Last night we were watching the end of the 1944 MGM film An American Romance, in which the protagonist emigrates from Czechoslovakia and and succeeds in America as a manufacturer. At the end (it’s 1944, remember), his factory is turning out military aircraft. We get a good look at factory workers assembling the main pieces of the aircraft, and to my untutored eye, it all looked surprisingly modern considering that this film is 68 years old. Besides, the quality of the print was very high, which may have some bearing on what follows.
Unfortunately what I want to ask about involves something that happened a little too fast for me to accurately describe, but here goes. I believe they were assembling the tailgunner’s assembly that goes in the clear “bubble” in the back of the plane. Or it’s possible that the “bubble” would protrude from the bottom of the fuselage, because at a key point in the sequence, it appeared that the final assembly is attached at the top. There was something strangely familiar about this roughly spherical component as it was being hoisted into position, and I couldn’t quite place it. Then it hit me: this strangely familiar object was none other than the EVA pod from 2001, made 24 years later! Well, I could be wrong, but the shape seemed exactly right, and all the attachments and appurtenances seemed to be there, right down to the manipulator arms that David Bowman used to capture Frank Poole’s floating corpse in 2001. Moreover, the roundish object even had the flat cylindrical areas at either side from which the manipulator arms protruded, just as in the later film.
Is it possible that this same prop was used in both films? Is there any online repository of information about this sort of thing? The usual film sites don’t seem to help much, nor could I find suitable stills, unfortunately.
Eve, if you’re still about, perhaps you know something.
If you take the lot tour at Universal Studios, they show you the prop warehouse where they store thousands and thousands of props for their films, a lot of which get reused pretty regularly. I assume all the major studios have something similar.
A couple that I’ve caught:
The PKE meter they used in Ghostbusters to detect spooks showed up in They Live as an alien communicator.
The armor worn by the soldiers in Starship Troopers is worn by the Alliance soldiers in Firefly.
And one I only remember half of: in Topsy Turvy, Sullivan has a life-sized wooden statue of a satyr that he keeps in his den as a place for visitors to leave their calling cards. Can’t for the life of me remember what other movie I saw that in, though.
In his 1974 film Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks used the same mad scientist electronic gadgets from the original 1931 Frankenstein. So that’s 43 years right there.
Robbie the Robot, from Forbidden Planet (1956) and was used in several movies and TV shows down through the years, ending in an AT&T commercial in 2006, so that’s 50 years. He’s now in the Robot Hall of Fame. They also reused the base of the transporter from Star Trek: The Old Stuff as the ceiling of the transporter for Star Trek: The New Guys, which is about a 20-year gap.
Stanley Kubrick famously destroyed all the props and models from 2001 at the completion of the film, and even the plans for them. There are pictures of the remains of the Space Station prop out rusting in a London field. When they made the sequel, 2010, they had to reproduce the sets from examination of the film, since not even the plans still existed. So whatever you saw wasn’t an original pod from 2001.
Often props are re-used, sometimes very deliberately. The original Martian Mastermind from the 1953 Invaders from Mars is visible in the background of a basement in the 1986 remake 33 years later.
In other cases, it’s not clear to me that the prop used is the actual one from an earlier film or simply a re-creation. I suspect the Maltese Falcon in the 1975 film The Black Bird is a re-creation, and that Bubo the owl in the recent re-make of Clash of the Titans is also a recent construct.
Incidentally, the Kenneth Strickfaden “Frankenstein” equipment wasn’t sittiong long dormant before its re-apprearance in Young Frankenstein – He’d been providing it for TV and movies for years, and it had appeared only two years previously ion Blackenstein
The AN/FSQ-7 SAGE computer banks of consoles with blinking and flashing lights has been appearing as a standard prop in movies and TV series from the 1950s right up until today. It’s a real-life object that has had a long life as a prop for some 60 years. There’s a whole website devoted to it:
Another robot has perhaps a stranger history. A number cut from the 1933 Clark Gable/John Crawford movie Dancing Lady featured a robot. Gable was supposed to be a hot shot choreographer and Crawford a great dancer and the robot was to be an indication he had highly advanced notions about Broadway shows. Somehow the movie is fun anyway. It may be Fred Astaire’s first screen role, although he cameoed as - Fred Astaire.
Anyway, the prop department over at low-budget Mascot Pictures (doesn’t that sound like a fake, parody, name?) pulled the costume out of storage when they made Gene Autry’s sci-fi-oater serial The Phantom Empire. Here’s a pic. I think this set the tone for all the cardboard box robots of the century.
But it still lives!
When Captain Video, the lowest of all the low budget sci-fi kiddie shows debuted on television in 1949, they brought the robot back, possibly for the show, although some say it was a different robot, but definitely for the movie Captain Video, Master of the Stratosphere. Though I’ve read it several places, I can’t confirm that the robot was labeled I TOBOR because somebody stenciled ROBOT 1 on it backward! I’ve never found a picture with lettering to confirm this and if anyone knows of one (or can definitively refute it) I’d offer big thanks.
Though googling, it appears a wrecked EVA pod was in the junkyard in Star Wars I. I can’t find out if it was the actual prop dug out of a trashheap or a recreation though.
The first one I thought of was the light display which represents the computer in the Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn movie “The Desk Set” (1957). It was re-used in “The Fly” (1958) and both the film and TV versions of “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” (1961) and (1964 - 1968).
Props shops have a very incestuous relationship. At our theatre we regularly get calls asking to borrow a prop or a costume or piece of furniture. Some items are very rare and expensive and hard to store. It’s extremely common to loan or lease a prop from one company to another. We have a bulletin board where we keep track of who has what at various times and how much they’ve paid, put down as a damage deposit, etc.
Similarly, we borrow stuff ALL THE TIME from other companies. We’re currently running a production of A Few Good Men and probably 95% of the items on stage belong to other shops. The platforms belong to the arts center, the tables and chairs were borrowed from a local university, the uniforms were rented, the guns were borrowed, the wood to build the guard tower was donated/scavenged. The cable we made barbed wire from is less than borrowed, it’s only strung in a temporary looping/twisting config. When we take the show down we’ll be able to roll it back on the spool(which is tucked under the back of the stage, less than 100 feet from where it would normally live in the scene shop). Performing arts organizations are VERY good at reusing and sharing resources.
I’m the technical producer for the show(think executive producer in a Hollywood context) and I’m coordinating transportation to return items to our warehouse after we strike and I’m looking at getting a tiny UHaul truck because the vast majority of the stuff is going to other shops, staying at the performance space, or just going in a dumpster out back.
So while a control freak like Kubrick may have had everything built(and then destroyed), it’s not unusual at all for films, stage shows, and television productions to share and re-use items.
The floor of the transporter stage in the original Star Trek episodes was used as the top of the transporter stage in the Star Trek Next Generation set.
That is seriously cool. I’m going to have to start looking for that.
And of course, the jacket the Professor Marvel wore in The Wizard of Oz originally belonged to L. Frank Baum, but no one knew that until filming had already begun.
