The Ewok Adventure never crosses your mind when you think of how many Star Wars movie there are so far, but that's okay. It was a made-for-TV movie broadcast in 1984, and then renamed Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure for home video. None of the Star Wars saga principle characters appeared in this children's movie, but it managed to introduce youngsters to the Star Wars universe and its associated merchandising, which was the entire point. Here's some behind-the-scenes trivia about The Ewok Adventure.

10. The Ewok language is based on Tibetan.

It’s hard to imagine the guttural, chittering language being base on anything but it does have a solid base in the Tibetan tongue.

7. The story takes place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

That would explain why there’s no sign of Imperial or Rebel forces as they go on their quest, they hadn’t arrived yet, or they were in a different region.

Read more about The Ewok Adventure at TVOM.  

Film student Clark Zhu (previously at Neatorama) made a retrospective of the movies we watched in 2017. Contains NSFW language.   

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It's a artful blend of audio, video, and music in five sections: action, comedy, horror, drama, and epic. Just the last section makes me want to go to the theater to see something or other. Some movies fit into more than one section. You'll find a list of them here. -Thanks, Clark!  

The following is an article from Uncle John's OLD FAITHFUL 30th Anniversary edition.

These guys’ pro sports careers were unexceptional …except for that one big moment of glory.

CHARLIE ROBERTSON

In baseball, a perfect game is when one pitcher works all nine innings, and never allows a batter to reach first base. No hits, no walks, no hit batters, no errors. It’s an incredibly difficult and rare achievement: only 23 perfect games have ever been thrown in the history of Major League Baseball. Several Hall of Famers threw one in their careers, including Cy Young, Catfish Hunter, and Sandy Koufax. And so did Charlie Robertson. He started out with the Chicago White Sox in 1919, got cut from the team, and returned to the Sox three years later. In 1922, in just his fourth overall start as a pitcher, Robertson threw a perfect game against Ty Cobb and the Detroit Tigers. It was essentially the only highlight of an otherwise brief, forgettable career. Robertson bounced around the big leagues, playing for the St. Louis Browns and the Boston Braves, but retired in 1928. His career record: 49 wins and 80 losses.

DOUG WILLIAMS

The movie Casablanca was released in 1942, while war was raging in Europe and the US had just joined the fray. The complicated plot follows characters from all over the world stuck in the Moroccan port city for one reason or another, all with different motivations and schemes for getting what they want. The movie doesn't waste any words or closeups. You can watch Casablanca many times over and find something new in the film. But the most powerful of many powerful scenes is the singalong in Rick's Cafe Americain, featuring “La Marseillaise.”  

The power of this scene is helped, of course, by the indisputable fact that “La Marseillaise” is an incredible national anthem. While I’m by no means an expert, it’s the best one I’ve ever heard from any country, and its association in my mind with this scene is highly likely to always keep it there. But the scene is also helped by the people in it. The main actors are at their finest here, and I already mentioned how supporting actors gave great little tidbits in the German soldier part.

Yet perhaps the greatest thing in this scene is that most of the people in it weren’t actors at all; rather, director Michael Curtiz filled the scene with actual French refugees. Keep in mind, this movie came out in 1942 and was filmed at the height of World War II, at a time when Germany looked nearly unbeatable and Nazi occupation of France was indefinite. And here was a group of refugees from that occupation, given the chance to sing their anthem with defiant pride. For one brief moment, this wasn’t a movie. It was real life, and it was tragic, and it was brave. Reports have said that extras were crying on set during filming, and the passion is evident any time you look past the main actors to the background singers.

David Youngblood picks apart every character in the scene and how their emotions change in less than two minutes, and how the incident steers the film in a new direction. Oh yeah, the video is there, too, so bring a hankie.  -via Metafilter

MarkXXD built this shelter for a cat that hangs around outdoors near his home in Hungary. Yeah, he'd like to have a cat, and he even let this one inside for a while.

You would assume from that update that MarkXXD now has a cat, because that's how you get a cat. But his mother doesn't want a cat inside the house. If you find yourself in this situation, here are instructions for making a comfy winter cat shelter for outside cats from Alley Cat Advocates.  

Bill Young is a corporate pilot, but he's also a photographer. The confluence of those two activities led him a unique hobby. About half of his time is spent traveling, so he takes pictures of what he encounters along the way.

Apparently, back in 2015, Bill was spending time in yet another hotel when he realised the carpet had an interesting pattern. He took a photo, uploaded it to Instagram and set something in motion something truly special.

Bill continued uploading photos of curious hotel carpets on his personal Instagram for some time before his wife suggested making a dedicated page. As a result, @MyHotelCarpet was born.

Hallway #hotelcarpet in the Long Beach #Marriott. #cubes

A post shared by Bill Young (@myhotelcarpet) on Aug 1, 2016 at 7:51pm PDT

People are fascinated with the variety and, let's face it, the ugliness of carpets found in hotels around the world. Well, maybe they're not all ugly; that's a matter of personal taste. You should check out his collection of hotel carpets at Instagram.  -via Flavorwire

(Top image credit: Bill Young)

There's more to saving the galaxy than delivering your lines. If you're going to be in a Star Wars film, you're probably going to have to fight someone at some time. That requires physical stamina, choreography, and lots of training.

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In this behind-the-scenes video from Star Wars, Daisy Ridley, Gwendoline Christie, Kelly Marie Tran, John Boyega, and Adam Driver talk about the extra time they had to put in just getting ready for the more physical scenes in The Last Jedi. So we know who's going to do the fighting, although that's not what you'd call a surprising spoiler. Don't miss Ridley whacking herself in the head with her staff. -via Tastefully Offensive

When it was first released in 1983, A Christmas Story wasn't much of a hit. But by being shown on TV over the next thirty years, it has become a Christmas classic. Just mention leg lamp, freezing your tongue to a metal pole, or "You'll shoot your eye out!" and people know what film you're refering to.  The movie's age and sleeper status mean that there's a lot in the background about the making of the movie that you don't know. A mega-list of trivia is about to change that.

2. Peter Billingsley, the actor who played Ralphie, was the first child who auditioned for director Bob Clark. Clark figured he couldn't hire the first child he saw audition, so he auditioned thousands of others before deciding to cast Billingsley as Ralphie anyway.

5. A Christmas Story is based on Jean Shepherd's 1966 book, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.

6. The book started as a series of short stories published in Playboy.

Read a lot more trivia about the movie A Christmas Story at Buzzfeed.

These guys got a little too excited when they found new lightsabers for sale, so they had to take it outside. And the fun was only beginning! But they kept getting hassled. It turns out that "We're making a YouTube video" doesn't excuse everything.

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Soon the game expanded beyond Star Wars to include Pokemon, Harry Potter, and Spider-Man! Yes, all geeks enjoy a good lightsaber battle.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

Alex Bowen couldn't sleep, so he wandered down to the Waffle House in West Columbia, South Carolina. He waited around to be waited on, but then discovered an employee sound asleep on the job. So he cooked his own meal! He told WIS-TV,

"Got hot on the grill with a double Texas bacon cheesesteak melt with extra pickles," Bowen said. "When I was done I cleaned the grill, collected my ill-gotten sandwich and rolled on out."

The photos in this post show Bowen in the cooking areas and a stacked sandwich.

"I give all the credit to my old friend vodka," Bowen said. "I wouldn't normally have done that."

Bowen also took selfies, which he posted on Facebook. He returned to the Waffle House later in the day and gave an employee $5 for the meal he prepared himself. Waffle House issued a statement of apology to Bowen and hinted that he may have a future cooking for the company. -via The Daily Dot 

(Image credit: Alex Bowen)

Every year, the residents fo Gävle, Sweden, erect a giant Yule goat made of straw for Christmas. And almost every year, the goat becomes the victim of arson. The first goat, erected in 1966, was burned on New Years Day. Last year, the goat didn't even last one full day. You can look back at the fate of all the Gävle Goats here. And now the 2017 Gävle Goat has risen, 13 meters tall and 7 meters long, in the Gävle town square. You can keep up with the Gävle Goat at the Gävlebocken‏ Twitter feed. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Gävlebocken‏)

The first movie filmed  in color was way back in 1908, and even before that there were hand-painted motion pictures. But Technicolor took filmmaking to a whole new level. The word Technicolor refers to both the company formed in 1914 and the process they developed for adding color to movies. It wasn't a sudden breakthrough, though, but the result of years of tweaking the technology by filtering and blending light. Audiences became aware of the term only when the word Technicolor was connected with the eye-popping 1939 movies The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind.  

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The latest video from Vox explains both the history of Technicolor and how it works. Along the way, we learn some really neat trivia about The Wizard of Oz.   

Beer was a big part of life in Europe in 1380. In the city of Wrocław, which is now in Poland, beer was so important that it sparked a war. Building and maintaining a brewery was quite expensive, and the only entities that could afford to do it were the government and the church. Wrocław had its municipal brewery, right underneath the Town Hall. The city government, called the Rata, sold beer and taxed it, too. But the monks on the nearby island of Ostrów Tumski made beer as well, and it was a better quality brew. The Rata didn't have control over the island or its monasteries, but they didn't want to cede their beer profits.   

The Rata tried diplomacy first. The council sent representatives to the island to explain their disappointment, but also, Van Reed writes, threatened confiscations and sanctions if things did not change.

The Bishop responded to the provocation with a bunker-buster: He placed the entire city under interdict, which meant that no religious service could be conducted within it. Basically, he cut Wrocław off from God so he could keep selling beer.

Wrocław's Rata responded by calling up an army. However, that army was made up of citizens who already preferred the monastic beer, and continued to drink during the war. Read about the Wrocław Beer War at Atlas Obscura.

The world's first nuclear chain reaction took place 75 years ago today. On December 2, 1942, physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard led the team that conducted the experiment at the University of Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project. The possibility of such a chain reaction was discovered in 1938, but there were some kinks to work out.

For a sustained, controlled chain reaction, each fission must induce just one additional fission. Any more, and there’d be an explosion. Any fewer and the reaction would peter out.

The words "there'd be an explosion" sounds like quite the understatement, considering how the Manhattan Project turned out. But the chain reaction achieved that day also led to the development of nuclear energy plants.

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Read an outline of the science behind the first nuclear chain reaction at Smithsonian.

The anime movie Batman Ninja has an official trailer. The Warner Bros. film, directed by Jumpei Mizusaki, places Batman and his villains in medieval Japan. Batman, of course, is skilled in a hundred ways of fighting.  

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The trailer is a non-stop flipbook of gorgeous artwork. Look closely, and you'll see Joker, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Deathstroke, Nightwing, Two-Face, Alfred, and Robin. Batman Ninja will be coming to a theater near you sometime in 2018.  -via Metafilter