I’m the lucky winner of the screen-used tripod traps from Ghostbusters II. As the title suggests, I plan to post some photos of these shortly (hopefully later today). For a while I was hesitant - the community was in the midst of a feud. I guess you could say that the reboot brought out the worst in people both for and against it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted much to do with the GBFans community for a while. Thankfully, my best buddy Matt made me realize that there are still those of us here that have loved Ghostbusters for so long and have come here for so long and have made progress in our own endeavors by coming here for so long. I’ll be posting photos for those of you who I am describing - I want you to see the traps and am happy to share my joy with you.
I will not be posting measurements, part numbers (of which I don’t have yet anyway) or anything specific like that, so please don’t ask in this thread or complain about it. If I have to deal with entitled ghostheads again over this matter then I will not post anything in here again. In this day and age there are many people who like to be spoon-fed information and at times I used to be one of these people. Figuring out the M56 smartgun from Aliens mostly on my own has made me realize that it’s so much more fun when you don’t have everything right in front of you to just assemble and you discover something big or find something really rare for it. If you’re really sincerely looking to replicate the tripod traps for some reason then please feel free to PM me and maybe I can help you.
I will go through the photos I have and be back later. More photos will eventually come I’m sure, but for now I’m super busy with the Ecto-1 project and probably won’t have much time to go and unpack them to take more photos for a few months. Stay tuned!
As promised, here are the photos I took when I took them out and set them up with my buddies Matt and Jack. I hope you guys like them…
Each of the tripods have slightly different pieces on the tops. Each of the arms on top have places to insert incandescent light bulbs. The wiring to these have been cut internally, so it’s likely impossible to install functional lights on the tips without disassembling them, which isn’t going to happen. The good news is that most of the other electronics still work, as you can see.
And now for the control box…
And the trigger for everything…
Maybe at some point I’ll figure out how to upload videos to Youtube from my phone and then I can post the video of them fired up.
All of the tripods connect to the control box, which plugs into a power source, and then they are triggers by the small push button control. The incandescent bulbs appears to have been controlled by connecting telephone cords (the yellow wire wrapped around the regular wire) into the control box separately. Very cool setup!
Wow seeing this things in motion is beautiful, looks like they even gave them a Larson display for flare, the prop builders really made these things for close ups, These have been one of my favorite pieces of equipment from the films, I legitimately said to my best friend when (we failed on funds to make a proper bid) that our biggest fear was that they would go to some private collector that would lock them up, never share details, and these props would remain largely a mystery forever thank you so much for sharing.
I was going to buy these when I saw them up at auction. I could not afford them though. I took a screen shot of the image they had used so that I could use that image to build my own one day.
These images will help. Thank you very much.
One day if you get a chance I would love if you could take a photo from the front, the sides and the back of one of these tripod traps. Also a front, side, side and back of the trigger pad/ pedal or whatever its called. lol.
Its amazing that the prop masters at that time had put SO much work into these things for a scene that was used for just 5 seconds!!! So sad.
Thanks again for the photos though. I will look forward to seeing more, or maybe seeing these in person one day.
Amazing stuff, thanks for posting the photos - they really blow what we had until now out of the water.
A shame they were seen so fleetingly (both in Ghostbusters II and almost every other instance they’ve appeared on-screen, as they’re chock-full of detail. Too bad somebody cut out bulb function at the tops of the devices, that’d add a nice bit of show to them.
