I’ve been slack on updates lately. Sorry about that. I’ve been a little bit busy with other things since my father passed away a couple of months ago.
Anyway, here’s a few items I picked up for a great price. I’d been after these for a while, but they’ve been really hard to track down at a price I was willing to pay. Then suddenly they came up one day as a group, so I jumped at the chance to add them to my collection.
The three items are from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, starring Johnny Depp, Keira Knightly and the elf from Lord of the Rings. While they aren’t my favourite movies, I do like them and watch them from time to time. My sister, however, loves Johnny Depp and so when the chance to grab some props from Pirates came up, the opportunity to gloat was too strong to resist.
The first item is the Elizabeth Swann necklace made from one of the cursed Aztec coins that are a central part of the plot of the first movie. I was lucky enough to get a separate coin as well, which is fun to just play with. It has a good texture and weight to it, so it’s a good one to flip and toss. I was a little disappointed with the size of the coins when they arrived. For some reason I thought they’d be bigger, but looking at them on-screen I guess they’re about the right size.
The second pirate object is the key to Davey Jones’ Locker, which was part of the third movie in the series. I’d probably not have bothered with this one, personally, but it was part of the deal and so I took it. As it turned out I got all three for the price it would have cost me to buy just the Swann necklace on its own.
All three items are from the now defunct Master Replicas company. They turn up from time to time on Ebay, and you get usually get some decent deals at Amazon.
Finally arriving to my collection is the TARDIS key. In particular the Pertwee/Baker key, or “Spade” key as it’s known. As part of the purchase I picked up the other fan style key, though I’m not really too invested in that one. There’s also another style used by the oldest and newest groups of Doctors, but it’s a regular looking regular key and not too stunning visually.
I’ve been after one of these Spade type keys for years, and when I got into the prop collecting it was one of the main items on my want list. The trouble is that there are so many versions for sale and a lot of them are really poor quality. If you browse through Ebay for example, you’ll find many that have very plain tops or are made from poor quality materials.
This is actually the second time I bought a key, but had some issues getting it. I bought it from a guy in England and it was a quality piece for a very good price. When it came in the post though, I was in for a shock. The package was sliced open up one side with a nice clean cut, and the key was missing. I put in a claim with the Postal Service but had pretty much written it off after I hadn’t heard anything for a few months. Then one day they sent me a cheque out of the blue to cover the costs. It didn’t quite cover what I spent, but it was better than nothing.
Being so disappointed in the theft of my key, I let it go for a long time until I happened across the one I bought. The store had two versions, one in shiny metal and the other in a weathered metal. As you can see from the picture, I went with the weathered version. It’s got much more character.
Latest prop replica is none other than the Brady Bunch “Cursed Tiki” from the three episode arc where the family visited Hawaii.
While away on vacation, the Brady boys were exploring a construction site when Bobby found a small carved statue, or tiki, half buried in the dirt. He cleaned it up and wore it on a leather necklace as a good luck charm. Little did he know that from that moment, the bearer of the Tiki was cursed!
That night, while sitting on the bed, Bobby was almost crushed by a heavy falling shield. Later, Peter was attacked by a giant deadly tarantula. Later, Alice hurt her back and Greg was almost drowned while surfing!
Hilariously, every time someone was hit with the bad luck effect, the camera would zoom into the Tiki and a particular sound would play. “NEH NE NEHHH!”
My replica is a really nice resin cast, which I painted with a black undercoat. Over time I dry brushed it with a light ivory colour to build up the detail. I gave it a few brown washes along the way to simulate dirt in the grooves after it had been buried. Once it was done I attached a leather cord so it could be worn.
Also, the TV show Scrubs had an episode called “My Soul On Fire“ where two of the cast got Tikis and wore them throughout. The Tiki on that episode is not the same as the proper Brady Tiki featured in that series. Sorry Scrubs Fans.
Click the links in the text for the Scrubs Tiki and part of the Brady Bunch episodes. You can watch the full episodes on Youtube if you like.
The day I finished my Tiki I found my car has a leak in the radiator. NEH NE NEHHH!
While I don’t think Picard is better than Kirk, I do much prefer Star Trek : The Next Generation to the original series. As a sci-fi nerd and now a prop collector, I jumped at the chance to pick up one of the stranger Trek props to come onto the market.
By the third season of The Next Generation (TNG), old Captain Picard was getting a little frazzled, having zipped around the universe saving humanity time and again. In the episode “Captain’s Holiday”, Commander Riker suggested Picard visit the resort planet called Risa. Risa is basically a paradise world, full of sexy women and the perfect climate for some R&R. Secretly poking a little fun at his Captain, Riker asked Picard to pick him up a souvenir while he was away.
Little did Picard know that the item Riker requested was a Risan fertility idol, known as a Horga’hn, displayed by people requesting jamaharon, a sexual act performed by the beautiful Risans.
Later, in the follow-up series Deep Space Nine, some of the members of that show also visit Risa and again the Horga’hn featured in the episode. It showed up in various other TNG episodes and also in the Enterprise series at the end of Star Trek’s run.
My Horga’hn arrived unpainted, made from resin and I spent quite a while preparing it and painting it up as best I could. As a finishing touch I added some gold around the top of the head as displayed on Picard’s version of the idol. In the pictures below it shows up a little more red than in person, and the details aren’t as strong.
A few entries back I told you about my NCIS cup with the Caf-Pow label. At the end of that entry I mentioned I’d tell you about Bert the farting hippo.
Abby Sciuto has a stuffed companion which makes an appearance in some of the episodes, and it was quite the challenge to put him together. Doing all the prop stuff is fun, no doubt, but people certainly look at you funny when you tell them you collect various objects. This time though, I’m off the hook.
This one’s for my old ma.
I don’t even really watch NCIS all the time, to be honest. Sometimes I put it on when I come home from work, but I probably haven’t ever sat down and watched a full episode. Mum, however, loves it and so for Mother’s Day I wanted to get her something special. Bert had been done by others before, both on the RPF and elsewhere. There’s even a website called Farting Hippo which sells a whole bunch of them. They’re ok, but none of them are accurate.
My research into Bert took me to many web sites and forums, but people claimed to have ‘the exact type’ used in the show. In fact I don’t think I found any that were the accurate hippo. I wasn’t too bothered about the farting noise at the time, because I saw several tutorials on how to make a farting mechanism on Youtube and other fan sites. Getting that done would be pretty easy. I needed the proper hippo though.
After weeks of searching I found one that was very close. One member on the RPF had also done a lot of research and was telling people this was ‘the one’ used in the show. (See Image 1) It was a mother and baby hippo which were loosely stitched, and he had converted it to fit. Others were insisting that it was a hippo purchased only at IKEA as decoration for a child’s room. (See Image 2) There were many others that were obviously wrong.
Eventually I decided on the mother/baby hippo. There were certain characteristics that matched the one on the show, but the feet were wrong and it had the wrong eyes. I was running out of time though, but something stopped me from putting down the money.
Then, I found this-
If you watch from about 3:30 Pauley Perrette confirms he’s not a plush exactly, but a puppet. This was a major breakthrough in finding the proper hippo because it cut out the ones I’d already found out of the equation immediately. Doing a google search for “Hippo Puppet” I came across the Folkmanis range of puppets. Incidentally they’re also the ones who provide all the puppets for the Craig Ferguson Late Late Show of which I am also a massive fan.
Sure enough, they had the right puppet. So I went to Ebay and lay my money down on a puppet, and a cheap whoopee cushion for about $5 from Hong Kong (See Image 3) to insert inside.
After a week or two Bert arrived and Mum loved it. I didn’t have a collar yet, and hadn’t stitched in the whoopee cushion, but she managed to track a good collar down pretty fast. She seemed reluctant to do the whoopee interior, and for some reason I was too.
You see, in the show, he farts a lot. Well, the puppet doesn’t, they add it in as an audio effect in post production. Still, as Bert he should fart. People who’ve made their own Bert have used a combination of whoopee cushion with a cardboard surround to get the sound effect. Had I done so though, he would have become much harder and less comfortable to hold. You also have to get the cushion at just the right angle, and since Mum is getting on in years, she had trouble squeezing the cushion in the first place.
Back to Ebay I went, and found an electronic fart machine with a remote control (See Image 4). It was small enough to slip into the ‘hand grip’ part of the puppet and also had the bonus of having the remote. It was also loud, and had 13 different sounds. It was MUCH better than a whoopee cushion and I recommend you go that way instead of surgery on your puppet.
After a few weeks Bert was complete. Mum sits with him at the foot of her recliner, and when she goes to bed at night, she wraps him in a blanket so he won’t get cold.
I guess I could have bought any old hippo, and she wouldn’t have noticed. She’d have been happy with the plush toy and the extra farting amusement from time to time. I’m glad I put in the extra effort though. Sometimes the hunt is what makes it all worthwhile. Plus I like hearing the old girl laugh every single time Bert breaks wind.
Image 1 (Mother & Baby)
Image 2 (IKEA Hippo)
Image 3 (Self Inflating Whoopee Cushion)
Image 4 (Fart Machine)
Mum's Bert
Folkmanis Label
Here’s a short video clip of Mum’s Bert in action.
Not sure if you watch NCIS, but if you do you’ll be very familiar with the rather unusual forensic specialist Abby Sciuto. Abby has a strong personality, dresses in a Gothic style and Pauley Perrette plays her well. A month or so past, 8 perf from the RPF came up with the idea of a label for a cup of Caf-Pow, the fake energy drink often seen in the show. After some combination of label printing and cup gathering, I was lucky enough to pick up a couple of labels. Sticking them onto the cups provided by another RPF member; Rebelscum, and some careful positioning allowed me to have a pair of these 64oz. beauties in my collection.
Check back in a few weeks and you’ll see a partner of the Caf-Pow cup, Abby’s plush hippo side-kick, Bert the farting hippo.
Since it first started, I’ve loved the show, Dexter. The award-winning series about a serial killer played by Michael C. Hall has been running for four seasons, with season five on the way. From a prop collecting point of view, the prize from the show has got to be Dexter’s slide case, which contains a drop of blood from each of his unfortunate victims. The case is about 30cm long and 10cm wide, made of a nice varnished wood. Inside the case is a series of slots to hold about 50 glass slides.
On the RPF, a chap named GeneralFROSTY had commissioned his father to make a run of the slide boxes. Although expensive, the quality is great and they were produced and shipped really fast. For a while there was a bit of a war going on between a few parties interested in making the ‘definitive case’ but two of them seem to have withdrawn the offer. I’m sure they would have all made excellent replicas, but the GeneralFROSTY is the one that was produced, and so I put my name down as a buyer.
Annoyingly, it didn’t arrive in perfect condition, having traversed the globe via the United States Postal Service. Although well packed and clearly marked fragile, when I lifted the slide case out of the box, I heard the unpleasant sound of sliding glass. When I carefully unlatched the lid, I was greeted with a fine spray of powdered glass fragments. Luckily it was only about 10 of the 40 or so slides inside, and it wasn’t too hard to clean up. The box itself was damaged also, with one of the nubs on the grooves snapped off. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a picture below. I managed to glue it back in place without much trouble. You’d not notice it unless you knew what to look for.
When I get time, I need to add blood to the slides. Although I could have had the makers do that, I chose to purchase clean slides because of the distance the box had to travel. I’m sure customs wouldn’t be too thrilled to open it up and find a bunch of bloody slides all lined up in a row. Hopefully the blood will be fairly simple to do, once I figure out a nice and stable way to do it.
The box looks magnificent up close. It almost makes me want to go out and bump someone off to put in it. Hi FBI flag. Just kidding.
As you know, paper props have been my main interest lately, and I made up another one recently. You may remember the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, or the terrible remake with Johnny Depp, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” a few years ago. If not, it was about a crazy confectioner named Willy Wonka, who held a competition for the people of the world to visit his super-secretive factory so that the best of the applicants could take over when he passes away. To find worth candidates, he releases five golden tickets in his chocolate bars and whoever finds them gets to tour the factory. The children are all terrible, hideous people with the exception of Charlie, a kind-hearted boy from the poorer side of town.
I’ve always liked the first one and so I hunted around for some source images and gradually put together a decent copy of the ticket that I could print at a nice resolution. While I’m 100% happy with the ticket itself, I’m not so happy with the printed version. In the film, the ticket looks to be some sort of gold foil, with the words stamped on. Because I’m limited to my inkjet printer, printing on foil isn’t an option. I tried, and it was a disaster. The ink won’t stick, and that which does stay on the foil fades away to nothing in a few hours. So, heading off to Officeworks I bought some gold printer paper and tried again. It’s good for what it is, but it’s not the gold foil I wanted. Maybe at some point I’ll find a place that can do foil stamping and try again. The ticket looks good, but only if you don’t really compare it to the screen-used one too closely.
Sorry about the horrible picture, it doesn’t photograph well.
The latest prop acquisition is perhaps the most stupid I’ve bought, because I don’t really have anywhere to put it, and I didn’t really like the movie it was from anyway. Yeah ok… It’s still pretty cool. It’s a crystal skull from the latest Raiders movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It’s made from clear resin and is really big and heavy. While not nearly as huge as the one in the film, it’s plenty big enough for me, coming close to 40cm long and maybe 17cm wide and tall. It’s hollow underneath, which is fine because I bought a really nice LED light I can put under it to make it glow in an eerie fashion. I probably wouldn’t have worried about it if it were just featured in the movie, but I’ve long been interested in the real crystal skulls found around the world and said to be made by various cultures. Like most things mystical and strange, there’s a lot of untruths out there, but it makes for some interesting reading.
If you’ve read the previous entries to this blog, you’ll know I’ve been getting into movie props and the like, particularly maps. I’ve found some nice frames that don’t cost the earth, and I’ve been working on some other things as well.
First is one I didn’t make. Hell, I wish I could. I’ve had possession of the Gold Idol from Raiders of the Lost Ark for many years now, and at the time my friend bought a replica of the Headpiece to the Staff of Ra at the same time. The Staff of Ra is used by Indiana Jones to find the location of the Ark of the Covenant, and before that it’s carried on a chain by Indy’s ex flame Marion Ravenwood. The Headpiece plays a large part in the movie, much larger than the Gold Idol and I finally got a hold of one that was within my price range. When I got it, it was a bright shiny gold, and since the original prop isn’t bright gold, and actually made of brass, I carefully used some brown and black paint to age it. I’m really happy with how it turned out.
The second item is a Space Marine purity seal from the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The Space Marines are super soldiers living in a future universe in a constant battle against the forces of Chaos, the scheming Eldar and the Ork hordes. The Space Marines wear huge power armour and follow in the footsteps of the mighty God-Emperor of Mankind. Each Chapter, or battle-group of Space Marines have their own unique characteristics and each fan will have their own favourites. Originally starting as a series of board and table top games by Games Workshop, the 40K universe has since expanded into books, multiple game forms including PC and Console and soon it will hit the screens as a motion picture.
Space Marines are very devout and the technology they use is a mix of magic and machine with heavy splashes of religion. Because it’s a little out of my league to build a full set of Space Marine armour, I decided to try making a purity seal. These seals are worn on the armour or weapon of a Space Marine and are covered in prayers and litanies to help protect them in battle. There are various designs and prayers, all of which do certain tasks. To be given a purity seal is a great honour. To make it, I used a blob of DAS modelling clay, flattened out a ball and sculpted the skull with various sculpting tools. I think the originals are some sort of wax, or at least that’s the impression I get. To that end I tried to make mine look a bit blobby and ‘pressed in’ like a seal should be. I never was much of a sculptor, but it looks ok to me. Once dry I painted it up with acrylic paints and highlighted the high parts and washed the low parts to give it a more 3d and wax look. Once that dried I hit it with a coat of clear spray to protect it.
The parchment is just a litany I found on the web and positioned in Publisher. I printed it out and trimmed the edges and aged it with my trusty coffee.
Finally I’ve been working on yet another map, this one is Thror’s map to the Lonely Mountain from the Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. There are a bunch of versions of this map around, and the one in the Lord of the Rings movie is different to the one shown in the original book. To that end, I decided to go with the one in the book as I think it looks more hand-made. I tidied it up and changed the red parts to red in Photoshop, added the border and faded out the runes. The runes are only meant to show up in moonlight or something. On my print-out they’re still visible, but only if you look really hard. I took it off to Officeworks to get it printed, as my computer still has no printer set up. I think the ink will run anyway.
So, once printed I soaked it in coffee, just one application this time as it’s not as worn as the other maps, and tore up the edges and made the folds. I used much the same technique as suggested by Jheilman of the RPF forum, but modified it a little to suit myself. His map looks great, but it’s the one from the movie which I really didn’t want. Once trimmed up I put it in one of the frames I bought. No pictures yet because I haven’t make the little plaque for it yet since I have no printer. I have some test plaques done, but I’m not 100% sure what I’ll go with. I need to see them printed and in the frame first.
I’ll show you once I’m finished. Here’s some pics-
