Blade Runner’s Miniature Props Revealed in 142 Behind-the-Scenes Photos

in Film, Sci Fi | July 7th, 2015

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Blade Run­ner, unlike most sci­ence-fic­tion movies of the 1980s, improves with age — in fact, it seems to hold up more robust­ly with each pass­ing year. Rid­ley Scot­t’s adap­ta­tion of Philip K. Dick­’s Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep? endures for many rea­sons, none of them quite so strong as the rich­ness of its set­ting, a vision of 2019 Los Ange­les replete with fire-belch­ing smoke­stacks, tow­er­ing cor­po­rate obelisks, 30-sto­ry geishas glow­ing­ly endors­ing prod­ucts on the sides of build­ings, and crum­bling “old” archi­tec­ture retro­fit­ted to inhab­it this simul­ta­ne­ous­ly glossy and ram­shackle real­i­ty.

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The film’s pro­duc­tion design pays close atten­tion to those big things, but also to the small ones: the side­walk noo­dle bar where we meet repli­cant-hunt­ing detec­tive Rick Deckard; the glow­ing han­dles of the umbrel­las held by the count­less passers­by stream­ing past; the detail­ing of the firearm with which he cuts down his android prey one by one. And often, the big things are small things; at the top of the post, for instance, we see the hulk­ing head­quar­ters of the repli­cant-build­ing Tyrell Cor­po­ra­tion — and, for scale, a mem­ber of the design team work­ing on it.

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Blade Run­ner, you see, rep­re­sents per­haps the high water mark of the now seem­ing­ly lost art of minia­ture-based prac­ti­cal visu­al effects. Most every­thing in its slick­ly futur­is­tic yet worn and often makeshift Los Ange­les actu­al­ly exist­ed in real­i­ty, because, in that time before real­is­tic CGI, every­thing had to take the form of a mod­el (or, far­ther in the back­ground, a mat­te paint­ing) to get into the shot at all. You can take an exten­sive behind-the-scenes look at the blood, sweat, and tears involved in build­ing all this in a gallery show­cas­ing 142 pho­tos tak­en in the Blade Run­ner mod­el shop.

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“Take a look at the dystopi­an minia­tures, each tiny car hand paint­ed with future dirt from rid­ing clouds stuffed with future smog,” writes io9’s Mered­ith Woern­er. Par­ti­sans of these sorts of tech­niques argue that minia­tures remain supe­ri­or to dig­i­tal con­struc­tions because of their per­cep­ti­ble phys­i­cal­i­ty, and per­haps that very qual­i­ty has helped keep the look and feel of Blade Run­ner rel­a­tive­ly time­less. Plus, unlike CGI, it gives die-hard fans some­thing to hope for. If you dream about own­ing a piece of the film for your very own, you the­o­ret­i­cal­ly can; just make sure to do your home­work first by read­ing the threads at propsummit.com, a forum about — and only about — Blade Run­ner props.

Enter the pho­to gallery here.

via io9

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Mak­ing Blade Run­ner: See the Orig­i­nal Sketch­book, Sto­ry­boards, On-Set Polaroids & More

The Blade Run­ner Pro­mo­tion­al Film

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book: The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead and Rid­ley Scott Online

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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William Gibson’s Seminal Cyberpunk Novel, Neuromancer, Dramatized for Radio (2002)

in Radio, Sci Fi | July 3rd, 2015

Who can call them­selves fans of cyber­punk, or even mod­ern sci­ence fic­tion, with­out hav­ing expe­ri­enced William Gib­son’s Neu­ro­mancer? That 1984 nov­el, which many see as the defin­ing work of the sci-fi sub­genre where, as Gib­son him­self put it, “high tech meets low life,” has gone through many print runs in many lan­guages. But you don’t need to read it to get to know its dis­tinc­tive real­i­ty — its Japan­ese mega­lopo­lis set­ting of Chi­ba City, its char­ac­ters like “con­sole cow­boy” Case and “street samu­rai” Mol­ly Mil­lions, its tech­nolo­gies like advanced arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, elec­tro­mag­net­ic pulse weapons, a vir­tu­al real­i­ty space called, yes, the Matrix. You can also hear it.

Last year, we fea­tured the out-of-cir­cu­la­tion audio­book ver­sion of Neu­ro­mancer read by Gib­son him­self, and though it faith­ful­ly trans­mits his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly sawed-off writ­ing style, some may find that form a bit lack­ing in dra­ma. But as luck would have it, the BBC, home to some of the last remain­ing mas­ters of the radio dra­ma form, adapt­ed the nov­el in 2002, and you can hear the result­ing two-hour pro­duc­tion on the Youtube playlist above or stream it from SFFau­dio. Even Gib­son purists may well come away sat­is­fied, since its respect for the orig­i­nal text begins right with the clas­sic open­ing line: “The sky above the port was the col­or of tele­vi­sion, tuned to a dead chan­nel.”

In any form, Neu­ro­mancer has endured for many rea­sons, not least that it still gets us think­ing every time about the inter­sec­tion between tech­nol­o­gy and human­i­ty. It cer­tain­ly gets crit­i­cal the­o­rist Fredric Jame­son think­ing, and you can read his thoughts in his new essay “A Glob­al Neu­ro­mancer.” He con­tends that, among oth­er things, cyber­space still does­n’t exist: “It is a lit­er­ary con­struc­tion we tend to believe in; and, like the con­cept of imma­te­r­i­al labor, there are cer­tain­ly his­tor­i­cal rea­sons for its appear­ance at the dawn of post­moder­ni­ty which great­ly tran­scend the tech­no­log­i­cal fact of com­put­er devel­op­ment or the inven­tion of the Inter­net.” Jame­son does­n’t write prose quite as eas­i­ly fol­lowed as Gib­son’s, but like any true clas­sic, Neu­ro­mancer keeps inspir­ing not just works sim­i­lar to it, but works wild­ly dif­fer­ent from it as well.

Note: You can down­load for free a pro­fes­sion­al­ly-read ver­sion of Neu­ro­mancer (the com­plete book) if you take part in one of the free tri­als offered by our part­ners Audible.com and/or Audiobooks.com. Click on the respec­tive links to get more infor­ma­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Gib­son Reads Neu­ro­mancer, His Cyber­punk-Defin­ing Nov­el (1994)

Cyber­punk: 1990 Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing William Gib­son & Tim­o­thy Leary Intro­duces the Cyber­punk Cul­ture

Take a Road Trip with Cyber­space Vision­ary William Gib­son, Watch No Maps for These Ter­ri­to­ries (2000)

Tim­o­thy Leary Plans a Neu­ro­mancer Video Game, with Art by Kei­th Har­ing, Music by Devo & Cameos by David Byrne

William Gib­son, Father of Cyber­punk, Reads New Nov­el in Sec­ond Life

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metropolis (1927)

in Film, Sci Fi, Technology | June 26th, 2015

On Mon­day, we brought you evi­dence that Stan­ley Kubrick invent­ed the tablet com­put­er in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Today, we go back forty years fur­ther into cin­e­mat­ic his­to­ry to ask whether Fritz Lang invent­ed the video phone in 1927’s Metrop­o­lis. In the clip above, you can watch a scene set in the home of Joh Fred­er­sen, stern mas­ter of the vast, futur­is­tic, tit­u­lar indus­tri­al city of 2026. In order to best rule all he sur­veys — and to com­plete the image of a 20th-cen­tu­ry dystopia — he lives high above the infer­nal roil of Metrop­o­lis, safe­ly ensconced in one of its ver­tig­i­nous tow­ers and equipped with the lat­est hulk­ing, wall-mount­ed, inex­plic­a­bly paper-spout­ing video phone tech­nol­o­gy.

Fred­er­sen, writes Joe Malia in his notes on video phones in film, “appears to use four sep­a­rate dials to arrive at the cor­rect fre­quen­cy for the call. Two assign the cor­rect call loca­tion and two small­er ones pro­vide fine video tun­ing. He then picks up a phone receiv­er with one hand and uses the oth­er to tap a rhythm on a pan­el that is relayed to the oth­er phone and dis­played as flash­es of light to attract atten­tion.”

Not con­tent to infer the mechan­ics of these imag­i­nary devices, Malia would go on to cre­ate the super­cut below, a sur­vey of video phones through­out the his­to­ry of film and tele­vi­sion, from Metrop­o­lis onward, includ­ing a stop at 2001:

The super­cut also includes a clip from Rid­ley Scot­t’s Blade Run­ner, whose (on the whole, aston­ish­ing­ly time­less) design I called out for using video phones in a video essay of my own. In real­i­ty, con­trary to all these 20th-cen­tu­ry visions of the far-flung future, video phone tech­nol­o­gy did­n’t devel­op quite as rapid­ly as pre­dict­ed, and when it did devel­op, it did­n’t spread in quite the same way as pre­dict­ed. Even the rich world of 2015 lacks bulky video phone box­es in every home and on every street cor­ner, but with voice over inter­net pro­to­col ser­vices like Skype, many in even the poor­est parts of the world can effec­tive­ly make bet­ter video phone calls than these grand-scale sci-fi pro­duc­tions dared imag­ine — then again, they do often make them on tablets more or less straight out of 2001.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Did Stan­ley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Niko­la Tes­la Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed the Rise of the Inter­net & Smart Phone in 1926

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Did Stanley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

in Film, Sci Fi, Technology | June 22nd, 2015

While it now bears embar­rass­ing marks of the 1960s here and there, the future envi­sioned by Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey remains, on many lev­els, chill­ing­ly plau­si­ble. True, Pan Am Air­lines went under in the 1990s instead of launch­ing a space sta­tion like they’ve got in the movie, but in the small­er details, 2001 gets a lot right, at least inso­far as its real­i­ty resem­bles the one in which we find our­selves in the actu­al 21st cen­tu­ry. No less an aggre­ga­tion of brain­pow­er than Sam­sung thinks so too: in fact, they’ve gone so far as to cite Kubrick­’s sci-fi mas­ter­work before a judge as proof that the direc­tor invent­ed tablet com­put­ing.

“In 2011, an unusu­al piece of evi­dence was pre­sent­ed in court in a dis­pute between tech­nol­o­gy giants Apple and Sam­sung over the latter’s range of hand­held tablets, which Apple claimed infringed upon the patent­ed design and user inter­face of the iPad,” writes the British Film Insti­tute’s Samuel Wigley.

“As part of Samsung’s defence, the company’s lawyers showed the court a still image and clip show­ing the astro­nauts played by Gary Lock­wood and Keir Dul­lea eat­ing while watch­ing a TV show on their own per­son­al, mini-sized, flat-screen com­put­ers.”

kubrick tablet

Apple and Sam­sung have not, in recent mem­o­ry, played nice. Apple accused Sam­sung of “slav­ish­ly” copy­ing the design of the iPad for their own Galaxy tablet, a charge that in some ways aligns with Sam­sung and oth­er major Kore­an man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies’ rep­u­ta­tion for rapid­ly adapt­ing and even improv­ing upon prod­ucts devel­oped in oth­er coun­tries. Sam­sung’s defense? Watch 2001’s footage of its “News­pads” (above), and you can see that Kubrick invent­ed the tablet before either com­pa­ny — or, in the words of their attor­neys, he invent­ed a com­put­er with “an over­all rec­tan­gu­lar shape with a dom­i­nant dis­play screen, nar­row bor­ders, a pre­dom­i­nate­ly flat front sur­face, a flat back sur­face, and a thin form fac­tor.”

Even in their life­times, 2001 gave Kubrick and his col­lab­o­ra­tor Arthur C. Clarke, sci-fi emi­nence and author of 2001 the book, rep­u­ta­tions as some­thing like seers. “I’m sure we’ll have sophis­ti­cat­ed 3‑D holo­graph­ic tele­vi­sion and films,” Kubrick spec­u­lat­ed in a Play­boy mag­a­zine inter­view we fea­tured last year, “and it’s pos­si­ble that com­plete­ly new forms of enter­tain­ment and edu­ca­tion will be devised.” Cer­tain­ly the open­ing up of the realm of tablets has made new forms of enter­tain­ment and edu­ca­tion pos­si­ble, but I won­der: could he ever have imag­ined we would one day use our News­pads to watch 2001 itself?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1968, Stan­ley Kubrick Makes Pre­dic­tions for 2001: Human­i­ty Will Con­quer Old Age, Watch 3D TV & Learn Ger­man in 20 Min­utes

1966 Film Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Howard Johnson’s Presents a Children’s Menu Fea­tur­ing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Blade Runner Recut with the Sci-Fi Masterpiece’s Unused Original Footage

in Film, Sci Fi | June 16th, 2015

I recent­ly talked with a friend who’s plan­ning to sched­ule a screen­ing of Blade Run­ner at her film fes­ti­val. We dis­cussed the impor­tant deci­sion that any­one who wants to show Rid­ley Scot­t’s Philip K. Dick-adapt­ing mas­ter­piece faces: which Blade Run­ner? Sev­en dif­fer­ent offi­cial cuts exist: many would instinc­tive­ly choose the 2007 “final cut,” some might pre­fer the 1992 “direc­tor’s cut,” and a curi­ous minor­i­ty might even like to see the cut orig­i­nal­ly released in U.S. the­aters in 1982, fea­tur­ing the Har­ri­son Ford voiceover and hap­py end­ing that fans now con­sid­er ruinous.

But now we have yet anoth­er cut of Blade Run­ner, per­haps the most unusu­al of them all: a “new” ver­sion made out of shots that, even if you’ve seen every offi­cial cut of the film, you may nev­er have seen before. “Some enter­pris­ing souls have com­piled a B‑roll cut of the film, using all of the excised footage that was not incor­po­rat­ed in the pre­vi­ous cuts,” writes Nerdis­t’s Joseph McCabe. “There’s so much here that most Blade Run­ner fans have not seen before that it’s absolute­ly required view­ing. I found it worth watch­ing all forty-five min­utes just to hear Edward James Olmos’ gruff Gaff hilar­i­ous­ly exclaim, ‘I spit on meta­physics!’ ” Not to men­tion all the new views of the pic­ture’s still-strik­ing pro­duc­tion design.

That run­ning time, over an hour short­er than every oth­er cut, effec­tive­ly con­dens­es Blade Run­ner into a short film. It does­n’t play quite like any of the wide­ly seen ver­sions of the film, even though it retains the hat­ed nar­ra­tion and incon­gru­ous Hol­ly­wood end­ing of the Amer­i­can the­atri­cal cut. But the ele­ments that feel clunky, over-explana­to­ry, and audi­ence-dis­trust­ing in a two-hour Blade Run­ner some­how work bet­ter in this briefer ren­di­tion. (Cer­tain­ly Ford’s voiceover, awk­ward though it always sounds, helps this trimmed-down sto­ry cohere.) You haven’t real­ly seen Blade Run­ner, so many who love the movie feel, until you’ve seen every Blade Run­ner — but even now, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of them.

via Nerdist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Mak­ing Blade Run­ner: See the Orig­i­nal Sketch­book, Sto­ry­boards, On-Set Polaroids & More

The Blade Run­ner Pro­mo­tion­al Film

Blade Run­ner: The Pil­lar of Sci-Fi Cin­e­ma that Siskel, Ebert, and Stu­dio Execs Orig­i­nal­ly Hat­ed

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book: The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead and Rid­ley Scott Online

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner Made of 12,597 Water­col­or Paint­ings

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Isaac Asimov’s Favorite Story “The Last Question” Read by Leonard Nimoy

in Audio Books, Sci Fi | June 15th, 2015

Isaac Asi­mov, one of the most pro­lif­ic cre­ators in sci­ence-fic­tion his­to­ry, wrote or edit­ed more than 500 books in his life­time, includ­ing the high-pro­file ones we all rec­og­nize like I, Robot and the Foun­da­tion series (hear a ver­sion dra­ma­tized here). But which piece of this mas­sive body of work did Asi­mov him­self con­sid­er his favorite? Always a fan of clar­i­ty, the man did­n’t leave that issue shroud­ed in mys­tery: the hon­or belongs to “The Last Ques­tion,” which first appeared in the Novem­ber 1956 issue of Sci­ence Fic­tion Quar­ter­ly. It’s now avail­able in Isaac Asi­mov: The Com­plete Sto­ries, Vol. 1.

“Why is it my favorite?” Asi­mov lat­er wrote. “For one thing I got the idea all at once and did­n’t have to fid­dle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarce­ly had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any sto­ry to any writer.” But it also had, and con­tin­ues to have, “the strangest effect on my read­ers. Fre­quent­ly some­one writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a sto­ry, which they ‘think’ I may have writ­ten, and tell them where to find it. They don’t remem­ber the title but when they describe the sto­ry it is invari­ably ‘The Last Ques­tion.’ ”

You cer­tain­ly won’t for­get who wrote the sto­ry if you can hear it read by Leonard Nimoy, sure­ly the most dis­tinc­tive sci-fi nar­ra­tor of our time, in the video just above. Nimoy first read “The Last Ques­tion” aloud for an adap­ta­tion staged at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty’s Abrams Plan­e­tar­i­um in 1966, a pro­duc­tion that first moved Asi­mov him­self to con­sid­er rank­ing its source mate­r­i­al among his best works. Of course, the sto­ry would have received none of this ret­ro­spec­tive atten­tion, from its author or oth­ers, if not for its intel­lec­tu­al con­tent, which comes through vivid­ly no mat­ter how you take it in.

Look past the more enter­tain­ing­ly dat­ed ele­ments — expres­sions like “for Pete’s sake,” enor­mous cen­tral com­put­ers that print all their out­put on paper slips, an ear­ly ref­er­ence to “high­balls” — and you find plen­ty of ele­ments that qual­i­fy as eter­nal: the ever more rapid expan­sion of human­i­ty, the ever more rapid progress of tech­nol­o­gy, and the seem­ing­ly ever-fal­ter­ing abil­i­ty of the for­mer to main­tain dom­i­nance over the lat­ter. With­in the sto­ry’s nine pages, Asi­mov even digs into sci­en­tif­ic con­cepts like entropy and the heat death of the uni­verse as well as philo­soph­i­cal con­cepts like the true nature of “for­ev­er” and the ori­gin of life, the uni­verse, and every­thing. If you read only one of Asi­mov’s sto­ries, he’d sure­ly approve if you made it “The Last Ques­tion.” (And if you read two, why not “The Last Answer”?). Find these read­ings added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­sion­al­ly-read audio books from Audible.com, includ­ing ones writ­ten by Isaac Asi­mov? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy Dra­ma­tized in Clas­sic Audio

Isaac Asi­mov Explains the Ori­gins of Good Ideas & Cre­ativ­i­ty in Nev­er-Before-Pub­lished Essay

Isaac Asi­mov Explains His Three Laws of Robots

Leonard Nimoy Reads Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries From The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles & The Illus­trat­ed Man (1975–76)

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Yoda’s Long Lost Twin Found in a 14th Century Illuminated Manuscript

in Art, History, Sci Fi | April 18th, 2015

medieval yoda

In a new pic­ture book called Medieval Mon­sters, pub­lished by the British Library, his­to­ri­an Damien Kempf and art his­to­ri­an Maria L. Gilbert have gath­ered togeth­er illus­tra­tions that high­light the great mon­sters of the medieval world. Mon­sters were every­where, includ­ing “on the edges of man­u­script pages” and on “the fringes of maps.” The suc­ces­sor to Medieval Cats and Medieval Dogs, Medieval Mon­sters con­tains no short­age of fas­ci­nat­ing illus­tra­tions, includ­ing the one above. It looks remark­ably like Yoda, does­n’t it?

A British Library cura­tor told NPR, “The Yoda image comes from a 14th-cen­tu­ry man­u­script known as the Smith­field Dec­re­tals.”  “I’d love to say that it real­ly was Yoda, or was drawn by a medieval time trav­el­er.” But “it’s actu­al­ly an illus­tra­tion to the bib­li­cal sto­ry of Sam­son — the artist clear­ly had a vivid imag­i­na­tion!”

See more mon­sters at the British Library’s Medieval Man­u­scripts blog.

via NPR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

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The Making of Star Wars As Told by C‑3PO & R2-D2: The First-Ever Documentary on the Film (1977)

in Film, Sci Fi | April 18th, 2015

The Earth, it seems, has only one tru­ly unlim­it­ed resource: enthu­si­asm for Star Wars. Not even The Phan­tom Men­ace, the deri­sion mag­net that opened the film series’ new­er tril­o­gy, made a seri­ous dent in our reserves. But did every­one who got togeth­er in the 1970s to make the very first Star Wars movie, from George Lucas on down the chain of com­mand, under­stand how deep a vein of fan­dom they had drilled into? The Mak­ing of Star Wars, a 1977 doc­u­men­tary on that beloved space opera-turned-cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non, will give you some idea.

Now that Star Wars has gen­er­at­ed such a uni­verse, if you like, of sup­ple­men­tary con­tent, one more 50-minute behind-the-scenes spe­cial might strike you as no great shakes. But when The Mak­ing of Star Wars appeared in ’77, it appeared as the first doc­u­men­tary about Star Wars ever. And it has much high­er ambi­tions than the aver­age pro­mo­tion­al short of the day, fea­tur­ing not only cast and crew inter­views but seg­ments on the (decid­ed­ly pre-CGI) effects tech­nol­o­gy employed in the pro­duc­tion.

Even the most ded­i­cat­ed Star Wars buffs will still find mate­r­i­al of inter­est here, includ­ing footage that nev­er made it into the picture’s the­atri­cal cut, and footage rein­tro­duced into 1997’s revamped “Spe­cial Edi­tion” of the orig­i­nal tril­o­gy but altered with CGI (anoth­er drain on sev­er­al generation’s Star Wars love). But many of us will watch The Mak­ing of Star Wars on one of its strengths alone: C‑3PO and R2-D2 host the whole thing. Could even those pre­ci­sion-engi­neered droids have fore­seen the thun­der­ous recep­tion that has met this year’s brand new teasers for Star Wars: The Force Awak­ens?

The Mak­ing of Star Wars is a can­di­date for our list of Free Online Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 285 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Star Wars Bor­rowed From Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Great Samu­rai Films

Watch the Very First Trail­ers for Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back & Return of the Jedi (1976–83)

Joseph Camp­bell and Bill Moy­ers Break Down Star Wars as an Epic, Uni­ver­sal Myth

Hun­dreds of Fans Col­lec­tive­ly Remade Star Wars; Now They Remake The Empire Strikes Back

Fans Recon­struct Authen­tic Ver­sion of Star Wars, As It Was Shown in The­aters in 1977

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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