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.

But Carl isn't the only one who's gotten bigger -- his hat has too.

AMC Studios

AMC Studios

AMC StudiosThe magic of the zombie apocalypse also makes children's chapeaus bloom!

Fairly early on in the show, Rick gets a little sentimental and gifts his sheriff's hat to Carl. According to the actor himself, they started with a smaller-than-normal hat in Season 2 so it would fit his tiny head. But as Riggs grew, so did Carl, and so did his hat size. Further complicating things is the fact that they've made the decision to prevent anyone in the show from finding a pair of scissors for Carl. All that hair has to go somewhere.

This wouldn't be such a problem if that hat company still made that hat. Since it's discontinued, the props department has to keep custom-making Carl Hats for Riggs to wear. Riggs, for his part, is happy to get new hats, noting that "it'd be so disgusting if we had the same one" from the beginning.

Disgusting, sure, but can you imagine how great it'd be if an adult, zombie-slaying Carl refused to take off a delightfully minuscule cowboy hat? That'd be, like, nine more seasons worth of arcs.

The name "Wilson" was written into the script from the beginning. This wasn't a cry for product placement; they weren't going to name the ball "Adidas" if there was suddenly a better offer from them. It was always Wilson the Volleyball. The writers had consulted with psychologists, who told them that someone stranded on an island would seriously become pals with an inanimate object to cope with the loneliness. And so props master Robin Miller went up to Wilson the company hoping to get them to provide blank balls for the production to use. They said no.

Luckily, having Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis attached to the film really impressed some woman in the PR department at Wilson, so she pulled some strings and was able to get Miller some balls. Twenty of them, to be precise. Imagine how many balls a standard eighth-grade volleyball team goes through in a season, and now imagine they're playing on an island.

According to Miller, conserving volleyballs on set was like going through war rations. Each hand print took forever to apply to each Wilson, all the "hair" had to be hand-stitched in, and the island weather wasn't exactly kind to the volleyballs, either. The crew also had to make sure that the balls didn't meet Wilson's heartbreaking end and float away while they were shooting the raft scenes.

20th Century FoxNote that we never see Wilson die, leaving the door open for the spinoff, Wilson's Revenge

It's a miracle that even one ball made it all the way through filming, but somehow, all 20 did. Today, Wilson sells blood-painted Wilson Balls for like $20, and Miller probably audibly groans every time he walks past the sporting goods aisle in Target.

Finally, as they were wrapping up filming, someone made a small suggestion about something they could do with Gizmo, and it actually ended up in the final cut:

Warner Bros. Pictures

Luckily, the props team was able to find a few boxes of dangerously old condoms at an old drugstore that was closing down, and were able to use them for their vintage sex scene. Not literally use them, mind you; they'd probably disintegrate once applied.

Even harder was the retro diaphragm kit. It's apparently hard to get one without a prescription (preferably from a 120-year-old gynecologist), so the props team was only able to get two from a manufacturer, along with a sizing kit from Planned Parenthood.

Showtime"But the most effective method of birth control is a bowtie."

Notice the little holes in there? That's a Planned Parenthood trick. They poke holes in their kits so that nobody will steal them. That's smart -- these people probably deserve, just a thought, some funding or something.

Just kidding, they tossed it in the garbage as soon as the pilot was done.

HBOWhich was unfortunate for Bunk, who was still sitting on it.

Ironically, the couch had been a dumpster find in the first place. However, rather than go dumpster diving yet again and praying to the ghost of Oscar the Grouch that they could find a new one, they decided to start from scratch. This was a whole process in itself. The couch was made from orange crushed velvet -- words that you'll notice are rarely put together in such a manner. Flava Flav himself would not buy furniture that looked like that. They finally managed to find someone who had a bunch of it in bloody London, and were able to have them ship that over for a replica couch to get made. Then they had to further damage it by "aging" it and pulling out bits of stuffing to match the original. All in all, it cost them a cool five grand, which is more than most people will spend on any one piece of furniture in their lifetimes.

Believe it or not, this was the least creepy option available. When they shot the scene, the "baby" present on set looked like this:

Summit EntertainmentIn this version, it turned out that Bella and Edward were cousins.

Rather than trying to get a real baby to act, the props department tried to create an animatronic doll for the part, and ended up with that ... thing. If an actual woman had birthed that, she'd have demanded a refund from the hospital and speedy divorce. The crew went so far as to rename the doll "Chuckesmee," an affront to both Chucky and the concept of names in general.

What makes this even sadder is that the crew had to decide between CGI and animatronics, and ended up having to CGI over it anyway, so it's more or less a circle of life that nobody wants to sing about. Since Twilight is basically the first full series about vampires and werewolves to not be at least kind of scary, maybe it's some sort of lesson. Is the real "monster" the terrible life lessons we hand down to our children? Who's to say?

Isaac now thinks puppets are infinitely more terrifying than clowns. Follow him on Twitter.

Real talk though, the Twilight novels are just fascinating reads.

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