Working Movie Props | Feature | Charged

WorkingMovieProps

Little Nellie

(You Only Live Twice) James Bond is famous for gadgets from laser beam watches to Aston Martins so tricked out with extras that you don't care about the cup holders. They are flashy, exciting and sometimes it turns out that they actually work. One is Little Nellie, the autogyro from 1967's You Only Live Twice. She may be small enough to be a toy, but she really flies, can lift twice her own weight, be broken up and carried in four largish alligator leather suitcases, and she packs a punch. Sporting machine guns, heat-seeking missiles, flame-throwers, smoke ejectors “aerial mines,” and rocket pods that fire real rockets, she's better armed than most fighter planes. Really, really slow ones, anyway, since she can't do more than 200 km/h.

Reality bites Words: David H. Szondy

Fab movie props that actually functioned

W

ith digital formats, computer graphics, animatronics, and enough money to buy Luxembourg, movies can show anything – even the patently impossible. This can be spectacular in the “giant squid with a million tentacles” sense, but it's all so easy that it soon ceases to impress. However, when you have something that is made to really do what it does on the screen, then you've got something very special indeed. It's movie magic come to life. This is something The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan is very passionate about and the new movie's Batpod bike really works (though is rumored to be very tricky to control). So in celebration of the dark crusader's latest outing, here are a few other movie props that were actually real.

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Batmobile

(Batman Begins) The Batpod's big brother from Batman Begins, the Batmobile (aka The Tumbler aka Wow! What's that?) is a bit different. Where most movie cars are just an ordinary production car chassis with a plastic body slapped on, the Batmobile was engineered from the ground up at a cost of $1.7 million for each of four built – which just goes to show that Bruce Wayne has very deep pockets. Weighing in at two and a half tons, the Batmobile is fifteen feet long, nine feet wide, can go at least 180 km/h, does 0-100 in five seconds, can turn corners AT SPEED, jumps ten metres and shoots real flames out the back.

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WorkingMovieProps

HMS Bounty

(Mutiny on the Bounty) When Warner Brothers remade Mutiny on the Bounty in 1962, they could have used an old schooner or studio sets and models. Instead, they found the original plans of HMS Bounty and built their own. Of course, being Hollywood, Warner made theirs better and bigger – one third bigger, in fact and twice as heavy so there'd be enough room for the cameras and other equipment. She also differs from the original in having a 375 hp diesel engine because it ran into money having her tack under sail for half the afternoon for another take. Amazingly, they'd planned to burn her for the climax of the film, but Warner thought better in the end and Bounty is still sailing and making pictures to this day.

Frankenstein Laboratory

Octopus

Phoenix

Diving Suit

Nowadays when you see lightning bolts flashing around in movies it's almost certainly the work of animation or CGI, but that sort of thing wasn't available when Universal started making Frankenstein films in the 1930s. So they built a real mad scientist's laboratory with real lightning blasting all over the place. True, Dr. Frankenstein's machines couldn't bring a monster to life, but the machines did generate literally millions of volts of electricity and sent it arcing and booming all over the place, scaring safety inspectors. Perhaps it's just as well that the machines didn't really work or the famous line “It's alive!” might have ended up “It's hiding under the table!”

Time for the ultimate non-working prop. Always a stickler for perfection and cinematic quality, Ed Wood wanted the best for the spectacular battle between mad scientist and monster that ended his 1955 epic Bride of the Monster, so he... um... “borrowed” a rubber octopus from the Republic Pictures warehouse. Unfortunately, he forgot to take the octopus motor as well. Since an inert rubber sea monster is somewhat lacking in drama, star Bela Lugosi helped in his own watery death by wrapping the tentacles around himself while screaming. To be fair, an “octopus motor” is not something one expects to be on the lookout for.

We're making a picture about some men who escape from the desert by building an aircraft from pieces of their crashed one. How? Build a real aircraft out of pieces of another plane. Three other planes, actually. Where the 2004 remake of the Flight of the Phoenix used a model, the 1965 version's Phoenix P-1 was cobbled together from a T-6, a C-45, and an L-17 with bits of a T-11 thrown in for good measure and powered by a “like-new” Pratt & Whitney radial engine.

Then they had to make another plane because the P-1 didn't fly very far before it broke up and killed her pilot.

There is such a thing as too much realism, I suppose.

Walt Disney's 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea set a new standard for underwater film making. For the crew of the Nautilus, Disney had eighteen diving suits built as part of an undersea film operation so innovative that the US Navy sent observers to pick up a few pointers. Weighing 90kg each, the Nautilus diving suits were an experimental design that combined hard hat and scuba technology with a specially-made dry suit. Not only did they look like an authentic piece of Victorian hardware, but they actually worked very well as real diving suits. Mind you, it is a good thing that they did, otherwise the actors would have drowned and that puts a crimp in the shooting schedule.

(Bride of Frankenstein)

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(Bride of the Monster)

(Flight of the Phoenix)

(20,000 Leagues Under the Sea)

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