What are your picks? Let’s say it has to have some real-world non-effects component, so a lightsaber is fine, but a purely CGI “prop” is out – someone was going to say lightsaber anyhow, and I’d like to hear your argument for it anyway.
I keep thinking of Back to the Future’s DeLorean time machine and the Ghostbuster’s proton packs. Both seem to stem from the eighties tech look of vaguely ominous wires, tubes, and molded shapes that must house something. They looked clunky, yet cutting end back then. I suppose that perfectly reflects the two mad scientist who designed them in story.
Aliens was… er, is the prop nirvana in my opinion. Everything from the scenery, ships, guns, combat gear, etc, etc… is a top notch production design stuff.
Most of my friends are complete geeks for this stuff, and have a healthy collection of props and costumes from various genre movies. In fact a couple of them are sculptors and make their own stuff where they can, such as Aughra from The Dark Crystal, or a working R2-D2, or a complete Darth Vader suit.
Personally, if I could get a unique(ish) prop of my own, I’d like a Neverending Story book, or a Glaive from Krull.
The Maltese Falcon was sold at auction in 1994, fetching a sum just shy of $400,000. I don’t think that’s been beaten. On the other hand, I could swear I read recently that a pair of Oz slippers (four were used in the film) went up for auction very recently. I could be imagining this.
There is an unbelievable short story by Bentley Little called “The Idol” which answers the question of what happened to the lug-wrench that James Dean throws off the cliff in Rebel Without A Cause.
Two teenage boys get it into their heads that the wrench must still be down there somewhere in the woods, that the prop department would just have had multiple wrenches for the different takes and that they never would have bothered going back down and getting it. They figure that they could sell the wrench as a collectible on eBay and make a lot of money. So they track down the location where the scene was filmed, and begin searching in the woods…
and they come upon a shed. Inside the shed, the lug-wrench is embedded in a concrete floor and sticking up vertically. The walls of the shed are completely covered with Polaroid pictures of women fucking the lug-wrench. (A little detail that I love - there are so many photos that when you peel back one photo from the wall, there are other layers underneath it, and the kids can see different hairstyles from different generations and it’s obvious that this practice has been going on for a long time.) It turns out there’s some bizarre cult of women who ritualistically fuck themselves with the lug-wrench as a form of James Dean-worship…and then the narrator later discovers that his own girlfriend is part of it, along with all of the women in his hometown.
The Time Machine from the original 1960 George Pal film is my favorite movie prop of all time. The machine from the 2002 version is impressive, but I prefer the original.
[hijack] For Halloween the year Ghostbusters came out, my son went as a ghostbuster. Wife made him a jump suit and I had to make the proton pack.
1 shoe box, 2 2-liter soda bottles, some rubber hose and a toy gun all sprayed silver made it look very realistic.[/hijack]
I thought that was pretty clear. You have to be able to actually hold or touch at least part of it. So no cartoons, Jurassic Park dinos, etc. The lightsaber has a real handle, so it’s good.
Hitchcock used a lot of them: The “A to G” lighter in Strangers on a Train, the cellar key in Notorious, mom’s wig and dress and knife in Psycho, the bomb in Sabotage, the chest in Rope, the ring in Shadow of a Doubt, the handcuffs in The 39 Steps, etc.
There’s also the Henry Moore sculpture in The Object of Beauty
Changing the OP’s question slightly from “greatest prop”, which would require lists in a whole lot of different categories, to “prop I would most like to own”, I’d say one of the scal models of the Nautilus from Disney’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Some suggested categories for cool props:
Edged Weapons
Projectile Weapons
Energy Weapons
Scale Models (ships, buildings, creatures, etc)
Furniture
Costume Accessories