hey everybody adam savage you're in my cave with a show and tell that a show and tell that will
take us to new heights how about that here's what we're gonna do i'm gonna actually climb up
on a ladder here for this show and tell because it is about something you guys have been asking
about and it hangs from the ceiling of my shop and i wanted to talk about it and here it is
oh yeah here we go yeah there he is so a lot of people have asked about this thing hanging here
yeah it is one of my favorite things uh this is my norris head uh from the thing norris
the thing
okay the thing is one of the great american science fiction horror movies ever made
by uh john carpenter starring kurt russell wilford brimley so many other amazing actors
it is a true masterpiece and it is absolutely horrifying in just
all the best ways and there is this specific scene in which norris played by charles halloran um
seems to be having a heart attack and they bring out a defibrillator and they go to defibrillate
his chest and his chest becomes this gaping mouth maw which bites off the hands of the doctor
the doctor sticks his arm up since two stumps are spurting blood by the way they hired an
amputee for that one shot who was missing their hands just to get that shot of the doctor's arms
and then they set a flamethrower onto the monster that was norris that's on the operating table and
the flamethrower burns the body and as the body's burning it's writhing and screaming
seriously i'm describing what sounds horrific if you haven't seen this movie the movie is so
much worse than what i'm describing the monster is you know contorting on the on the on the operating
table and its head falls off the edge and now the head starts separating from the neck and now it
looks like it's kind of on purpose and the head falls all the way to the ground and then starts
looking around oh my god it's just incredible it starts looking around and it sees a table like it
sends its tongue out and lashes the table leg and pulls itself under this table to hide and then it
grows legs out of itself turns upside down two stalks out of the neck and starts to walk around
and at that moment it walks out from this spider head that used to be norris walks out from behind
the table and one of the characters in the movie does my favorite kind of movie joke my
favorite joke in movies is when a character in the film says out loud precisely what i am thinking
and at that moment when this spider head walks him around the corner
character in the film goes you've got to be [ __ ] kidding me which is precisely what you would are
saying in your head when you're watching that scene it's the highest comedy to me
so this norah's head was an animatronic puppet built by rob boutin and his incredible team on
this movie that entire team of model makers and animatronics engineers is like under 25 years old
it is an astounding production this is not one of the heads from the film i i don't mean to give
you that impression i bought this from a maker on ebay it is cast in polyester resin it is a lovely
sculpt it's well done um it is brittle some parts have broken off over the years there's a
the bottom of that leg is missing and it's down on my sewing table below us here and i just haven't
gotten around to fixing it it also the guy who built this it's been years and i i i i couldn't
find that he has an ebay store anymore um it did take me like a year and a half to receive this
and i i actually showed it to guillermo del toro who bought a couple things from the guy and they
took forever to arrive uh i'm not denigrating the guy like look sometimes making stuff can take a
while but when you sell something on ebay to take 18 months to deliver it is a little bit of a tall
order to ask of a customer that's all i'm gonna say that being said one of my favorite pieces
in this space i it's just who came up with this um and it has one really cool feature which is
i've got a a security camera up on the wall in this shop uh and if you tune into it at night this
head moves all the time it's constantly moving yeah it's really weird and creepy it's constantly
i it's just some reason some combination of the thermal load on the monofilament and the air
currents here in the shop some combination of that causes this thing to never find a place to settle
i think that's kind of great like that's exactly the kind of thing that should be a little haunted
in a shop there i know you guys have been asking about this forever my norris head that's the story
of my nora's head thank you guys so much for this show and tell and i will see you next time