Saturday Film Club: How Star Trek's Original Phaser Prop Was Built

Film and TV props, especially older ones, fascinate me. Once, when looking at some from Red Dwarf, I commented that they were more basic than I'd expected. The builders agreed, but pointed out that they were on screen for a fraction of a second, and people were more interested in the story than the details of the gizmo being waved around by the actor. Well, until the advent of DVDs, and sci-fi fans who will step through a scene a frame at a time, to fully take it all in. One of the best-known sci-fi props, has to be the phaser guns from Star Trek. Here, we take a good look at one of the screen-used props.