Booby Traps

Which is where flash powder may be useful?... for some reason, I think old style flash guns may be exempt.

They WERE there, a lot of their experts only appear on screen when they have to. For example Alan Normandy was on set when they were making steel bullets for the James Bond special, but doesn't appear on screen. (This was for legal reasons).

The problem with explosives, even squibs, is that bringing in an expert to supervise (regardless of why) limits production options. They not only have to find the expert in question, but have to plan filming around when that person is available and for how long. It is better from the production viewpoint not to have to overly rely on outside help for something minor, since this gives somewhat more flexibility to filming - for example if the electrical system takes longer to get working than planned they could always film the next day, which might not be an option if their expert is only available on the first day.

right.

The whole "bag" myth appears to be based on some sort of pressure-plate rig. If the weight of the item(s) on the pedestal changes, then a release is triggered.

I thought of Indiana Jones as well. The problems though are that the traps are large, old and made of stone. Working with stone on that scale would be too time consuming (if not expensive) and difficult - and substituting anything else for stone would lead to instant 'you did it wrong' cries.

The age is another problem, and one that also applies to films like The Goonies and The Mummy. Basically even if MB could duplicate the traps they couldn't test to see if the ropes (which most of the traps seem to have) could have remained in place (and usually under tension) for years or centuries. Making any results suspect as well.

Wouldn't that just leave us with 'plausible' or 'busted' as options and automatically rule out 'confirmed'?

As I see it, if the trap doesn't work at all with new rope, the age of the rope would be a moot point, since it's busted anyway. If it does work, that leaves us with 'plausible' as the only viable call, because the age of the rope could still come into question and there's no way of telling whether it would make a difference or not.

None of these possible calls would rule out testing it altogether. And you just KNOW Adam would jump at the chance to play out his Indiana Jones fantasies

That is the thing, I suspect that a few of the Indy traps could in fact work...when they are new. The dart-firing trap from the first film is certainly plausible using leather as a bellows and activated using rope, wood and a pressure activated stone...At least IF the device is new. After a couple of years though (let alone a century or two) I seriously doubt that the bellows would work - or if they did you'd get less of a dramatic 'whoomph' that would embed a dart into a thick piece of wood, and more of a 'paraph' that would barely be enough to push the dart out of the barrel.

Of course another problem is that while we know what the trap does and what activates it, we don't actually know the design of machinery. We do know this from the Goonies films (because they show us), but then we again run into the problem that the real myth in both of these cases would not be 'would this work?' but 'would this work after two hundred plus years?' The Goonies is set in the mid 1980's, and since pirates of the type who made the traps in the film were basically extinct by 1730* that would mean the traps had been sitting there for some 250 years.

(*Actually pirates of the type seen in the film never existed in the first place)


These are some of the problems dealing with movie traps, like those Indy encounters, would have. The materials they'd have to work with might be too difficult and time consuming (in the case of stone) or in the real world are not going to have survived the centuries in a state where the device is going to work.
'Real world' traps run into other problems, principally the risk of someone watching being able to duplicate the design and deciding to do so - and many of the realistic traps seen on TV and film are real and potentially lethal. (I checked, and frankly a LOT of the stuff out there scares the crap out of me).

Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE MB to do an episode on traps - the inventive nature of A&J plus the amount of planning and building needed would lend itself very well to an episode that starts with a particular trap or two and ends in a build-off between the two. Given their attempt to 'go back to their roots', and build-off's were once part of that, I can see this being considered seriously...IF they can find a trap or two that A; Could not be duplicated at home, or at least not unless you were REALLY determined and had a lot of time and money to waste. Or B; Isn't/couldn't be modified to be lethal or crippling.

*Muses*

What about traps designed for animals in kids movies? Is there anything there maybe? I'm WAY to old for kids movies and don't have kids myself, but maybe some of you have kids and can think of something from such a source? Depending on the trap they might be able to 'supersize' it to human scale, dressing someone up as that character/animal to test it out. Hey, Adam has been a caveman, pirate and god knows what else...why not a mouse?

How about the good old net on the ground, covered with leaves pulls someone up into the air where they're suspended from a tree without hurting them?

I've always wondered if that was even possible to make without some kind of seriously heavy duty winch that would be difficult to hide in the woods. And seeing as the net has to have at least 3 points (and most movie and cartoon versions seem to have 4) to succesfully close around anything, how would you go about hiding that? I think I'd notice 3 or 4 ropes hanging strategically placed from a tree...

I know, but a chicken has a brain the size of a pea. It won't be suspicious of ropes hanging from trees. People will and I was thinking of the people version of this trap.