Comment by harimau777
2 months ago
I had a friend whose home was full of movie memorabilia. The boxing shorts from Rocky, the journal from Raiders of the Lost Ark, props from Star Wars, etc. all professionally displayed in shadowboxes along with autographs and photos.
The only thing is that they were all fake. My friend's hobby wasn't collecting memorabilia, it was making fakes. He was quite open about the fact that none of it was real and would happily describe how he created each piece.
I remember reading an article about a guy who wanted to make a point about the antiques world, and made a copy of a very desired and rare old chair. He sold it for next to nothing to an antiques dealer without making any claims as to what it was or wasn't. Somebody thinking they'd found a steal bought it from the dealer and sold it on for a big profit. It eventually ended up at a museum, at which point the original maker approached them and told them it wasn't what they thought it was. They told him they were experts and could vouch for its authenticity, until he told them to x-ray it and they'd see modern screws hidden in it. Oops.
Found it! https://web.archive.org/web/20100805234134/http://www.thehen...
Edit now that I’ve read the article: I appreciate that it appears that the museum wasn’t dismissive of the claims and verified the forgery with their own analysis. But the original article was posted on the museum’s website, so who knows.
The URL is cut off, could you post a shorter version or a title to search?
2 replies →
https://www.woodshopnews.com/columns-blogs/the-great-brewste...
That’s an entire hobby, making replicas. It’s only “fake” if you’re trying to convince people they’re real.
There's a whole fun additional layer of ethical replica hobbyists figuring out how to make replicas that are satisfyingly accurate to the original, but difficult for an unscrupulous third party to pass off as real.
One of my favorite examples is Gibson replica guitars with period-accurate serial numbers, but the serials are intentionally stamped during the wrong step in the painting & finishing process to signal that they weren't assembled at a Gibson factory.
If you're not trying to pass them off as authentic, I think they're just called replicas, not fakes.
>He was quite open about the fact that none of it was real and would happily describe how he created each piece.
His heirs probably won't be so forthcoming.
Adam Savage from Mythbusters and the Tested YouTube channel does this I think.
I remember he did a pretty cool recreation of the gun from Blade Runner at least.
He also shows off replicas from other companies etc. But for him it’s not about authenticity, it’s about the feeling of a prop. He build many cases for his props to showcase and here he goes into creatively expanding the universe of the movie by inventing items. Andre is very keen on weathering to give the prop some history. For me the most impressive build was his Hell Boy gun with bullets and all.
Gotta say, making collectibles sounds like a cool side project to do, and I'm confident there's a market for them.
Of course, Etsy is probably the main platform to sell these, and it's full of copycats so anything that looks like it could make money will quickly have cheaper made duplicates flood the market. And not just Etsy, inventions like the fidget clicker box and -spinner saw the might of Chinese manufacturing and drop shipping spin up almost overnight and flood the market with them.