Adam Savage Learns About Creature Prop Restoration

One can only imagine how on-the-fly movie making is, how props, animatronic creatures, costumes, and sets are only made to be held together long enough for their close-ups. We all know the many stories of famous vehicles, spaceships, and other movie props that ended up tossed onto junk heaps, re-furbed and reused in other productions, or scavenged for parts.

And then there is the flipside of all this, those professional prop preservationists and fans who go to great, even obsessive lengths to preserve the sets and props of our beloved cinematic history.

In this Tested video, our favorite geek obsessive, Adam Savage, gets an intimate tour of Tom Spina’s studio. Tom and his team repair, restore, and preserve iconic movie props and other artifacts. In the video, Adam and Tom examine and discuss several of the animatronic puppets used in the Gremlins 2 movie. Very much the worse for wear (and age), Tom and the team are painstakingly trying to preserve these creature while keeping them as historically accurate as possible.