15 Iconic Movie Props And The Bizarre Stories Behind Them

Many genius minds worked behind curating and making some of the most iconic movie props. Scroll down to learn about 15 iconic movie props and the bizarre stories behind their origin:

1. The fish skeleton in Airplane! was a very expensive piece of art taken from a museum. The man in charge of the film’s props, Steven Levine called a museum for a fish skeleton which they lent him for $350.

2. The drugs used in The Wrestler weren’t actually fake. For cocaine, the makers used inositol, a Vitamin B, which is used to cut actual cocaine with. Mickey Rourke even felt uneasy.

3. In Dexter’s episode titled “The Decomposing Couple.” the makers used rice as maggots. They needed many maggots for a corpse scene, so they ordered 20,000 which fell short. Hence, they put rice underneath.

4. The Star Wars makers put tapes over brand names that showed up on lightsabers. Luke’s lightsaber prop had an old camera gizmo labeled Graflex. To cover, they put some chrome tape over it and called it a day.

5. The lettering on the Marauder’s Map in Harry Potter wasn’t very easy to design. The graphics department created their own custom font, just to make that one prop look great.

6. An Orange Is the New Black prop required the prop team to draw numerous sketches of penises. For the “Pin the cock on the hunk” scene, the team did many many sketches of penises that had to look like different people drew them

7. The props of What We Do in the Shadows couldn’t have been made had there been no Lord of the Rings. The makers borrowed props from LOT’s costume designer like teeth and elf ears which were perfect for their needs.

8. The voting machine in Parks and Rec was just the body of an old ATM. The team needed something like a voting machine for the episode titled “Win, Lose, or Draw,” and an ATM machine was fit for their demands.

9. One of the many iconic movie props, the rotting human heads in The Walking Dead were super hard to create. The prop team used both human and yak hair on which they had to punch in by hand.

10. The watch used in Tenet was a very difficult custom job by Hamilton. The makers had no idea what it would be for. This was Hamilton’s third job on a Nolan movie and the most complicated by far.

11. A basic cheesecake package on Mad Men was surprisingly difficult to create. The prop makers couldn’t find actual ’60s cheesecake packaging so they redrew it from the scratch by looking at images of ’60s kitchen scenes

12. The life-size dragon that we saw in Shang-Chi was a handmade artwork made of 8,000 scales. It was a very difficult task for the prop-maker who hand sculpted it and ensured every scale was right.

13. The Doof Mobile in Mad Max: Fury Road was made using actual parts of buildings. The maker used the base of a rocket truck, and added a bunch of stuff including AC ducts taken from the insides of several large buildings.

14. The painting in the living room in Parasite was actually a piece of very expensive artwork. “Maya 2078”, by the artist SeungMo Park cost $120,000 to the makers.

15. The Y-Wing craft in A New Hope was partly made out of hosiery packaging, The front caps on its two engines are actually L’eggs containers