Ok, so we all know about the little tab on the trap when Ray is leaving the ballroom after catching slimer.
but the other day I was looking around and saw it somewhere else,
I wonder how many other places it has shown up?
maybe its just my head cold, but i dont have a clue what you’re talking about.
That schematic appears to be based on that picture, actually!
Being a complete noob to GB props, I’m sorry if this has been covered, but what I think is odd is that the tab doesn’t contact the door. It bends up before touching, and with the lighting coming from above, you can see that it doesn’t come back down again. The hero trap images in the Ref section show that the opposite door is the one that would need to be held down to keep both of them in place, so…
Perhaps it was intended as a loop for the pedal cord?
I thought it was used for the strips to make it smoke but i may be wrong.
I think it was determined that it helps keep the doors closed.
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Considering that the end is rectangular, meeting up against the indicator housing, it wouldn’t be capable of swinging out of the way for the doors to even open in the first place.
Just popped in the movie to check.
Okay, checking the movie first would have been a good idea! The tab is clearly attached with a screw in the OP photo. In the Sedgewick scene, the tab is physically bent away. There’s no hinge, or else it wouldn’t keep the doors closed, unless it had a spring mech, in which case it wouldn’t have been pointing out anyway. If it was intended for keeping the doors closed, I would think they’d have put it back in position for filming.
I’m really thinking it’s simply a static metal tab for looping the pedal cord on the stunt traps.
Alternatively, I could be coming off as an uninformed noob ready to “blow the doors off” some so-called mystery… always a possibility.
Is it used anywhere in the movie or reference images to hold the pedal cord?
If yes, then you could be right. If no, try again 
Are there any more reference images aside from the pic above and film itself? This thing has really got my attention now! If it was supposed to hold the doors, it’s an abysmal design choice. It just doesn’t make any type of sense for that function. At the same time, if the doors do indeed open on that trap then it doesn’t matter what it’s there for, cord hook or no, because it just gets in the way.
Do the doors on that trap actually open?
I promise, I’m not trying to be stubborn, it’s just that as easy an answer as the common assumption appears to be, I don’t think that would actually work.
Your head-cold must be contagious - because apparently I have one, too.
That trap is a solid hunk of wood with a few lights=no openning doors. It has something to do with the smoking, since it’s only on that trap.
The second movie trap had the strips, the first movie trap doesn’t have the wide rails for the strips. In one photo I have it looks like that tab has a thin wire attached to it.
I have no clue what its used for but I don’t think it was for the doors, maybe we should go back and check, wasn’t there also a smoking trap in the montage sequence? and Ray hands Winston a bundle of traps might be on one of them, maybe. I honestly wasn’t trying to speculate the use though, I’ve seen other threads do that. I just wanted to point out another appearance of it, and see if it had popped up in anything else. For the head cold victims in the room I have circled said tabs on the pics
Also in the other shots from that set obviously:
My guess is it’s a semi-hero trap/pedal and the clip is a holder to keep the pedal from flopping around:
The stunt version of the belt trap/pedal was one piece(more or less) and made from foam. That means the above is a semi-hero with more detail, probably seperable but the pedal seems very well attached, not just hanging off the trap handle. I believe you can even just make out the clip doing just that in this screencap:
I don’t think those first two you posted are from the same set, the second pic he has marshmallow goo on him. I thought that was a photo shoot all to itself. I also just noticed that it looks like the ecto goggles in the first pic aren’t broke, and iirc they got broken early in filming right?
The Goggles in the first shot have shaving cream on them, they filmed some of the ending in New York before they came to California to finish and somewhere between New York and California they got broke. The shaving cream staining can be hard to see at times but it’s there.
Tracing for the win!
That’s probably correct. Here’s the photos I have first up is the “Life” photo showing the wire running from the battery box to the forward plate, light is on and kind of blends into the silver plate:
This one shows the tab bent out and the trap smoking:
My guess is that the tab just got bent down in all the other photos.
Yeah it’s fairly common to do that, Franz Joseph’s Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual was a pretty good example of this, he took photos that had bad shadows, shortening angles and fisheye effects and turned it into drawings which mirror the shadowing, shortening angles and fisheyes effects.
Didn’t he also place Engineering in the saucer, with the Warp Core tucked between the Impulse Engines?
Anyway, looks like I was wrong about it being a pedal loop, but it’s still nice to know that it wasn’t used for the doors… not for my ego’s sake, but just because it made no sense as a door closure!
It’s a bottle opener! (That keeps the doors shut.)
Brock
phantom50
omg Brock is alive!
I’m begining to think that the red light on the back of the GB1 trap is actually a rounded top lense and the second movie is the flat topped.
Yep, nothing wrong with that since they never really told us where engineering was until The Motion Picture. Besides the hallway leading up to it was curved, on the set, because it was right next to sick bay and a generic crew quarters usually dressed as Kirks quarters. Amazing how they made that little set look like a whole big space ship.