7 Famous Props That Were A Huge Pain Behind The Scenes

7

Marvel Had To Build Replica Walkmans For Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2

Guardians Of The Galaxy's soundtrack did such a good job at making us nostalgic for 1970s dad rock jams that people started buying up stuff they didn't realize they were nostalgic for. Like these bulky atrocities:

Marvel Studios"Carrying a brick on my person at all times for lower quality than I'd get on my phone? Sign me up!"

After the release of the first Guardians, people started buying up old-school Sony Walkmans (Walkmen?) en masse. These suckers are going for thousands on sites like eBay now. (We'll pause the article as you all go check your closets.) This became a real problem when the Guardians props team needed a bunch of Walkmans for the sequel. Director James Gunn went on eBay himself and found the model they needed ... for around $8,000.

As it turns out, when you've got a movie as CGI-heavy as Guardians 2, your props budget doesn't exactly include room to spend thousands of dollars on crappy old technology whose price has been artificially inflated by the general populace. Making matters worse was that a fire at Sony's warehouses had burned up a bunch of the retro Walkmans they'd been hoarding.

Marvel StudiosRight. "A fire." Not a raccoon with a flamethrower.

So the next-best thing they could do was make some replicas. They didn't have to work; they just had to look right. Altogether, the crew constructed six of them from scratch for the movie. Hopefully the inevitable wave of buyer's regret has hit eBay by the time they start work on the third movie.

6

Carl's Hat On The Walking Dead Has Been Secretly Growing Larger

One of the most difficult aspects of casting child actors is the fact that they keep growing. For example, live-action shows on Disney Channel can only last a few years, as the stress of the gig inevitably turns all of the teenage actors into desiccated husks. The Walking Dead, however, has done a really good job of keeping pace with the growth of its young star Carl, portrayed by Chandler "I Just Want A Haircut" Riggs.

5

The Wilson Company Was Reluctant To Fork Over Balls To Play Wilson In Cast Away

For the eight people out there without a proficient knowledge of Tom Hanks' filmography, Cast Away is a movie in which Hanks gets stranded on a deserted island with only a volleyball named Wilson for company. By the end of the film, you're kind of upset that Hanks' character survives and the volleyball doesn't. And if you're athletics equipment company Wilson, you're kind of upset that this movie got made in the first place.

20th Century FoxProbably for the best that the company didn't have a female name, or that hole in the middle would be a lot bigger.

4

Working With Gremlins' Gizmo Puppet Was A Living Hell

If you're a puppeteer and not Jim Henson, your work is probably wildly underappreciated, given how difficult it is. The reason we now know this is because of how pissed off the puppet people were following the movie Gremlins. It's a movie wherein the main stars are the not-so-distant ancestors of Furbies, and it was a nightmare for all involved.

According to director Joe Dante, "A small army of puppeteers was living beneath each set, controlling rods and levers and staring into video monitors with the picture flipped as in a mirror." That meant that there were a ton of people sitting down there moving bits and pieces of the little mogwai around, glancing at a screen to make sure they were even close to being on the right track.

Warner Bros. PicturesIt was the puppetry equivalent of trying to parallel park an Escalade with a TV remote.

Gizmo, in particular, was the hardest to operate. The team had designed Gizmo thinking they'd only have to work with the puppet for the first 25 minutes of the movie, because he was supposed to turn evil after that. But then, weeks before shooting started, producer Steven Spielberg decided he loved this barely functional, constantly breaking little fuzzball, and that he should be the hero of the film. So the crew had to improvise. As they toyed around with various rods and levers, they had to make an ongoing list of things that could and could not be done with the Gizmo puppet -- basic stuff like making it walk, or moving its face at all (close-ups were done with a giant animatronic Gizmo head straight out of Hades).

3

Masters Of Sex Had To Go To Ridiculous Lengths To Obtain Vintage Birth Control

Sex Ed has come a long way, but still has a long way to go. And a lot of that is due to the tireless efforts and studies of the researchers Masters and Johnson, who were the primary subjects of the TV show Masters Of Sex. See? It's possible to combine academia and puns.

Because of the subject matter, and because this was a cable show (mostly the second thing), there are a number of sex-related scenes in it. For one sex scene, the crew had to get vintage condoms, but it turned out that little penis-sized tubes were constructed differently 60 years ago. In the '50s, condoms didn't have reservoir tips, which are a pretty important part of their anatomy today. We'll go out on a limb and call it more important than chocolate and fruit flavors and such.

2

The Orange Trash Couch From The Wire Cost $5,000

The Wire is perhaps the greatest series in television history, with ideas reverberating through its five seasons like the themes of a great novel. And so when the first episode had the Pit Boys hanging out on their orange couch in the middle of the projects, the crew knew it was an iconic locale that was sure to be revisited.

1

Twilight's Uncanny Valley Baby Was Even More Horrifying In Person

The Twilight movies had a surprising amount of action and plot, given that they were based on books that were 80 percent adjectives and similes. But by the time they got to Breaking Dawn, the films were running on fumes, and nowhere was that more evident than with the infant Renesmee (yes, that's a character's name), the half-human, half-vampire spawn of Edward and Bella. Renesmee was eventually portrayed as a child by actress Mackenzie Foy, but for the scenes wherein she's a super-smart baby, she's played by a mass of unnerving CGI.

Summit Entertainment"Bella! How could you betray me with my best friend, the conductor from The Polar Express?!"