From Batman’s grapnel launcher to the canister that nearly smuggled dinosaur embryos out of Jurassic Park, Paragon FX Group is recreating the objects that made imaginary worlds feel real.
The best gadget in Jurassic Park might be a can of shaving cream. Dennis Nedry is supposed to use it to smuggle dinosaur embryos off the island. Unscrew the bottom and there’s a whole little cold-storage system inside. It’s a terrific sight gag, and it tells you something about the world of the movie. Of course somebody figured out how to steal a dinosaur. Of course they hid it in a can of Barbasol.
Decades later, Paragon FX Group made a replica. Universal had kept the original among the Jurassic Park props in its archive, alongside items such as the night-vision goggles and park maps. That gave Paragon something a collector freeze-framing the movie could only dream of. The team could study the object itself, including details the camera barely had time to register.
“I like to think of us as cinematic archaeologists,” Paragon director Ry Pruett told Business News & Info. It’s a job that can send the team to Tokyo with a scanner in search of original Godzilla props. Paragon’s planned replica of the Oxygen Destroyer, the device deployed against the monster in the original film, will be made in machined aluminum and limited to 300 pieces. The company’s take on the grapnel launcher from 1989’s Batman uses machined aluminum, too, and comes in a laser-cut case that looks like something Bruce Wayne might pull out of a drawer.
At Disney’s D23 fan event, the same obsession turned up in the clothes worn by three ghosts. Paragon showed half-scale replicas of the Haunted Mansion’s Hitchhiking Ghosts, made with access to surviving original figures through the Walt Disney Archives. Scanning got the team the shapes. They still had to identify the fabrics and match the colors. A ghost only gets a few seconds to make an impression from a moving ride vehicle. On somebody’s shelf, the jacket has to hold up to a much longer look.
For some collectors, the reason to take that longer look has little to do with how well the thing was made. Pruett recalled a man who bought a Blade Runner replica because the movie had given him and his father something they could always agree on. Conversations about the film and the Philip K. Dick novel behind it were when the good Scotch and cigars came out. The replica on his mantel brings those evenings back.
That’s a second life the person who built the original prop could hardly have planned. On set, the object has a job. It gives an actor something to reach for or lets the audience know, in an instant, what’s at stake. Years later, it can sit on a mantel and do something quieter. It can remind you who you used to watch movies with, and what you talked about after the credits rolled.
