I think the most famous/beloved/notorious version of this is the guy in Star Wars running around with a completely unaltered off the shelf ice cream maker.
I just found that link through Google, but that is apparently a whole subreddit devoted to this type of use of modern objects getting repurposed as some fantastical movie/TV props.
Sure looks like an electric ice cream maker but it's not the exact model pictured. Look at the pattern of vents on top of the motor, how far the "arms" overhang the pot, and the thickness of the pot lip for example. ;)
My favorite example is in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where one of Captain Pike's hobbies is cooking. Real cooking with fresh ingredients, not replicated food.
Pike grew up on a ranch in Montana, where his family used Lodge cast iron pans. Cast iron isn't perfect for cooking - the heat distribution is mediocre - but one thing you can say about it is that it will outlive you.
Even if it gets rusty from neglect, you can sand it down, re-season it, and it will be as good as new!
I don't know if they make it explicit in the show, but I have a feeling that Captain Pike's pans were handed down from generation to generation, so naturally he brought his family's old cast iron pans with him on the Enterprise.
My mother-in-law (from Alabama) recently gifted me all _her_ grandmother's cast iron (my wife can't cook). I hope they get passed down for a few more generations!
The Galactica miniseries had a scene near the beginning with a futuristic looking alarm clock on a nightstand. I had that exact same alarm clock, as it was given as a cheapo christmas present to all the student employees in my department at the university.
FWIW Star Wars is set a long time ago, not in the future ;)
I've always liked to imagine any similarities between Star Wars and humanity on Earth is because Star Wars is set so indeterminately long ago that it seems 'plausible' that Star Wars is all really true, and if we build the right telescope and point it at the right galaxy, perhaps we can watch the Rebels fight the Empire IRL!
Maybe it depicts a part of this galaxy history. I like to believe that work of art that touches us, stay in our memory, has some truth into it that fascinate us.
We are strongly led to believe we are alone in the universe, and that we are the first human like specie in the whole universe and our solar system to ever have existed. Believing otherwise is pure heresy. What is left for us to contact part of the world that we know exist but that "can't be real because that would be heresy" ?
In The Expanse, a painted Ikea "washcloth hanger" that looks like an octopus is actually a game for special childrens. Also a 3d connexion space mouse is used to control the rocci. I kind of hate spotting them tho.
The Expanse used a ton of off-the-shelf props; most of them were used cleverly enough that they didn't stand out too badly. My personal favorite was a couple of laptop coolers used as "vents" in a maintenance passage: https://i.redd.it/rn2iac41t8h51.jpg
> Also a 3d connexion space mouse is used to control the rocci.
Did you know that the SpaceMouse got developed by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) as DLR SpaceMouse for controlling robot arms in space?
As I looked through the shots of the chairs in the episodes, I noticed that the old shows had some wild lighting: sometimes like a Halloween set, sometimes like a task light was just set up on a tripod next to the camera, and sometimes like a cube farm. The new shows all seem to go for web developer's / Twitch streamer's dungeon with no overhead lighting, wall-mounted spotlights, and RGB rim lights everywhere.
Arg! I can't find it now but a while back I read an amazing article discussing the set design on the original series; particularly for the alien planets. From what I recall, their overall assessment was that the set designers used strong color design and bold shapes to compensate for their lack of budget. In that respect, while later entries in the series had much "better" sets, TOS had the strongest aesthetic.
> From what I recall, their overall assessment was that the set designers used strong color design and bold shapes to compensate for their lack of budget.
I thought it was specifically because of (1) the color film process used at the time required it for faithful (-ish) reproduction, and (2) the need to make something that looked good on both black and white and color TVs, as lots of people were still using black and white.
The original Star Trek sets made a lot of use of gobos, patterned metal shadow casters placed in front of lights. You can see some uses of them in pictures here:
and you can take the above tour and see them in use yourself. They were made of metal because the lights were hot. Some sources for them, if you want to play with your own, are old metal pot holders and small cast iron table tops. They usually welded a rod to them to attach them to the light fixtures using standard lighting rod clamps so they'd be stable. Cast iron is heavy, aluminum pot holders are preferred and they disippate heat better.
Lighting in black and white movies was much more important where you didn't have the additional dimension of color. My understanding was the Star Trek lighting team came with black and white experience.
Not exactly the same, but I love the actor's "lighting" in old German expressionist silent films. Often, instead of using actual lighting, shadows and highlights were applied to actor's faces manually using makeup.
If anyone wants to take a look, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has some great examples.
I notice in old James Bond movies (and others) the lighting was rather simplistic. A big spotlight casting harsh shadows on the walls behind the main actors that don't make any sense if you stop to think about it. It seems more thought / technique is put into lighting design these days and it's probably better, though of course our current age has its own cliches (the Twitch dungeon style for example)
My son and I just watched our way through the Bond movies, and I remember this exactly. Was it “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” or one of the later Roger Moore gigs? I remember that one in particular was lit and shot exceptionally poorly.
This isn’t a matter of time period, it’s skill and attention. At the time of the Bond films it was well-known how to do good lighting, and people had been doing it for decades. Contrast the crappy Bond films with any beautiful old movie, like “The Third Man” or “Citizen Kane,” still legendary for great cinematography.
Someone in the props department had a massive furniture budget. I love it.
It reminds me how the "chair" is one of those objects supposedly so hard to classify for things like machines, a little easier for humans. Although may of these designs cause even my brain to struggle with, "Is that a chair?" Some reminded me of the Wood Allen bit from Sleeper:
One of the benefits of Hollywood is rental and studio stock. Many of these sets are one-off or occasional, and the furniture would return after the shoot.
I was asked to build an electronic prop for a movie once and the strangest question to me was "how do we return it to you?"
Made no sense to me: you're paying me to build you a custom object, why would I want it back? Until I realized that so much stuff in movies is just rented: they wouldn't even have a place to store it after the production is over.
I read that one of HBO MAX’s key advantages over Netflix is that WB has a century worth of costumes and props in the archive that are available and catalogued for any new production. Whereas Netflix shows pretty much throw away everything when a shoot is done.
this is sort of dying. there are only one or two major prop houses still running. Sony just shut theirs down and they were one of the last studios to have their own prop warehouse. several specialty shops remain, but they seem much more limited in selection.
Less so than you may think, at least for the initial run for the show. Most mid-century modern furniture was designed to be cheap enough for the middle class/upper-middle class (although the show did tend to use more-expensive leather variants), which brought it relatively wide popularity. That popularity would later cause an increase in price as they became notable objects.
I'm surprised they don't seem to have an entry for one of the more recognizable mug from Star Trek - the one they drank coffee from on the Defiant in Star Trek: DS9. It was present in many episodes of the Dominion War arc.
The mug itself (a Thermos mug from the 90s) is an absolute pain to find anywhere, but I've managed to secure two of them last year (with shipping prices that would embarrass even a Ferengi) and did the necessary conversions:
I gave one out as a gift, the other I've been using every day for over a year now. Got so used to it, I don't know how I'll ever be able to replace it.
I cannot fathom how someone has the attention to analyze these shows to note the chairs being used. Frankly, the Stokke Globe Garden is so far in the background of the Lower Decks screen capture that I can't understand how someone picked up on it.
Usually it’s a group of people who do so to receive social credit from each other on a successful entry. Us humans are designed to do all sorts of unpleasant weird shit for social credit.
A friend of mine has that chair or a copy of it. I'll ask if it's original.
It's a tall chair and one must climb it, then you can look at the other people from above. Not uncomfortable but not comfortable too. We call it the Klingon Chair.
In a world where "inertial dampeners" exist and making invisible forcefields is pedestrian, physical seatbelts aren't terribly important. If inertial dampeners outright fail in a spacecraft designed for them you can expect to be reduced to a souplike homogenate whether you're wearing a seatbelt or not.
Appears to be missing the painfully bog-standard office roller chair used in the center of the court in the courtroom episode of TNG where Data needs to plead with Starfleet not to be disassembled for research.
It might be on there, it’s a huge list, but I could not find it.
Sure looks like what I was remembering! The listed `TNG: "The Drumhead"` also sure looks like the courtroom I remember but is not the episode I was referring to. I may have been remembering the wrong courtroom episode, I was thinking it was from “Measure of a Man” but all my Googling only shows red more interesting chairs in that episode.
I’ll need to do some digging through the episode when I’m out of this meeting!
I remember my suspension of disbelief being challenged in Star Trek TNG (my favorite) when they started using my Dansk cutlery and also my crystal highball glasses! What are the odds?
We have a bunch of those. A local grocery store used them for deliveries a long time ago and I guess they didn't want them back because we probably accumulated a dozen or so. They are surprisingly well built and held up well to being in the sun for 15 years.
Readit News
- In Luke's home in Star Wars IV there's a lot of Tupperware - https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2014/02/in-praise-of-t...
- In Alien, Ripley drinks from a Tupperware mug - https://twitter.com/EverRotating/status/1156650673972363264
https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/comments/bf20dp/i_p...
I just found that link through Google, but that is apparently a whole subreddit devoted to this type of use of modern objects getting repurposed as some fantastical movie/TV props.
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Camtono
Deleted Comment
Pike grew up on a ranch in Montana, where his family used Lodge cast iron pans. Cast iron isn't perfect for cooking - the heat distribution is mediocre - but one thing you can say about it is that it will outlive you.
Even if it gets rusty from neglect, you can sand it down, re-season it, and it will be as good as new!
I don't know if they make it explicit in the show, but I have a feeling that Captain Pike's pans were handed down from generation to generation, so naturally he brought his family's old cast iron pans with him on the Enterprise.
https://www.foodandwine.com/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-kit...
I've always liked to imagine any similarities between Star Wars and humanity on Earth is because Star Wars is set so indeterminately long ago that it seems 'plausible' that Star Wars is all really true, and if we build the right telescope and point it at the right galaxy, perhaps we can watch the Rebels fight the Empire IRL!
We are strongly led to believe we are alone in the universe, and that we are the first human like specie in the whole universe and our solar system to ever have existed. Believing otherwise is pure heresy. What is left for us to contact part of the world that we know exist but that "can't be real because that would be heresy" ?
Science-fiction, fantasy.
Did you know that the SpaceMouse got developed by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) as DLR SpaceMouse for controlling robot arms in space?
https://www.dlr.de/rm-neu/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-3808/
"Little Tikes kid’s Apollo Space Capsule Toy Chest." - https://third-wave-design.com/2018/11/30/houston-we-dont-hav...
It also pops up in a ton of other places.
Deleted Comment
50 credits, transportable anywhere in the Sol cluster
I thought it was specifically because of (1) the color film process used at the time required it for faithful (-ish) reproduction, and (2) the need to make something that looked good on both black and white and color TVs, as lots of people were still using black and white.
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/mudds-gobos.276831/#post-113...
https://startrektour.com/photo-gallery/our-beautifully-recre...
and you can take the above tour and see them in use yourself. They were made of metal because the lights were hot. Some sources for them, if you want to play with your own, are old metal pot holders and small cast iron table tops. They usually welded a rod to them to attach them to the light fixtures using standard lighting rod clamps so they'd be stable. Cast iron is heavy, aluminum pot holders are preferred and they disippate heat better.
of the scanlines wink
If anyone wants to take a look, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has some great examples.
This isn’t a matter of time period, it’s skill and attention. At the time of the Bond films it was well-known how to do good lighting, and people had been doing it for decades. Contrast the crappy Bond films with any beautiful old movie, like “The Third Man” or “Citizen Kane,” still legendary for great cinematography.
It reminds me how the "chair" is one of those objects supposedly so hard to classify for things like machines, a little easier for humans. Although may of these designs cause even my brain to struggle with, "Is that a chair?" Some reminded me of the Wood Allen bit from Sleeper:
https://youtu.be/H4ZBPz4DinU?si=OM5TOpkumyNwPOvG
Made no sense to me: you're paying me to build you a custom object, why would I want it back? Until I realized that so much stuff in movies is just rented: they wouldn't even have a place to store it after the production is over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardroom
:-)
(That's what came to mind from a few years ago, and I see in the credits this page was inspired/originates from it)
The mug itself (a Thermos mug from the 90s) is an absolute pain to find anywhere, but I've managed to secure two of them last year (with shipping prices that would embarrass even a Ferengi) and did the necessary conversions:
https://fosstodon.org/@temporal/109690528747856580
https://fosstodon.org/@temporal/109677869270157594
I gave one out as a gift, the other I've been using every day for over a year now. Got so used to it, I don't know how I'll ever be able to replace it.
It's a tall chair and one must climb it, then you can look at the other people from above. Not uncomfortable but not comfortable too. We call it the Klingon Chair.
It might be on there, it’s a huge list, but I could not find it.
I’ll need to do some digging through the episode when I’m out of this meeting!
I was tickled when I saw two red-uniform officers carrying them around on TNG.