No Tardis are for sale

I have been looking at some sites. I have found restored British phone booths (5,000 GBP), and nice red British letter boxes for sale. I maintain no company sells reproduction British police call boxes. (I did find instructions on how to make one. That does not count.)

I would like very much for some smart Doper to prove me wrong.

I see a market niche here.

I believe the BBC actually has a copyright on the image of the TARDIS/blue police call box, so that probably figures in to why you can’t find any for sale.

How can they have a copyright on the design of something owned by (some sort of British police organization)?

They don’t.

There aren’t all that many still about, but there are a few:

Glasgow

London

Edinburgh - there’s more than I thought - that crafty bastard Doctor

OK, perhaps I was mistaken then. I thought I had read that somewhere before and looking now, just found this bit on Wikipedia:

OK, so does anyone out there make a full-sized Tardis for the home? I bet it would make a great vestibule for a closet.

Dumb question: What do they have in the blue police boxes? Do Bobbies sit in there feeling down about themselves, or do they store their guns, ammo, and LAW rockets in there? Are they like police ‘sentry’ huts?

Seriously, what are they for? And what happens to the box if it’s unmanned in the middle of a busy street?

Tripler
Curious Yankees want to know–we put our Bobbies on horseback or make 'em walk.

We also have Police call boxes in the USA. It’s a secure land line, that’s all.

In the old days, it was a police telephone. They also contained some first-aid stuff and paperwork the constable might need from day-to-day.

If you mean something like this, which is basically just a telephone, that’s very different from a Tardis style police box, which I have never seen in my decades of living in the United States. As the picture shows, it looks vaguely like an old-fashioned telephone booth, but the phone is actually on the exterior.

Here’s a computer rendering of a police box in use.

Why do I obsess over everything to do with Doctor Who? I think I may have to quite watching once David Tennant leaves. It’s just not healthy.

http://www.thisplanetearth.co.uk/main/page31.html

Caveats:

  1. It’s modeled on the Tardis from the lamentable Peter Cushing movies, which is supposed to be very close in appearance to William Hartnell’s Tardis but differs significantly from the current incarnation. (Although word has it that the St John Ambulance logo is back on Matt Smith’s Tardis.)
  2. It’s extraordinarily expensive.
  3. It does not include a working light (you would think for that kind of money it could include a working light) or travel through space (without an external force) or time (except forward at the rate of one second per second).
  4. Some assembly required.
  5. I can only imagine that if the deliver at all to the United States, the shipping fees would be considerable. On the other hand, you can pick it up in Slough.
  6. It is not guaranteed waterproof or durable.

The same company also offers to build Daleks and Cybermen for you (also sadly nonfunctional).

It is, there’s on-set photos. Matt’s Doctor is being filmed in proper high-def so there are new props that will look decent under that level of scrutiny. New TARDIS interior too. Can’t wait to see it - hopefully it isn’t going to be the “Leopardskin” desktop. :wink:

Thank you TWDuke, we have a vendor.

http://www.thisplanetearth.co.uk/main/page31.html

Indeed, that’s more or less what it is a Police call phone with a telephone booth. Telephone booths themselves are quite rare in the USA.

FWIW, there were at least one booth-type police box in use on Long Island NY when I was a kid (1960s). It was in Lake Ronkonkoma.

“FWIW, there were at least one booth-type police box in use on Long Island NY when I was a kid (1960s). It was in Lake Ronkonkoma.”

Actually there are a number (dozens probably, I couldn’t find a count) of police booths in use currently in Nassau County, (Long Island NY).
Here is an image of one, in the ‘wood shed’ style (again, not sure if this particular one still exists, but ones like it are in use), and there are others done in brick. None that I have seen look like Tardi, or even remotely British, though.

Yes, but they were common enough here recently that one could be used as a disguised for a time capsule in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) without the teenage protagonists having to ask “What’s a phone booth?”, just as no one in London in 1963 had to ask the Doctor “What’s a police call box?”

I’m honestly not sure if you’re having a laugh or you don’t understand that when the OP asks about reproduction British police call boxes he is not talking about a “a secure land line,” but a structure that’s about 10 feet tall with windows and a door and was once common in London. The fact that he uses the word “Tardis” suggest that he specifically means one that looks something like this. The phone is almost incidental.

Really, it’s kind of like responding to a post asking where you can get good British-style fish and chips by saying you know a deli that serves tuna salad and a bag of Doritos. Some of the words may be the same, but it’s a very different concept.

A friend of mine found a guy who was willing to build him a modular TARDIS. Certain parts will be interchangeable to match each generation of TARDIS throughout the series.

You can do such things for non-profit, I think, but anyone who builds props like this and gets paid for it is technically in breach of a copyright, or trademark, or some such thing.

Except that I wasn’t responding to the OP, I was responding to " Originally Posted by **Tripler **
*Dumb question: What do they have in the blue police boxes? Do Bobbies sit in there feeling down about themselves, or do they store their guns, ammo, and LAW rockets in there? Are they like police ‘sentry’ huts?

Seriously, what are they for? And what happens to the box if it’s unmanned in the middle of a busy street?"
*

They have Police Call boxes in the USA. Now they don’t look like a Tardis, much, true. But they have call boxes that serve the exact same function, and even those that have a large phone booth like enclosure with them.

So the question was- what was the purpose of a Police Box and why do just Bobbies need them, as opposed to American police. My answer explained the purpose and went on to show they have a similar purpose box right here in the USA. Americans are often honestly puzzled as to what the purpose of the non-Tardis actual boxes was.

My answer was in no way to help the OP, but to answer Tripler, as should have been clear from the context.