In early January of 2021, Adam Savage put up a video on his YouTube channel in which he mentioned that a prop he made for the movie Galaxy Quest was available for sale online. I was immediately curious and looked up the details.
I had recently experienced a minor financial windfall and was looking for something to get for myself as a gift, so this really was kind of a perfect choice. It's from one of my favorite movies, made by one of my favorite makers, and there's one more detail that really sealed the deal for me, but you're going to have to read ahead to find out what it is. Given that I'd already done all the responsible things with my money, it felt very propitious to spend a little on something fun and interesting, so I did.
Because of the then-ongoing pandemic, it took a little while to arrive, but when it did, I was quite pleased. Apart from a little dust (some of which is inside the piece and maybe impossible to remove), it's quite clean and in nice shape. The construction is pretty simple, seemingly mostly made with laser-cut acrylic. A lot of the front detail is cut into the plastic itself, further enhanced with -- I assume -- paint.
I had known from the listing that the piece was wired for light, and also that neither the function nor the safety of said wiring was guaranteed. Once given the chance to examine it myself, I understood why. I don't want to impugn anyone's electrical skills here, and I'm sure this wiring job was entirely sufficient for the demands (and deadlines) of filming, but I just didn't feel safe having this setup powered on, or even plugged in, in a house where people are living.
So first I (carefully) yanked out the lights, the attached ballast, and all the wiring. Luckily it was all just held in with zip ties and hot glue, much of which had already failed. The rest yielded quickly to the gentle application of force, and then I packed everything up in a box. I don't feel right just throwing this stuff away, even if it is basically garbage.
So now I need a new lighting solution. Luckily I'm already familiar with PhotoGlow, a lighting panel product intended for backlighting photographs. They're available in custom sizes, so I was able to order 3 that would fit perfectly the existing space in the back of the piece.
Next I grabbed some nearby lumber and fashioned 3 support rods. I drilled holes in them to line up with the existing threaded holes in the back of the dock. I assume those holes were originally used to mount it to some armature rig for filming, and they really came in very handy for me.
Then I just epoxied the wood to the back of the light panels. I considered some different mechanical connection possibilities, but they all seemed too complex and not really worth it. I didn't want to use epoxy to attach anything to the prop itself, but making a semi-permanent attachment just to the light panels seemed fine.
Next I attached them all to the back using #10-32 machine screws and washers. I also added some hanging loops to the mounting points at the top. Originally I had intended to secure the screws in place with nyloc nuts, but it proved to be essentially impossible to hold the nuts in place from inside the prop. Eventually I decided that I was more at risk of damaging it by trying to install the nuts than I was from the screws somehow magically working their way loose without them, so I just left them off.
Finally, I hung it on the wall.
This is the detail that so drew me to this piece in the first place. When illuminated, you can see that all of the little windows in this dock are populated with saluting Thermians. Looking closely, you can see that they are all photographs of actors in full costume, printed on some platic film and installed on all 144 little windows. The windows are various different colors, which at first thought was down to age, but have since learned that this was an intentional choice made by the production team to give the piece more visual interest.
These might seem like small details, but without them, this piece wouldn't be nearly as interesting to me. Otherwise, you wouldn't know if this was supposed to be part of an enormous space station or the side of a car -- this could be from almost any science fiction movie -- you wouldn't even know which side was up. They provide scale, orientation, and tons of context and make this just a super cool piece.
A postscript: some months later, Adam and Fon made a video together talking about another part of this same dock in some detail. Worth a watch if you're curious.
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