It’s one of the most iconic moments in science fiction cinema, that black screen with the blue words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” and then the Star Wars logo pulls back and we get the opening crawl of A New Hope. A move lifted from the serials of George Lucas’ youth that inspired the films, it’s been aped and spoofed, but it’s also synonymous with the beloved space opera. And it was almost very different.

What appears in the original 1977 film is the product of Lucas and Brian De Palma, who helped edit down the initial text some. Over at Imugr there is a collection of rare and behind the scenes Star Wars photos, and one of them shows a page of the original script with the first attempt at the crawl. Read it for yourself here:

How come adults don’t get meals that come with prizes? Some of my favorite rituals from childhood involved being elbow-deep in a box of cereal, feeling around for the prize, or dumping all the food out of my Happy Meal just so I could get to the toy. So how come we don’t get a grown-up equivalent? After-dinner mints and fortune cookies don’t count, damn it. I want to be able to finish my snazzy, five-star meal, and then have the waiter bring me out a Rocket Raccoon action figure on a silver platter. Sadly, I will probably never live in such a world, but at least pretending is a little bit easier thanks to these faux Happy Meals that were ripped right out of my Happy Place.

These awesome fake Happy Meals are the work of Los Angeles digital artist Newt Clements. (He mostly comes out at night. Mostly.) His Pinterest is full of a wide variety of crazy projects, but his Happy Meals collection is one of the most extensive. He’s got over 100 of the things by my count, and they’re all incredibly well done. Designing Happy Meal boxes to tie into Doctor Who, Aliens, or Escape from New York would have been worthy of a story in and of itself, but Clements goes the extra mile by imagining what toys might be included with each meal as well. And I don’t care what bounty McDonald’s has on offer, there’s no way it’s cooler than an action figure of Firefly’s River standing atop a pile of Reaver corpses.

One of the things I love most about GFR is discovering new artists or filmmakers or writers who weren’t previously on my radar and then diving into their work headfirst. Today’s particular rabbit hole (and mixed metaphors) are brought to you by artist Andy Fairhurst, who has put a new spin on beloved science fiction properties simply by approach them from a different angle: from the top down.

That Guardians of the Galaxy picture up top is one of my favorite things he’s done, just because it emphasizes something that some animator or comics artist once said, but I can’t for the life of me remember who: that a recognizable silhouette is key in creating a new costumed character. There are thousands of superheroes and villains who’ve been dreamt up over the decades, but the most iconic, the most legendary, almost all of those are instantly recognizable just from their silhouette. Or their shadow, as the case may be.

Once again, the internet has reached deep into its depths and gifted to me something I didn’t know I always needed. We’ve seen no end of clever creativity devoted to the shows and movies and books we love, but this is one that puts a big silly grin on my face because it’s an idea that seems obvious in retrospect, and it’s executed really well. A big GFR tip o’ the hat goes to graphic artist Mr. Whaite, who has created animated gifs that pay homage to many beloved pop culture classics in the form of “neon signs.”

Honestly, I’m slapping myself for not coming up with this idea myself. I’m probably being a little hard on myself though, since I haven’t the foggiest how to go about creating an animated gif. I’d probably end up accidentally decapitating myself if I even tried.