Are you a huge sci-fi fan who happens to have $15-20,000 just lying around? If so, you might be able to own a piece of movie history.
What do you do when you’re an underpaid staff member of a low-budget sci-fi film and production has just started to wrap? Well, if you’re anything like my friends who’re in film school, you take home some of the props and costumes to decorate your apartment. If the movie turns out to be the start of one of the biggest franchises of the next quarter century, you auction this stuff off when its value has appreciated by many thousands of dollars.
An assistant art director on the original Terminator film managed to save the robot arm seen on the right, which is from the T-800 cyborg model that was demolished at the end of the movie. While the model was blown up, Shay Austin snagged the arm and apparently kept it in a box with other props.
“We started picking up the pieces and I picked up the arm,” Austin explained to Suvudu. “I stayed on the film until the very end including doing pick up shots. After that we wrapped quickly, and I had another job to go to, so I tossed the arm into a box with some other leftover props, and then into my storage. Because I liked the film so much I kept some of the pieces as my souvenirs.”
Suvudu also has an in-depth description of the arm itself:
The metal arm measures approximately 24″ in length and is partially articulated. One of the fingers has separated over time due to the soft-wiring of the endoskeleton’s parts, done to allow it to fragment properly during the explosion. The arm was also aged by the art department of the film to look properly scorched in the explosion.
This isn’t the first time a T-800 went on sale. The last time such an item was on the auction block, it sold for $20,000 (plus expenses). As a result, it’s estimated that this prop will go for somewhere around $15,000.
