hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a friend who's come to visit and show us some
magical things brandon allenger from prop store how are you sir i'm good thanks for having me
out today oh and i'm always happy when you come because you bring amazing things that i feel
like really lucky to get to see prop store has a tremendous auction coming up later this month yeah
it's coming up soon actually november 9th 10th and 11th um this is the catalog which is also online
am i right it is yeah there are some incredible things in here uh which if you're interested you
should bid on and if you're just a prop replicator also prop stores pictures are always reliably
complete i'd love your photo archives um but you have brought something special in here yeah i mean
this auction this is one of our emla auctions or entertainment memorabilia live auction so this is
i would say the signature event where the best items that we've found all year live and we do
one a year in la one a year in london this is the london auction and we have found some
really good things here you know for us we're all fans and collectors ourselves so we love
having things come in the door that we haven't seen before yeah and this is a fresh to market
piece for us this we have not seen or handled before and this is an original weems robot
built by industrial light and magic for batteries not included oh my god now just safely pull it up
there wow oh it's a little puppetable yes yeah those are actually puppeteering rods and i think
the wire is just to sort of keep them from from spreading apart from each other to kind of hold
them in place well it looks like that's also where it gets power for the lighting oh maybe that's it
yes okay yeah which there is a little switch right there oh my god look at that micro switch i might
have seen this or one i saw one of these robots at the california state fair in 1993 or four
oh really there were some there were some display yeah ilm had their own custom display there
and there were a couple of batteries not included robots and it was that was the very first time
i ever saw a piece that had been made for a movie right up close and i remember being like
wow it's it's a little it's not shitty but it's it's way less precise than you understand around
the edges yeah rough around the edges yeah and the character so much character this is an amazing
amazing piece what else did they have at that exhibit just all kinds of different ilm models
yeah and these are the ones i really specifically remember because i remember feeling like i could
see the maker's hand on them and so that's the only thing i remember that's like it took over
my whole brain yeah yeah but i love like the aliens here like cobbled their stuff together
out of stuff they found on earth right yeah and it's i mean they call them the fix-it robots in
the movie and there's at least three different main characters and i think there's the parents
the bigger ships as well yes um the maampa robots and i know ralph mcquarrie had a hand in designing
these he did a bunch of sketches for them which is pretty cool yeah and we actually i think we have
another lot in the auction which i don't have here today but it's actually a 3d model a prototype
that ralph built which is cool because he didn't build a lot of models you know most of this stuff
is 2d but he for whatever reason on this project he built some models i think he liked building
models and sort of always wanted to inch into that world i wish i had known that i've gone over to
his house and built some models yeah i know i know um but it's a great it's a great classic design
everything that came out of that 1980s era at ilm is kind of gold and um i think this is is
no exception you know regardless of what you may think of the film especially 35 later 35
years later the robots the puppets everything to do with the visual effects is fantastic for such
a delicate piece i mean i can see that there might have been an antenna here that's missing but it's
incredibly complete for how delicate it is yeah that's right because you do still have a couple
baby antennas on the back and the sides here and those puppeteering rods i think the electronics
are untested i don't think we've opened it up but theoretically there are some remnants of 1980s you
know green and wheat bulbs or whatever it may be exactly take a look see what you can uncover oh
man oh yeah these little tiny 080 screws there's one here and there's one there and that's probably
how you pull the whole carapace off yeah i would do that if you hired me to restore it but i won't
do it now well it probably hasn't been open since 86 or whatever it was you know so but it's it's a
great little piece and you know it's interesting we talk a lot about we talk a lot with collectors
about what they're looking for and one of the things that comes up frequently is people want
something that's easy to display right and it's like a lot of stuff is great like you've got
han and carbonite to there on your wall but it's huge that is that is an impossible piece of this
if you don't have a warehouse it's a very very challenging thing to display whereas something
like this you can almost put it anywhere it's like it'll go on your desk it'll go on your bookshelf
it's kind of that perfect size you know that certain props fall into where it just really works
from a display aesthetic perspective i i noticed you guys also put a lot of energy into uh the
singular display of the of the objects that you auction off so that people can bring it home and
do that yeah yeah i mean it's you know it's sort of all about taking it from what it was
as a production asset into what it is now as sort of a holy relic of cinema you know and
specifically as a holy relic as a as a bit of like religious iconography of american culture
it is again this is a i'm so grateful this has been so well cared for over the intervening
35 years because it's again it's really rare to see something this delicate where
so much is still perfectly extent on it right and they could have easily been thrown thrown out you
know i've i actually heard stories that in the 80s some of these wound up in just prop rental house i
don't know if it was sony or another studio but you know they were just a little robot so they
just put them on the on the shelves i know some of them were preserved by ilm model makers that
may be where this one came from i don't know the exact lineage i know this has been consigned in
by a collector who's had it for a number of years um but we've handled a couple others in the past
the construction is absolutely consistent the paint work the the level of detailing and and
the finish and yeah just just a great little piece a great little example of ilm's work
also all the lettering on here is clearly done using uh dry transfer rub down lettering which is
how we did everything back in the day we didn't do decals as much because there was always it was
harder to cover over the edges of a decal but this rub down here it says industrial you can just see
the letters have kind of moved over the years it's a classic tell of rubbed down lettering i miss
rub down lettering i like used to be able to order it for models and like you're saying
it's a cleaner look than a decal it is a cleaner looked at a decal and you can also you used to
be able to do it with nice opaque bright white colors which is much harder with a decal so uh
yeah it's a shame that that process is mostly gone as a as a purchasable thing as you're saying
that i'm wondering if there's any easter eggs hidden in there you know model maker initials or
oh yeah i mean this says industrial is that for industrial light and magic it could be right yeah
out of reach contents under pressure content's under pressure non-toxic yeah i mean or maybe
that's just what was on the sheet yeah and then this is like this is almost like one of those
sort of maker's marks oh yeah right yeah i put a easter egg on the space shuttle for space cowboys
i was making all the stuff for the interior of the payload bay and at one point i made a
i just made a coffee maker i made like a mr coffee with a gold coffee pot
and a like a white tyvek and i hid it in this place i thought it would never be seen and
it ended up in this hero shot and i got some crap for it well that's kind of cool here's a
question when you were making models did you sign your models um at ilm we did there was actually
it's a healthy tradition you can see it on the um in the smithsonian's collection where they've
got the mothership from e.t the model makers all signed it uh and the same with a lot of the star
wars the close encounters right the greg gene crew the mothership from et came through ilm
when we were doing the restoration for boy it was called boy's life when spielberg was doing
the restoration and that model the paint job had deteriorated and i think they hired the original
model maker it might have been mike fulmer to come in and repaint because it was all like this
rubbed graphite and silver yeah but specifically there's a spot under the carapace where everyone
had signed that's cool so it was that felt like being part of a great tradition at the end of the
we did uh padme's apartment fon davis and i okay and we definitely signed some of the interior
you have to right yeah because if somebody's looking at it in 30 years you wouldn't yeah you
got to be in there um on some of the ilm ships the signatures are more visible than you would think
there are places where if you brought a camera really close you'd be able to see lauren
peterson's name yeah which probably noah was doing in 1976 but today it's like it's up there that's
interesting story about the et ship too i never realized that was a restored model because i got
to see once in the conference room at amblin but i didn't realize i was looking at a restored piece
it's and it was just the paint job like the piece was in pretty good shape but the paint job was
it's one of those um when you do those hand rubbed finishes anyone touches it it just comes right up
absolutely it's just it destroys it so you know it's something collectors always debate about
it's like should i restore it or do i leave it in the original condition obviously if you restore
it the aesthetic comes up it's more presentable etc but have you taken away a little bit of that
originality i think filmmakers air towards let's make it look like it should look yeah collectors
and fans may be aired more towards believe it historically you know so it's i don't know i'm
more in the realm of doing restoration but hiring someone who really cares about it like my friend
john goodson who you know just spent a couple of years restoring the orion spaceship from 2001
and like absolutely that thing was in pretty great shape but you totally needed to give it
to someone like john goodson to like let it live out the next 100 years of its existence right
right because restoration is also about stopping the deterioration right conservation preservation
and he probably just being the obsessive model maker type he probably went to extreme lengths
to make sure everything that was being put back was exactly as it should be oh yeah no john is
the deepest geek when it comes to this he built a razor quest for razor crest all of the razer crest
models for the mandalorian and i worked with him at ilm and like he's pretty naturally fast with
styrene it's amazing what that guy can do and so because he like has paid deep attention i feel
like you'd give him any model and he'd be able to like make it look exactly like it should but
last right yeah and that's more i feel like that's where i would be yeah and i think especially if
there are elements that are missing then it's like you kind of want to see those you know
it feels incomplete without them so that makes sense and it's i think it's you know
restoration is really its own world and its own art and sometimes people think like oh you'll
just restore it like you you know paint a car in three days and it's like no no the restoration
work could take six to twelve months right it should be a massive absolutely what you're doing
this begs the question when you guys have stuff restored do you make that part of the provenance
and the record of we do yeah we try to you know we we did a very public restoration project on
the nostromo model which you're familiar with oh and i loved how mccune designed it and we tried to
document that and really show what we were doing and even there we didn't get everything perfect
and some detractors said like ah that shouldn't be there and so you could probably go in and say
like actually we're now going to go a level beyond what prop store did on this one you know there's
there's all these different levels that you could hit with how accurate how obsessive how
fanatic you're trying to be with it so you know i think it's important to capture that and capture
the history of the piece and it's it's you know it becomes part of the story of the object and
you know you know it's and it's it actually makes you appreciate that much more how rare it is to
see models and things that are in their original condition because like we talked about the batwing
unfortunately was fully repainted and there's nothing anyone can do about that that's what
history did to it so all you can really do is improve on prior restoration work but if it's in
its unrestored condition then i think you know there's a there's a sort of a bigger argument
for leaving it exactly as it is and again when you look at a piece like this up close you see
so much of the hand of the maker it's it's quite thrilling like there is something that you know
you see it in the movie and you put it in one part of your brain and then you look at it up close
and it ends up in this whole other aesthetic mechanical uh problem
solving part and i just i i never obviously i love looking at original props up close but
i really feel like if you were able to see this up close you'd have a really similar experience
like wow look at that someone built that for a movie and took it on set and puppeted this little
guy and it's actually kind of impressive that it's as small as it is you would almost think
they would go larger just to have more room to work with it with your hands right yeah they
like working small though too i mean ilm built an actual head size replica of the alien from
uh uh men in black oh right i mean they built a full a big one but they also built one that was
just the size of the guy's head yeah you know they they love the detail it's a challenge i guess of
course absolutely yeah dude what a great piece i never thought i'd get to see these guys again
well i'm glad you got to see it it's always fun showing it to a model maker like yourself
who really appreciates the craft that's gone into it ah man it is gorgeous thank you brandon