While we often think of Star Wars as George Lucas’ baby, it took a whole lot of different people with money, power, and/or talent to get that first movie to the silver screen in 1977. Almost forty years on, many of their contributions have been forgotten, or or they never got the recognition they deserve. Some were well-known already, like Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma, and some are known mainly within their craft or area of expertise. Others are sort of in between, like film editor Marcia Lucas. 

George's wife from 1969 to 1983, Marcia Lucas' influence on American Graffiti and the Star Wars trilogy was profound. Although Marcia Lucas was nominated (along with Verna Fields) for an Oscar for her editing work on American Graffiti, Marcia wasn't originally working on Star Wars in the late 70s. While George labored on his space opera, Marcia worked with Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver. But as production on Star Wars wound on, Lucas realised that the editor he'd originally hired (John Jympson) wasn't cutting the film together with enough creative verve.

Jympson was duly replaced by three new editors, Paul Hirsch, Richard Chew, and Marcia Lucas. Together, they took Star Wars to pieces and put it back together in a way that conveyed the pace the story clearly required. One of the key sequences Marcia worked on was the final assault on the Death Star. Knowing that it was one of the pivotal moments in the movie, she took it apart and re-ordered the scenes to give it a greater flow and build-up.

Marcia and George's subsequent break-up has often left her overlooked, but her contribution to the Star Wars franchise shouldn't be underestimated. While she shared an Oscar with Hirsch and Chew for her editing work, Marcia's efforts went beyond the technical. For years, she was George's closest and most honest critic, telling him frankly which parts of his story worked and which ones didn't. When George struggled with what to do with Obi Wan Kenobi's character towards the end of Star Wars, it was Marcia who came up with the idea of killing him off. Conversely, Marcia encouraged George to keep some of Star Wars' more humane moments, too. Leia's "Kiss me for good luck" line to Luke was nearly edited out, until Marcia convinced him to leave it in.

Meet nine more of the people who brought us Star Wars, at Den of Geek.

Neil and Michael Fletcher, brothers from Sudbury, Ontario, found a bald eagle with one foot stuck in a hunting trap. They approached the skittish bird and draped a sweater over its head. The eagle eventually calmed down enough so that the brothers could open the trap and remove the bird.

"The eagle was actually holding on to [the trap] and we were having a hard time getting him to let go," [Neil Fletcher] said.

Once the eagle's foot was out of the trap, Neil suggested they take a selfie with it.

"I knew this would never happen again, so before we let it go, I told my brother Michael, 'we should take a picture with it.' The bird had its mouth open, but he never tried to fly or bite or do anything," he said.

"It made it pretty easy [for us to] take a picture with it."

After documenting the rescue, they released the eagle. Chris Blomme of the Sudbury Ornithological Society said it was a brave thing to do. The story at CBC News has videos of the rescue and the release. -via Fark

(Image credit: Neil and Michael Fletcher via Ann Fletcher/Facebook)

Diseases brought by Europeans wiped out 90% of the people living in the New World, which allowed conquest and colonization. That happens when long-isolated populations meet for the first time. Have you ever wondered why it didn’t go the other way? Why didn’t New World diseases wreak havoc on Europeans?

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CGP Grey explains how the differences between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres over the long history of civilization left us with plague, typhus, cholera, smallpox, and other diseases, but no “Americapox.” The transcript is at Grey’s website, and there’s a discussion at his subreddit. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The Charles Dickens story A Christmas Carol has been adapted in many different ways. In 1988, it was made into a comedy! The characters were brought into the modern world, and the plot centered around Bill Murray. However, his character’s name wasn’t Ebenezer Scrooge, but Frank Cross, a TV executive overseeing a live Christmas Eve presentation of A Christmas Carol. Despite all the changes, we still see a greedy, cynical man visited by three ghosts who lead him to understand the spirit of Christmas. There’s a lot of behind the scenes trivia you might not know about what went into making Scrooged.  

1. THE FILM MARKED BILL MURRAY’S RETURN TO THE BIG SCREEN.

Though it’s easy to remember the 1980s as a decade packed with Bill Murray comedies, Scrooged marked a reemergence of sorts of the in-demand comedian. Though he had a brief cameo in Frank Oz’s 1986 remake of Little Shop of Horrors (playing a pain-seeking patient of Orin Scrivello, Steve Martin’s demented dentist character), Scrooged was Murray’s first major role following a self-imposed, four-year exile from Hollywood.

6. THE MOVIE WAS AN SNL REUNION OF SORTS.

The script for Scrooged was written by Mitch Glazer and Michael O'Donoghue, whom Murray had worked with in the early days of Saturday Night Live.

7. EVEN PAUL SHAFFER WAS THERE.

Before he rose to fame as David Letterman’s musical director, Paul Shaffer was a member of the SNL house band from 1975 to 1980 and appeared in a number of sketches, most notably as the piano player to Murray’s Nick the Lounge Singer character. He makes a cameo in Scrooged as a street musician, where he plays alongside fellow musical legends Miles Davis, David Sanborn, and Larry Carlton.

That’s just a taste of the 22 Fun Facts About Scrooged you’ll find at mental_floss.     

Randall Munroe is a fan of the internet’s favorite astronaut, Colonel Chris Hadfield. Hadfield is a fan of Munroe’s webcomic xkcd. The astronaut and the former NASA physicist got a chance to meet and talk about their mutual interests: geography, exoplanets, technology, politics, communication, space, comics, and ideas. They started out by discussing the movie Gravity.

Randall Munroe I spent the whole of that movie trying to recognise the Earth’s terrain in the background of scenes. I’ve always been a geography enthusiast and I kept wanting to identify where they were in their orbit. I’m curious whether, when you looked out the window on the International Space Station, did you always know where you were from a glance? What’s the longest you have to go thinking, “Well, that looks like Jamaica…”?

Chris Hadfield North is never up, which is disorienting when you grew up with maps. You have to break that bias, and be able to recognise Madagascar upside down. If you ever see a coastline, you can immediately work out where you are. And you’re often in sight of some island; the Canaries might help you. The Sahara is obvious – it’s the Sahara. You always know the Outback, the Mongolian desert. Europe is harder, the borders are hazy – you’re looking for the big rivers, mountain ranges. After a while, after a thousand times around the Earth, you get to know the world pretty well. It becomes intuitive, and you can just glance: “Oh, there’s Vesuvius.”

RM That’s so cool!

What’s cool is being able to read an interesting conversation between two interesting people we feel we already know personally. The rest is at The Guardian. -via Fark 

(Image credit: Randall Munroe at What If?)

Your winter wonderland of snow is cold, wet, and slippery. The sleigh skids off a cliff and everyone dies. Or else you get pneumonia and frostbite, too. That’s the mood of this version of "Jingle Bells."

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The Gregory Brothers took a happy, upbeat little ditty usually associated with Christmas and put it into a minor key. The result is pretty grim. Creepy. Sad. It may as well be a funeral dirge. They have a whole playlist of sad songs if you’re in that kind of mood. -via Tastefully Offensive  

Have you ever tried to direct your dreams? Think of something wonderful as you are falling asleep to see if it stays in your brain. Well, your brain has different ideas. Sarah Andersen illustrates that terrifically in the latest comic at Sarah’s Scribbles.

You never imagined the Orcs from Lord of the Rings to be the dancing type, did you? When an unexpected dinner appears, they do a victory dance. But you know how it is when you celebrate too early!  

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Scott Winn brings us dancing Orcs with a special appearance by the Elf Legolas. The song is “Through the Flame” by Scott & Brendo. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Science has shown us that people who are generous and altruistic are happier and healthier than people who aren’t, no matter what economic class they belong to. But it’s not as easy to be kind to strangers as you’d think. Everyday people are often suspicious of acts of kindness, especially from someone they don’t know. Psychologist Sandi Mann, who is studying the “pay it forward” phenomenon, found this out firsthand when she tried to give away an extra coffee at the cafe when it came with her child’s breakfast. No one wanted to accept it!   

It was only once she framed the act differently, so that it seemed more logical, and less altruistic, that their attitudes changed. “Suddenly it was a different story altogether – it made perfect sense that my kid won’t drink coffee.” They still refused, but “the suspicion vanished, and there were smiles, and thanks”. Eventually it was accepted by a lady named Rochel, who subsequently found an opportunity later in the week to treat someone else.

That initial mistrust was a common theme for each of the following 13 days – in which she tried to offer strangers an umbrella on a rainy day, pay for someone’s parking ticket, and let fellow shoppers jump ahead of her in checkout queues. “Suspicion was the strongest reaction throughout,” she says. Each time, it was only when she offered a rational explanation – such as the fact she was waiting for someone at the checkout – that people would accept her offers. Looking back, Mann now explains it as “stranger danger”. “We’re brought up to expect strangers to put one over us,” she says.

It’s true that we often mistrust strangers bearing gifts, because we don’t want to suffer the fate of the Trojans. And free gifts so often come with strings attached. But there may be other forces at work, like a feeling we don't deserve something free, or an unwanted implied obligation to pay it back or forward. And research also tells us that spite and greed are more contagious than kindness- which only makes the effort of spreading kindness more crucial. Read more about the research on kindness and generosity at BBC Future. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Heath Brandon)

This video is captioned in the upper left completely by machine. It was generated in real time by a neural network programmed to describe images. Stanford Ph.D. student Andrej Karpathy developed the NeuralTalk system and Kyle McDonald adapted it to describe this laptop of Amsterdam on a laptop.

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Yes, it changes pretty fast, so you might want to keep your finger ready to pause. The original program generated four captions per second! McDonald reduced that to only one caption per second so we have a chance of following it. The program isn’t completely accurate, but it’s close enough to give you an “uncanny valley” feeling.

If you want a real laugh, a different neural network was used for an earlier experiment in captioning the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. That program definitely needs a bigger vocabulary. -via Metafilter

John went to the Bahamas and took in one of those “swimming with dolphins” attractions in Nassau. There he met a dolphin who wants to be a comedian. Instead of a kiss, he spit water in John’s face!

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Well, John reacted naturally, and spit right back. Things escalated from there until a trainer stepped in to break it up. The man and dolphin made up, and a good time was had by all. -via Viral Viral Videos 

This quiz from mental_floss is driving me nuts. It’s a simple concept: just recognize all the U.S. states by their names. Easy, huh? But the names are scattered among words that are not U.S. states. Some are cities, some are places in other countries, and some are just a bit mangled. And if you pick the wrong one, the quiz is over and you have to reload to try again. But the hardest thing about it is that you only have one minute to go through them all! If you read too fast, you’re liable to click on a wrong name. If you go too slow, time will run out. And you will have to stop and scroll a couple of times. The best I’ve gotten so far is 41 of them when time ran out. I hope you can beat that!  

A security camera caught an absolutely bizarre traffic accident in China. You don’t see any of the cars hitting each other (at first, although the two vans eventually collide). They just stand up and start a weird dance! What’s going on?

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Turns out that there’s a cable lying across the road, waiting for a phone pole installation. A street sweeper, which you can see on the right side, sweeps it up and winds the cable into its rotating brushes, which pulls it taut just as the three vehicles are passing over it. -via Boing Boing

Shane Victorino of the Boston Red Sox fell into the stands. The crowd helped him up. But there’s a lot more going on in this clip if you watch it a few times. Look at it again, and keep your eyes on the guy with the blue shirt with red sleeves. He moves in to help Victorino, but is no help at all. Victorino is up, so the guy knocks a woman’s phone onto the field, breaking it. Victorino hands the phone back, so the guy knocks a woman’s beer into her face. Really, if you’re going to be a walking train wreck, learn about personal space.

This happened during a game between the Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers in 2013. You can see the original video here. You kinda get the idea that if you watched the sequence a few more times, some other weird things will  start happening. -via reddit

Rapper and comedian Dan Bull (previously at Neatorama) and his cats Jimmy and Sammy had a visit from a fox.

This incredible encounter happened to me this week. The fox was curled up asleep at my back door. Foxes are normally nocturnal and will run away if they spot you anywhere near. But I just sat there for ages chilling with this fox and two of my cats Jimmy and Sammy. I sensed no hostility from either side, just a relaxed inquisitiveness.

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The fox and the cats got along just fine, but eventually the fox realized that not only was he being stared at by a human, but he was also being recorded. Bye, Mr. Fox! -via Arbroath