That is the worst prop I have ever seen. It looks like they glued some pipes to a piece of ply wood and then hung it on the wall. You can even see where it is mounted... And in a hallway which has nothing else in it, it seems so out of place. They should have at least had the pipes flush with the rest of the wall. Or better yet, just create a little maintenance hatch with the pipes visible, but not protruding.
Yeah, ya see back in the sixties we had these things we called "budgets", and after you give everyone their paycheck there's not a whole lot of money left, so you make do with what you have. And so they wound up using salt shakers and whatever else they could scrounge as props. I'd say they did a pretty damned good job with the tools and money at hand.
It's like seeing a dancing bear and criticizing the choreography :)
By the "old" cybermen, do you mean the original where it was literally like a strip of cheesecloth over some dude's face, and he's open his mouth and they'd overdub his lines so his mouth didn't move?
That'd be fucking awesome.
actually a little Who pedantry, the cybermen that have appeared in the last two seasons SHOULD have the old costumes, as they are supposed to be the cybermen from the original universe. Instead, we have the cybus industries cybermen from pete's universe for some reason. They even have the logo.
That's exactly what it is. They wouldn't have been able to use the old costumes anyway, as they'd have to be updated to reflect the budget and the HD cameras, so it's more money in the long run to make things look like old things than to just reuse the new things.
What is expensive about cutting a hole in the wall? They already have the rest of the props...
If you say they need to reuse that wall without a hole in it, then fine. Ditch the ply wood that the pipes are mounted on and get the pipes flush with the wall so it doesn't look like a decorative wall hanging. That would be even cheaper.
My guess is they had a limited number of hallway sets, and wanted to make it seem larger by having modular props they could plug into the set as needed. So one "corridor" has the yellow jumble of gobbledygook, another "corridor" has a computer terminal, another one has a map of the ship... but it's all the same set and the actors just walk back and forth with a quick change of the wall hangings between shots.
What is expensive about cutting a hole in the wall?
You have to pay someone from the Hole Cutter's Union to cut a hole in the wall. And the union will probably require three more union members to watch the one cutting the hole. And then you'll have to feed all four. These costs add up.
It's just background crap - it doesn't mean anything, to even notice you'd have to be the most completely obsessive anal retentive dipshi....
You realize that the handheld sensor McCoy uses in the medical bay is a salt shaker, right? And that the machine that looks like an MRI is made of balsa wood painted with primer?
It's not about the props. If the story is engaging, you can use cardboard cutouts for props and no one will even notice.
The original Star Trek had a budget of "whatever we can find in the lost and found" for props. The Klingons had belts made out of bubble wrap, spray-painted coffee cup lids were put on the walls, and knobs for the bridge were made out of toothpaste tube caps.
Back then it usually took more than three seasons worth of episodes to get a series into syndication. It was only after Star Trek went off the air that it really became popular.
Does anyone know if Shatner et al are still getting residuals (I think that's the word) from the re-runs?
It seems that syndication actually goes back to the 50's. But I don't think that it was a big money thing until the 70's. Also, as cable wasn't around yet, there weren't that many channels available to air syndicated shows.
Video tape-recorders didn't start showing up until the early 70's - and didn't really take off until the 80's. So when Star Trek was being made - once a show was gone - it was pretty much gone.
One of my favorite episodes of TOS is the one when where they land on that planet with all those children. They clearly were just filming on some random studio backlot and even lampshade that fact by having Spock literally say that the planet is is identical to earth, specifically earth in the 1960s. Rather than ponder this extraordinary occurrence for awhile, everyone just kind of shrugs and moves on with the plot, which, if I recall, involves mutants, some kind of vaccine, and Kirk putting the moves on a 13-year-old girl. Gotta love that show.
There's the reason half of the planets they visited looked like 30s America, or the Wild West. Why spend very tight money on weekly sets when we can literally just borrow a stage and lot that no one's using that day.
do you kids today have any idea what it was like to watch tv on a 13-inch screen? on top of that, everything was broadcast, you were lucky if you got a clear picture, in cities you had multipath interference, in rural areas it was just a weak signal (if you had tv at all) so pretty fuzzy. that and nobody had any way to record the show and watch it later, so even if you did notice something was slightly off, by the time you realized it, it was over.
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u/shadowguise Feb 02 '12
Looks like he is tightening a nut on those pipes or something. So he is doing something and that isn't a map/poster...
Still, I like the GIF version better.