joe manus asks a question about mrs don't try this my wife um
he says is mrs don't try this inclined towards making if so is there is there anything
you would consider bringing into tested for a show-and-tell situation um my wife is brilliant
uh she has an incredible mind and she also has uh incredible hand-eye coordination
a bunch of years ago we had a regular poker game with some friends every sunday night for
several years actually such that we actually had some custom poker chips printed up and the cheap
way to have poker chips printed up is to have them print the stickers but you put the stickers on the
poker chips so that's how we did it then we got a thousand poker chips and there were a thousand
stickers and i'm sitting there at the dining room table putting the stickers on and my wife is like
i want to play and i'm like absolutely here are some stickers here's some chips and we start to do
them and now i notice that she's keeping an eye on me she's a little competitive and so am i and we
start going and i think i've got this locked right because i've been a bottle maker for you know 15
years and i had hand-eye coordination as one of my brands and uh reader uh by the end of the
hour we spent applying a thousand stickers to a thousand poker chips she was way faster than me um
she does like to make things she goes down different avenues of obsessions
just like i do but i think one of my wife's primary creative outputs is actually cooking
she is a gifted and amazing cook and that's been a lovely thing we're both fairly serious
about using the kitchen well and making food that is good i am much more i'm much more like
i'm breakfast guy i can do the eggs i make you an omelet that's my that's my jam um but julia is
like a fully rounded she can do like high quality baking and that kind of precision work she's even
made macarons in the house and she can also do just like you know a zuni chicken or an improvised
uh and improvised well her improvised grilled cheese sandwiches are amazing and i actually no
lie i i my wife's bomb me sandwiches are among the best i've ever had absolutely um thank you
for asking about my family i appreciate that i don't think that my wife's going to show up in
a show and tell i think that we're going to have a separation of church and state on that front
but i'll ask her but i'm pretty sure i know what the answer is um let's see here john england wants
to know he asks a compelling and deep question and i'm not going to give be able to give a full and
detailed answer to this i think um because it's all over the place but he says recently on the rpf
there was a great debate about the authenticity of some of the props coming up for auction i believe
that was in a profiles and history auction some were clearly clearly replicas being passed off as
originals like the jaws clapperboard i saw that and that was weird while others other items in
the auction generated mountainous reams of forum posts as to why they might not be the
real deal um and he says parents i'm looking at you star trek original series hero phaser
um and there was a discussion about who has the authority and he's curious to
hear my commentary about these recent issues um and he actually has a couple of follow-up
well let's talk about that let's talk about what shows up at auctions look
the prop collecting scene has exploded over the past 20 years
and it is a deep deep situation of buyer beware without a doubt uh
i noticed that uh i've seen auctions auctioning off stunt things as hero things and one could i
guess potentially make a case that if a stunt thing is did i i didn't even
fastness hold on i think a case could be made that a stunt thing that you can
screen match might be callable a hero but hero tends to mean a very different thing
look there's a lot of money to be made in the definition of the props and that just
means that people are going to be spongy in their definition of those props um there is
there's no central authority on what is an original star trek prop
and there that original series star trek props is one of the most um
compromised collecting landscapes um that is one in which from what i understand there was
a concentrated effort by a person or persons to sell some completely fabricated replicas
as original star trek props and they like their yellowed cracking epoxy and things like that
that made it look like it was as shitty as the original but they i mean so this is like star
trek props is a really really really difficult area to collect and i would advise like if i
had a rich friend who was asking me should i spend 50 grand on this thing i would probably
you know call a couple of collectors i know and ask their opinion about that kind of thing
look before before you go and spend tens of thousands of dollars on anything you should have a
pretty good idea of the landscape of where you're purchasing from and i know that's not always
possible but the buyer must beware because yeah there's a lot of unscrupulous people there's i
mean there was somebody for at least 10 years who had a superman suit on ebay they wanted 90 grand
for they said it was original and it was like this auction just kept on sitting there and they were
just i'm sure that's just i felt like that was somebody who was like oh it might be original and
they just left it there for a decade um he has a couple of other questions uh there's a lot to
unpack does a replaymaker have a responsibility to include a hidden change that would allow it
later to be identified um yeah or a replica maker should sign the inside of their work i do i put my
name on the inside of the props that i replicate or i put a tell or i even sign them with a sharpie
in a place people can't see um to make that clear ryan nagata when he makes his replica apollo parts
uh when he makes the late i mean ryan goes so deep into the fidelity of a one-to-one perfection of a
replica that when he makes the labels he actually includes reproduction in the label so it can't be
uh so that no one could sell one of his things as an original it would become really clear um
an auction house is a responsibility to adequately vet and offered objects provenance
yes an auction house does have a responsibility to follow through the provenance and make sure
that the piece is legit but like it is a difficult landscape and there are there are a lot of cliffs
in this metaphor of using a landscape um there are a lot of cliffs to fall off on so you know
i think that sometimes you could certainly chalk up a misnamed listing a misnamed listing to a
an auction house that is trying to pull the wool over your eyes i think much more often it has to
do with what the seller represents and the auction house is trying to follow best practices but these
yeah look if you wanted to collect like early american silver there's a bunch of people you
could find that would be the experts that would guide you through what to look for
and the same exists in the prop community but it's much spongier
because these are objects made they're meant to be temporary and
they weather in different ways and it's just it's it's a much more complicated
it's a yeah it's a complicated thing um and he also asks about purposeful
market inflation by auction houses via ghost bidding and other stuff i don't know anything
about that i you know i i really don't i've never heard of such i've i mean i've heard of that
practice i don't have any personal experience of it happening within prop auctions but um
the biggest takeaway is yes in the market of prop collecting there are a lot of places to uh
to lose your money if you are overly trusting uh and so caveat emptor the buyer must beware and
do as much research as possible uh and those those threads on the rpf which can
get hundreds of posts deep are absolutely where to start but you also really want um
you want real expert advice and oftentimes that means paying for it i don't know who you'd pay in
the prop collecting community to go and show you but i do know like if you have an object again
if you have like something from the turn of the 20th century that you think is highly valuable you
don't just walk into a thrift you know an antique store and say how much is this worth you pay that
person for their evaluation and paying them for that evaluation they will sign that evaluation
and stand by their assessment of the worth of your object and its history um i don't it's
actually really interesting i'm curious if people know about this you can put it in the comments
if there are anybody that does that uh within within the prop within the prop replica within
the prop community within the movie memorabilia community there we go um that's a good question
yeah when it comes to appraising and assessing you get what you pay for and you shouldn't expect
if you're about to spend tens of thousands of dollars to be able to get a free estimate and
hope that it's genuine and dead on the money um when you want real expertise you should pay for
the time of that expertise okay let's move on i like i said i don't feel like that's a complete
answer to your question it's a thorny area i agree um and it's open for lots of discussion
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