Happy July, everyone. And to my US readers, happy Fourth of July weekend. I’ll keep this brief as most of you are off work and school, or drifting away to vacation. Unless you’re in summer stock, in which case, you should be building props rather than reading my blog!

Here is an interesting story for those of you who make replica props: DC Comics Sues Gotham Garage Over Replica Batmobiles. Prop replicas live in a murky area of copyright and trademark law, and this lawsuit has a lot of specific factors (and it hasn’t been settled yet). It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

This past June, Dave Lowe celebrated the 30th anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark with thirty days of posts about the movie. In a post titled “The Temple of Dagobah“, we learn how the vines from Yoda’s planet in Star Wars ended up being reused for the temple Indiana Jones steals the golden idol from in the opening of Raiders.

Dream Now Reality: A filmmaker from Victoria wins a contest to make a movie from his script. His script is about a ten-year-old girl who builds a robot friend from old VCR parts. The filmmaker suddenly realizes he needs to build a robot. Luckily, he has Paxton Downard on his team, who built props for Stargate and Fringe. Man, I wish this article had photographs; still, it’s a cute story.

Finally, Make Magazine has an interesting editorial by Saul Griffith called “DIT: Raising Our Collective Barn“. He writes about the importance and benefits of collaboration when making things, and describes it as DIT—do it together—rather than DIY.