Tomb

Many films and TV shows contain magnificent objects; things that inspire awe and amazement in all who see them. Occasionally, these objects are represented onscreen by whatever mundane pieces of crap the props department could scrounge up on the last day before filming. Here are a few favourite pieces of unremarkable knick-knacks that try unsuccessfully to impress us with their non-existent awesomeness:

• Plasma lamp — we’ve all seen them at places like Spencer’s Gifts and other novelty stores; those glass spheres filled with undulating tongues of colourful electricity. Touch the glass and a column of neon energy flows straight towards your fingers. Very cool, and it’s an invention of the great Nikola Tesla himself! Surely, if any device could stand in for a time machine or a spaceship engine in a movie, it’s this thing.

The lamp’s biggest starring role is as the title contraption from the 1985 sci-fi comedy My Science Project. Here, it’s a gizmo that impresses everybody who lays eyes on it. A teenager finds it amongst some UFO wreckage at a military base and decides to submit it to his science teacher as a last-ditch effort to get a passing grade. The gizmo soon starts shooting out Ghostbusters-like bolts of lightning, while sending the science teacher (Dennis Hopper) through a time warp and leaving the hapless students to fight a unit of freshly materialized Viet Cong and a dinosaur. Not bad for a novelty lamp.

The thing is, by 1985, plasma lamps were already mundane. Every mall had a couple of them on display and kids were allowed — nay, encouraged — to touch them. That kind of thing robs “alien artifacts” of their mystique pretty darn quick. Too bad we never got to see the aliens — I bet they wore Hypercolour T-shirts.

• Bell peppers — the title sequence from the 1970s science fiction program The Tomorrow People combines Doctor Who-style ominous music with The Twilight Zone’s penchant for hurling items like windows, eyeballs and relativity equations at the camera. We see fetal organisms, galaxies and a creepy hand grasping at us over and over again. We also get two quick glimpses of a cross section of a tasty and nutritious bell pepper.

Wait a second — back up. Bell peppers? Seriously? How mysterious and ominous are they supposed to be? Has the target audience for this show never been inside a kitchen?

• “Spaceship control panels” — there is a long and proud history of prop departments scouring jumble sales and garbage dumps for whatever futuristic-looking crap they can find to nail onto the console of a space vehicle. Sometimes it works and things look suitably space-age. Other times, certain pieces are all too easy for audiences to recognize.

In one episode of Blake’s 7, for example, a character consults the “ship’s records” of a luxury spacecraft by staring into what is obviously a Xerox machine, while the familiar line of light whirrs back and forth across his face. In The Ice Pirates (1984), the spaceship’s controls are decorated with a plastic dome immediately recognizable to children of the era as a game of Computer Perfection, an updated variation of the Milton Bradley puzzle game Perfection that used to vomit plastic pieces up in the air after the timer ran out. The best piece of “You’ve-gotta-be-kidding!” spaceship hardware remains the plain old blinking-orange construction-site lantern on the control panel of the flying saucer from Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959).

• Balloon — the most overt element of science fiction (and horror!) in the bizarre cult TV series The Prisoner has got to be Rover, the killer balloon that polices the perimeter of the mysterious Village. This is an example of a prop so mundane that it actually becomes quite impressive in context, as we see the white orb do things no balloon should be able to do. Rover became a hit with audiences and probably inspired the similar-looking alien beach-ball from John Carpenter’s film Dark Star (1974).

• The Power Glove — the film The Wizard (1989) was pretty much made as a feature-length advertisement for Nintendo game consoles and accessories, so when a sneering gamer whips out the Power Glove, everybody gasps in awe and covetousness. Here it is folks, the game controller that will turn you into an unstoppable game-winning ninja robot sex machine! “It’s so bad!” coos the smug, glove-owning villain.

And bad was the right word. The Power Glove sold well in North America — well enough for people to realize how shite it was. In theory, the thing was a kind of proto-Wii motion-sensing controller that would give you exquisite dominion over your Mario and Zelda games. In practise, the stupid thing didn’t work. Owners would spend hours weeping in front of their televisions, waggling their Power-Gloved hands like they had epilepsy and cursing as their onscreen avatars jumped into bottomless pits 37 times in a row. It didn’t take long for people to figure out that regular old Nintendo controllers actually did a much better job and Power Gloves everywhere got shunted into forgotten basement nooks and garage sales.