In 2009, Brooklyn-based Web developer Casey Pugh was looking for a new way to explore the potential of crowd-sourcing when he hit upon an idea of galactic proportions. He took the original 1977 Star Wars film (later known as Episode IV: A New Hope in the chronologically ordered six-part series) and chopped it into 15-second pieces, inviting fans from around the world to choose a piece and re-create it in whatever medium they liked: live-action, puppetry, animation, you name it. Three years and one Emmy Award later, Pugh and his team have put the best pieces together and (with the blessing of Star Wars creator George Lucas) released the finished film, Star Wars Uncut: The Director’s Cut. It runs a fun two hours and five minutes. You can watch the complete movie above and learn more on the official website.

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The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978): It’s Oh So Kitsch

Star Wars Uncut: The Epic Fan Film is a post from: Open Culture

If you’re not intimately familiar with his novels, then you assuredly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. Today, we bring you another way to get acquainted with his writing. We’re presenting a selection of Dick’s stories available for free on the web. Below we have culled together 11 short stories from our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. And, just as an fyi, you could always snag one of Dick’s novels (in audio) by signing up for Audible.com’s no-strings-attached Free Trial program. Get details here.

eTexts (find download instructions here)

• “Beyond the Door” – Multiple formats – iTunes
  • First published in 1954, the text is not usually found in collections of Dick’s writings.
• “Beyond Lies the Wub” – Multiple formats – iTunes
  • Dick’s first published story. Originally appeared in Planet Stories in July, 1952.
• “Mr. Spaceship” – Multiple Formats
  • Appeared first in Imagination in 1953, and later in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
• “Piper in the Woods” – Multiple Formats
  • First published in 1953 in the fantasy and science fiction magazine, Imagination.
• “Second Variety” – Multiple Formats
  • Influential short story first published in Space Science Fiction Magazine in May 1953.
• “The Crystal Crypt” – Multiple Formats
  • Sci-fi story published in the January 1952 edition of Planet Stories.
• “The Defenders” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • A 1953 sci-fi story that laid the foundation for Dick’s 1964 novel The Penultimate Truth.
• “The Eyes Have It” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • One of the shortest, if not the shortest, of all of Philip K. Dick’s many short stories.
• “The Gun” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • A 1952 sci-fi story that later appeared in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
• “The Skull” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • Same as right above.
• “The Variable Man” – Multiple Formats
  • A 1953 novella written/sold by Philip K. Dick before he had an agent.

Audio

• “Beyond Lies the Wub” – Free MP3
• “Beyond the Door” – Free MP3
• “Second Variety” – Free MP3 Zip File – Stream Online
• “The Defenders” - Free MP3
• “The Variable Man” – Free MP3 Zip File – Stream Online

P.S. Don’t miss the film Philip K. Dick: A Day in the Afterlife (1994), a documentary appearing in our collection of Free Movies Online.

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Free Philip K. Dick: Download 11 Great Science Fiction Stories is a post from: Open Culture

Let’s do the time warp today and revisit the Not-S0-Golden Age of American Television. The year was 1978. Star Wars fever still gripped America, and the Variety Show TV format wouldn’t say die. So, producing The Star Wars Holiday Special was a no-brainer. The two-hour show takes you inside the domestic world of Chewbacca and his family – his father Itchy, his wife Malla, and his son Lumpy — and features guest appearances by Jefferson Starship, Harvey Korman and Bea Arthur, plus a little stock footage of Alec Guinness. As for the production quality and special effects? They’re all textbook kitsch.

You’ve heard enough to know that this wasn’t the finest hour for the Star Wars franchise. One critic called it the ”the worst two hours of television ever.” And, when he’s willing to acknowledge the existence of the TV special, George Lucas readily admits that turning Star Wars into a variety show “wasn’t the smartest thing to do.” But because the show only aired once in its entirety, the holiday special has gained something of a cult status and circulates “underground” on the web. Vanity Fair has more on this misadventure in television programming here. H/T goes to Dangerous Minds.

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Star Wars as Silent Film

Star Wars the Musical: The Force is Strong in this One

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The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978): It’s Oh So Kitsch is a post from: Open Culture

In 1941, director Dave Fleischer and Paramount Pictures animators Steve Muffati and George Germanetti produced Superman: The Mechanical Monsters — a big-budget animated adaptation of the popular Superman comics of that period, in which a mad scientist unleashes robots to rob banks and loot museums, and Superman, naturally, saves the day. It was one of seventeen films that raised the bar for theatrical shorts and are even considered by some to have given rise to the entire Anime genre.

More than a mere treat of vintage animation, the film captures the era’s characteristic ambivalence in reconciling the need for progress with the fear of technology in a culture on the brink of incredible technological innovation. It was the dawn of the techno-paranoia that persisted through the 1970s, famously captured in the TV series Future Shock narrated by Orson Welles, and even through today. Take for example books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

Superman: The Mechanical Monsters is available for download on The Internet Archive, and Toonami Digital Arsenal has the complete series of all seventeen films. Find more vintage animation in Open Culture’s collection of Free Movies Online.

Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and DesignObserver, and spends a great deal of time on Twitter.

The Mechanical Monsters: Seminal Superman Animated Film from 1941 is a post from: Open Culture

In 1964, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the futurist and sci-fi writer best known for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, peered into the future, to the year 2000, and described what he saw. And a pretty good guess it was. Ours would be a world in which…

We could be in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth, even if we don’t know their actual physical location. It will be possible in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London…. Almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even any physical skill, could be made independent of distance. I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand.

By 2001, California doctors were already conducting virtual surgery on patients in Rome. And, by 2005, Thomas Friedman published his bestseller, The World is Flat, which pretty much told us that us that Clarke’s imagined world had arrived — with, of course, one big exception. Cities? They’re still standing…

via Kevin Kelly and @bookslut

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Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It is a post from: Open Culture

A quick addition to yesterday’s look back at Siskel & Ebert’s 1982 review of Blade Runner.

As we were saying, the film got off to a very shaky start. The production was a mess. Critics panned the film. Filmgoers went to see ET. And all of the rest.

It was time to pull out the stops. So, M. K. Productions was enlisted to shoot a 16 mm promotional featurette that circulated through America’s horror, fantasy and sci-fi conventions. Featuring interviews with Ridley Scott, Syd Mead (visual futurist), and Douglas Trumbull (special effects), the short promotional film let viewers peer inside the making of the magical Blade Runner universe. And now you can do the same.

H/T @Ryan Gallagher

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The Making of Blade Runner is a post from: Open Culture

It’s perhaps hard to imagine now, but Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi film, Blade Runner, saw some hard days when it was first released in 1982. Preview screenings went badly. Crowds flocked instead to see Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster, ET. The film lost money. And critics gave the film mixed reviews.

Case in point, Siskel & Ebert’s review on national television. Roger finds some redeeming qualities – the special effects. Siskel calls it a “waste of time.” One thumb up grudgingly; another firmly down. A decidedly mixed review.

Siskel died, of course, in 1999. If you’re wondering if Ebert ever changed his position, you can find this reappraisal written in 2007, on the 25th anniversary of the film’s release.

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Blade Runner is a Waste of Time: Siskel & Ebert in 1982 is a post from: Open Culture

Ray Bradbury, one of America’s beloved sci-fi writers, turns 91 today. So how about a little party favor: This retro clip takes you back to the 1970s (we believe) and it features Bradbury giving a rather intriguing take on the role of literature and art. For the author of Fahrenheit 451, literature has more than an aesthetic purpose. It has an important sociological/psychoanalytic role to play. Stories are a safety valve. They keep society collectively, and us individually, from coming apart at the seams. They’re the linchpin of civilization. And they provide a more immediate source of pleasure and wonder too. His most recent book, We’ll Always Have Paris: Stories, came out in 2009.

This clip now appears in our collection of 275 Cultural Icons. Here you can watch great thinkers and artists speaking in their own words…

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Ray Bradbury: Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization is a post from: Open Culture

You know George Lucas’ classic, The Empire Strikes Back. Now roll it back a good 60 years and imagine the silent version. It works unexpectedly well. H/T to @wesalwan. And don’t miss many landmark silent films in our collection of Free Movies Online. Chaplin, early Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, the first sci-fi and western films – they’re all there. Find them at the bottom of the page…

Star Wars as Silent Film is a post from: Open Culture

Ever since Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created the very first installment of the The Uncanny X-Men for Marvel in 1963, the beloved team of mutant superheroes known as the X-Men have conquered almost every medium in popular culture from television to video games, to movies and of course comic books. Their enduring popularity isn’t hard to understand: What American teenager (redundant, we know, since all Americans are basically teenagers) could ever say no to an angsty band of telegenic outsiders who are perpetually reviled and persecuted for the very attributes that make them superior?

But there’s more than narcissism at play. The core of the X-Men myth — genetic mutation — is something scientists have been learning how to manipulate for decades, and now it’s just a matter of time before we know how to build X-Men of our own. But just as in the case of nuclear bombs, killer viruses and 3-D action movies, the fact that we can make them doesn’t mean we should. In the above video from Emory University, Bioethics professor Paul Root Wolpe explores this moral dilemma via the latest iteration of the beloved mutants’ saga: X-Men: First Class (In theaters June 3rd, and, praise be to Mendel, NOT in 3-D).

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

X-Men: Science Can Build Them, But Is It Ethical? is a post from: Open Culture