a possibility now. Or do they? California assemblyman Mike Gatto believes the amendment could be used to prohibit the National Security Agency (NSA) from spying on American citizens.

    Let's examine whether a case may be made. The National Security Agency is part of the Department of Defense and therefore of our nation's military. By law, the NSA director must be a commissioned military officer, and per its mission statement, the NSA gathers information for military purposes. That's strong evidence that NSA personnel would qualify as soldiers under the 3rd Amendment.

    And why did the framers prohibit the government lodging soldiers in private homes? Besides a general distaste for standing armies, quartering was costly for homeowners; it was also an annoyance that completely extinguished a family's sense of privacy and made them feel violated. Sound familiar?

It’s been said many times that the US Constitution guarantees no right to privacy, but a broad interpretation of the Third Amendment might actually include some expectation of privacy. Ars Technica lays out some of the pros and cons of this argument.

(Image credit: Flickr user Jane Dickson)

What if Marvel made a romantic comedy? It could star the cast of The Avengers, since there are plenty of them! And more importantly, there are plenty of Avengers movies to take clips from in order to assemble such a movie.

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The most important question is: Will Thor be there? This is the latest from the Vulture Remix series.  -via Tastefully Offensive

D. Vader has a 365 project on the photo site tookapic, where he adds a selfie every day. It began on October 19th, so there will be plenty more to come before the 365 days are up. His profile reads:

Sith Lord. Born and raised on Tatooine. Loves to fly his TIE fighter. Took up photography lately. Releases the shutter using the Force. The dark one.

From the photos posted so far, we can tell that Darth loves coffee, reading, and gourmet cooking, although he does indulge in pizza occasionally. See all the photos at Vader’s tookapic account. -via Metafilter

In 1996, the news was full of how the NBA was considering drafting some hotshot kid right out of high school. A 17-year-old! Would the pros chew up and spit him out? Would he crash and burn from his immaturity? He did not. That was Lower Merion Ace Kobe Bryant, who yesterday announced his retirement after this season, his 20th with the Los Angeles Lakers.  

But back in 1996, his teammates and coaches at Lower Merion High in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, were focused on winning the state championship. At the same time, the rest of the sports world was focused on that one kid that stood out.
 

Gregg Downer [Head coach] When your best player is your hardest working player, first in the gym, last out of the gym, first in every drill, first in every weight room activity, that makes it easier. But it did put a lot of pressure on me. I used to say, “We’re one Kobe Bryant sprained ankle away from being an average team.” Anything less than a state championship would have been viewed as a disappointment.

Jeanna Mastriano [English Teacher] During his senior year he flew all over and missed days at a time. When he returned, he always showed up with assignments that were due.

Drew Downer [Assistant coach] I used to give him FedEx packages from Duke or Kentucky. Half the time I don’t know if he ever opened it. I’d be like, “Dude, that’s from Duke!” But it was probably like the 17th package he’d gotten from Coach K.

Robby Schwartz [teammate] If you think about the times, 1995-96, it was like the first reality show. By the end, if there wasn’t a camera crew at practice that was the weird thing.

Lower Merion won the state championship that year for the first time in 53 years, and they’ve won twice since then. Mashable has an oral history of Kobe Bryant’s high school basketball career with recollections from those who were there. You don’t have to be a basketball fan to find it riveting.  -via Digg

They’ve been talking about it for months, and it looks like Amazon is serious about its drone delivery system called Prime Air. Jeremy Clarkson explains how it will work.

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I suppose you’ll have to  live within 15 miles of an Amazon warehouse to take advantage of drone delivery. That’s a pretty small customer base, but I guess you have to start somewhere. When will it happen? When all regulatory agencies are satisfied with the plan. So, we have no idea. -via Viral Viral Videos