Star Wars Super Fan Travels The World To Find Props
Star Wars super fan Brandon Alinger is the subject of one episode of Mark Hamill’s Pop Culture Quest, and talks a lifetime of movie prop collecting.
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Brandon Alinger, Star Wars superfan who appears on Mark Hamill’s Pop Culture Quest, talks traveling the world to build his collection of movie memorabilia. The webseries was created by SDCC HQ, and features Mark Hamill on a tour of different collectors’ homes and museums, talking nerd culture, pop culture, and a shared love of movies. It’s a webseries with a lot of appeal for the SDCC crowd, for whom watching the movies just isn’t enough, and collecting comics, action figures, art and props is a hobby all on its own. The appeal of Star Wars star Hamill being involved certainly doesn’t hurt, either.
Episode 9 of the webseries focuses on Brandon Alinger, a 34-year-old collector who also buys and sells for the PropStore in LA, and has even written a few Star Wars tie-in novels for Lucasfilm. Now, in a new interview, Alinger has opened up about spending the past decade (and then some) hunting down props all over the world, and how the industry is changing to make prop-scavenging more difficult for fans.
Alinger spoke to Collectors Weekly about his life as a professional prop-hunter, and how it started with a family vacation to Tunisia (which he begged to go on, seeing as it is the setting for Tattooine scenes in the franchise). After that, he started to contact anyone connected with the franchise, and has traveled all over the world to film sets to try and scoop up leftover props and pieces of sets.
“Well, I guess there was some pleading involved. It sounds a bit more outside of the box than it is. In Europe, Tunisia is a very common tourist destination. The English, the French, and the Germans go there all the time, because it’s only a couple-hour flight and it’s a beautiful country on the Mediterranean Sea with nice resorts. At that time, in 2001, it was reasonably cost-effective, because the U.S. dollar went a long way there. So I think traveling to Tunisia sounds more adventurous than it really was. The adventurous part of it was going to look for the “Star Wars” locations themselves, which are in the more off-the-beaten-path locations.”
Although he’s got some great stories from his travels, Alinger recognizes that scavenging from sets is nowhere near as easy as it used to be:
“Over time, studios have become aware that: A) There’s a reason for them to archive key assets for themselves for the future. B) Collectors and fans are interested in buying these things. They would love to have them, and be the caretakers themselves. C) There’s a better final destination for all these things than a landfill. There’s been a rise in awareness, which may have been influenced by Planet Hollywood, which was a big restaurant chain in the ’90s and 2000s. That’s when many regular people first encountered movie props and costumes. Since then, there’s been a steady shift from props and costumes being byproducts of a movie to being seen as artifacts worthy of preservation in their own right.”
Film fans know that sets themselves have become much harder to get near, especially as studios are concerned about the prevalence of camera phones leading to leaked spoilers for the project. In addition, the collector points out that a lot of the earlier set locations have now been picked clean by other collectors over the years.
That said, Alinger is still encouraging young fans to get out there, “but I wouldn’t go strictly with the mindset of coming back with collectibles.” The sets are still incredible to visit just for the sake of seeing where iconic moments came to life, and that’s something that any fan can enjoy, whether or not they get to take a piece of it home.
Next: The Star Wars Toy Mark Hamill Thinks is the Goofiest
Source: Collectors Weekly
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Rose Graceling-Moore has been writing about film, TV and comics since 2013, when she began writing for a local print magazine in Vancouver, BC. Since then, Rose has written for Horror Honeys, Moviepilot and Quirkbooks as well as Screenrant, increasingly focusing on comic books and live-action comic adaptations, as well as diversity and representation on screen. Rose also co-hosted the DC Movies Podcast, and has guested on other nerd and entertainment podcasts over the past five years. Rose’s love of comics began all the way back in the early ‘90s, when she discovered the X-Men while living in Africa (where there wasn’t a whole lot to do but read!), and since then has had an on-again, off-again love affair with not just Marvel, but DC and indie comics as well. You can follow her on Twitter: RoseMooreWrites for tweets about comics, movies, and more.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/star-wars-pop-culture-quest-mark-hamill/