One of the toughest places to maintain pristine perfection is in the props department. With so many moving parts to every silver screen story there are potential clangers at every turn. Don't believe us? Here's proof. We've uncovered some amazing movie prop problems that you might not have spotted at the cinema (including one that's become legend)...
1. Helmet Faux-Pas, Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
The moment when one unfortunate Stormtrooper bangs his head on a door has gone down in the annals of movie blooper history. However, the juxtaposition of poor helmet vision and low-hanging prop has now actually been written in to the Star Wars mythology.George Lucas – who already retconned the head-bump in his Star Wars: A New Hope Special Edition by adding a sound effect – decided to insert a similar bonce bang in his prequel, Attack of the Clones. This time it was by Jango Fett – hinting that his clumsiness has been passed down to all the clones. Nice.
2. Seatbelt, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation
“Do you have your seatbelt on?”, Tom Cruise's Ethan asks Simon Pegg's Benji as he revs up for one of the Mission Impossible franchise's most stunning car chases. And it's a good thing he asks, because while the car zips through alleyways smashing motorbikes left, right and centre, Benji's seatbelt appears and disappears.
Ordinarily this kind of continuity snafu is annoying, but given the health and safety implications of – you know – driving down an enormous flight of steps and landing on your car's roof, this really shouldn't have been overlooked. Clunk, click, every trip.
3. Wolvie's Trousers, X-Men: The Last Stand & The Wolverine
Rather like the Hulk, Wolverine and shirts do not always work together. Also - like the Hulk – Old Man Logan's trousers never fully disappear, no matter what he's been up to.
And thus, at the finale of X-Men: The Last Stand, Jean Grey can scour Wolverine's shirt from his chest – and even the skin from his bones – but his keks remain firmly in place. If that's not weird enough, in The Wolverine he actually (if rather crisply) withstands the fiery bombing of Nagasaki. Levi's Adamantium, range, maybe?
4. Sunglasses, Django Unchained
You can't deny that Jamie Foxx looks the very epitome of cool in Django Unchained in these tinted specs (even if he's wearing them at night, which is universally regarded as a non-cool move today).
The problem is that sunglasses weren't readily available in the US in 1859 – it would have been almost unheard of for someone to wear a pair back then. Quentin Tarantino's costume designer, Sharen Davis, actually modelled these on a pair of (also historically dubious) specs worn by Charles Bronson in 1977 western The White Buffalo. Still cool, mind you.
5. Baseball Card, The Goonies
After stumbling across the skeleton of Chester Copperpot in the tunnels, the kids need to know if it really is him and so they go through his wallet.
Inside is a baseball card for New York Yankees player Lou Gehring, who would have been the greatest sportsman alive when Chester was still drawing breath – it being the '30s and all.
However – rather strangely – the card itself might feature a '30s player, but it's actually from a 1974 Topps All American set. So, er, either Chester secretly had a time machine in The Goonies, or someone planted it on him. Weird.
6. Newt, Aliens
How can a little girl be a prop, you ask? Well, in the climactic scenes at the end of '80s classic Aliens, Sigourney Weaver had to spend a lot of time running around holding Carrie Henn in her arms.
Given that she's already lugging a giant flamethrower – and she's not superhuman – a dummy version of the kid was produced so that Weaver didn't stuff up her back during filming. And you can quite clearly see that Newt's a dummy in several scenes: Her body is way too stiff to be real.
The same technique is used in one of the final scenes in 1982's Poltergeist, too, in which poor Carol-Anne looks like some kind of rigid muppet.
7. Guitar, Back To The Future Part II
Marty McFly's ahead-of-its time rendition of Johnny B Goode at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance is a one of the best moments in Back To The Future Part II – but not if you're a guitar nerd.
Marty has travelled back to 1955, and yet, somehow, he's playing a Gibson ES-335, which wasn't made until, er, 1958. And in case you're thinking, “Perhaps it was in the boot of the DeLorean!” – okay, we know you're probably not thinking that, but bear with us – the real brainteaser is that he borrowed it from one of the musicians already on stage. Could it have been another time-traveller? This is heavy...
8. Air Canister, Gladiator
It does seem rather churlish to criticise a film that's so good – Ridley Scott's film Gladiator did win five Oscars for a reason, after all. But still, we can't help wishing the film had used some of its much-vaunted CGI to erase this particular goof.
During the Battle of Carthage re-enactment, one of the chariots is dramatically tossed through the air to smash into the arena wall – and you can quite plainly see the air canister that the effects team used to propel the flip. If we were Commodus, we'd give this a hearty thumbs-down.
9. Broom, Quantum Of Solace
This little moment of cinema magic in Quantum of Solace comes not so much from the prop itself, but from the over-enthusiastic extra holding it.
All hell is breaking loose in the foreground: James Bond is doing his James Bond thang, the music's pumping, our pulses are racing... and then there's this guy in the background sweeping the floor without touching it.
Not just once, either: That broom sweeps nothing but pure thin air again and again. We suspect that chap must have a very dusty house, despite claiming he cleans it.
