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Fake retro console in Jumanji movie?


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Bump.

 

Well I finally got the opportunity to redbox this thing on BluRay. It's a surprisingly good action flick, though the plot of the game world itself could use some work. The actors were really good and had good chemistry together. Jack Black really nailed the whole 16-year-old girl part.

 

I took the liberty to make some screengrabs off of my new HDTV.

 

Warning: Hardcore "nerd porn" follows...

 

 

 

The cartridge seems to be a cross between an NES and Famicom design, but fatter like an Atari cart, with a shorter connector.

post-33189-0-20938200-1522397023_thumb.jpg

 

 

The console is clearly some monstrosity loosely inspired by the woodgrain VCS, with A/V cables, SNES style controller ports, and gamepads with one analog thumbstick and three action buttons arrainged into a triangular shape. Pretty lame controller design if you ask me. Sorry I did not get a screengrab of the glowing orb but it's already been shown off in this thread.

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The user interface is clearly inspired by 90s era point and click PC games.

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And finally at the end of the movie, the console gets destroyed by a bowling ball, explodes with fireworks complete with PCB and a wire harness that connects to the SNES controller ports. Someone clearly spent a lot of time designing this prototype. The PCB seems to have a lot of large inductors and power transistors on it arraigned into rows. Best guess is some type of audio amp. I can't imagine a video game console having huge inductors like that.

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Disclamer: My purpose in providing these screenshots is protected fair use, as a commentary of the video game console prototype featured within the movie. Screengrabs remain the copyright of their respective owners.

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The PCB seems to have a lot of large inductors and power transistors on it arraigned into rows. Best guess is some type of audio amp. I can't imagine a video game console having huge inductors like that.

 

No, modern video game consoles tend to be made out of video capture cards, not audio amplifiers.

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I just looked up the new Jumanji.

 

Is Dwayne Johnson in everything these days? Aren't people sick of him yet?

 

 

Hahah...I was just watching "Reno 911 : Miami" last night, and guess who showed up in the movie? The Rock... he only had a 3 minute scene, but thought it was hilarious. It also had Mindy Sterling in it... also for about 3 minutes. She's the sister of one of my wife's friends from North Miami Beach High School.

 

Funny thing though is, I should have figured... both of them live in Miami, and since the movie was filmed there, it was probably easy to get them. There were probably other cameos, but I just didn't know the other people.

 

 

I don't know if the Rock still lives there (South Florida), but about a decade or so ago... he lived in my parents neighborhood (Emerald Isles Estates, in Davie, FL). I wasn't friends with the guy or anything... but I kept a couple of Fieros at my dad's house (yeah... he totally didn't love that). And occasionally when I was outside working on them, he'd drive by in his 1996 Corvette and stop and chat... wanted to know what they were, etc. REALLY nice guy. Whatever you may think of him as an actor... he's a smart guy, and very down to Earth. He always lives below his means, and his means are many. Gotta have respect for a guy like that.

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  • 3 months later...

Did anyone ever figure out what this system was based on? Maybe a prototype of something? Seems to have SNES controller connectors.

 

It looks like a REALLY good "prop" for a movie, I mean... I'm surprised. Most movies, even the best ones, don't put that kind of work and effort into something that probably has less than 5 minutes total combined screen time.

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Well, for a movie with a budget of 90 million USD it isn't entirely unthinkable they spent $1000 or even $5000 at having someone cobble together a custom video game console, instead of badly disguising some existing system. Even if it isn't featured a lot in the movie, it has a very central role so to speak. If it had been something briefly used for 30 seconds and then the movie would go on with something else, I can agree they wouldn't spend a few thousand dollars on making a custom item but that is not really the case.

 

Besides if they got $2100 on selling the carcass of what was left of the prop, they probably got back the money spent on manufacturing it. According to IMDb, the cumulative worldwide gross is up to 961 million USD by now, so they would have made ten times the budget.

 

Edit: Hmm.. there were a lot of prop auctions. A standard PlayStation 1 for $120, just because it was part of a movie for a minute or two? A standard NES with 25 games and a zapper for $250? An Intellivision with 17 boxed games for $350?

 

There was a second smashed Jumanji console sold for $1500: https://propstoreauction.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/124/lot/24128/though this one was smashed in a different way. Either they weren't pleased with the impact the first time, or wanted angles where it would not be consistent. The fact they had two smashed consoles for sale makes me wonder if they kept a third and a fourth prop unsmashed somewhere, just in case.

 

Most of the costumes existed in multiple copies, both for the leading actors and doubles (stunt, dance etc).

Edited by carlsson
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Looks like they were auctioning it off back in March. And a bonus, it came with the bowling ball. https://propstoreauction.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/124/lot/24149/

 

 

Where the broken circuit board came from is anyone's guess.

 

attachicon.gifbroken_prop.jpg

I love how the auction's condition listing states good, yet it is smashed to bits! :lolblue:

 

Someone paid $2100 for it plus fees. While I would love to see it restored to it's former glory, like the burial atari carts, it's value as a collectir's item and history piece is worth more unrestored. Thanks for the bump! :)

 

 

There was a second smashed Jumanji console sold for $1500: https://propstoreauction.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/124/lot/24128/though this one was smashed in a different way. Either they weren't pleased with the impact the first time, or wanted angles where it would not be consistent. The fact they had two smashed consoles for sale makes me wonder if they kept a third and a fourth prop unsmashed somewhere, just in case.

 

Most of the costumes existed in multiple copies, both for the leading actors and doubles (stunt, dance etc).

They always make more than one. The console destroyed with the bowling ball made the final cut so it is worth more. If I were the bidder, and won both units, I'd have grabbed a vial of model airplane glue and painstakingly restored the $1500 one.
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There have been some rumored talk of a sequel, so maybe they've kept a non-destroyed unit for some transitional/continuity shots.

 

Kind of like how the board game transformer into the console, now the console would need to rebuild itself and transform into something else to catch the eye of the new kids that are sucked into the game.

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  • 1 month later...

I can guess there could have been licensing issues with having a real console maybe... but why not just have a strange cartridge for a known system? I mean, the video in the movie The Ring didn't have to have some creepy special VCR or anything, it was the video itself that was cursed. There was a creepy pasta about something like this... a Zelda cart with a weird game save or something...

 

They don't have to license something if the brand name and logo aren't shown. That's why older movies had black bands/bars over brand names. They could have used any existing game console they wanted without paying any fees whatsoever.

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Ummm... so a basketball and a fire truck would look the same to you? :)

I think basketball and football (gridiron or association style, doesn't matter for the sake of the argument) would be a more apt comparison. At least both are balls.

 

They don't have to license something if the brand name and logo aren't shown. That's why older movies had black bands/bars over brand names. They could have used any existing game console they wanted without paying any fees whatsoever.

Or just take a bunch of stock photos of random vintage hardware and tell your prop artists to create something unique that would have come from the same time period.

 

What's funny is the console is very clearly 80s hardware and the game menu is 90s pc point and click style.

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And early 80's no less.

It's amazing how people, even of the younger generation, are so out of touch.

 

The French gaming community laughed and gritted teeth when a journalist, supposedly a "new tech" one, a guy in his 30's no less, talked about the "E3 (the ECube...) taking place in San Francisco".

Edited by CatPix
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And early 80's no less.

It's amazing how people, even of the younger generation, are so out of touch.

 

The French gaming community laughed and gritted teeth when a journalist, supposedly a "new tech" one, a guy in his 30's no less, talked about the "E3 (the ECube...) taking place in San Francisco".

I think it should be a prerequisit that Journalists have knowlege on the subject they are reporting on. If they are reporting on a newly discovered archeaology dig site, they should know something about archeaology and the ancient culture being unearthed. If they are reporting on a global conflict, they should have knowlege about diplomacy and the parties involved. If they are reporting on video games, they should know something about games...
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Looks like they were auctioning it off back in March. And a bonus, it came with the bowling ball. https://propstoreauction.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/124/lot/24149/

 

 

Where the broken circuit board came from is anyone's guess.

 

attachicon.gifbroken_prop.jpg

That's a 4 phase SMPS buck regulator, commonly found on PC motherboards and video cards. That one seems to date around the athlon 64 era if I had to guess. If you check out athlon 64 mobos on google, you will see a lot of similar setups. They tend to have 3 phases but I saw a few 4 phases. It could be a year or three newer but it's from that era. That has toroidal inductors, which went out of favor for the box style ones, as inductance went down and switching frequency went up. It could also be a VRM module from a server. I did a quickie google search and found plenty of similar things but nothing exact.

 

The other piece of PCB has a single phase buck regulator on it. I suspect if it was a mobo or video card they were careful to only take the most generic power supply components and not have anything too identifying like a CPU socket or GPU. In fact there's not really anything other than power supply in that "videogame system". All four pieces of PCB are just power supply parts. There's no chips of any kind other than power by the looks of things.

 

I like how they used a band saw or similar to cut the PCB up to make it look broken, and the switches and stuff don't have any wires or anything attached to them.

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That's a 4 phase SMPS buck regulator, commonly found on PC motherboards and video cards. That one seems to date around the athlon 64 era if I had to guess. If you check out athlon 64 mobos on google, you will see a lot of similar setups. They tend to have 3 phases but I saw a few 4 phases. It could be a year or three newer but it's from that era. That has toroidal inductors, which went out of favor for the box style ones, as inductance went down and switching frequency went up. It could also be a VRM module from a server. I did a quickie google search and found plenty of similar things but nothing exact.

 

The other piece of PCB has a single phase buck regulator on it. I suspect if it was a mobo or video card they were careful to only take the most generic power supply components and not have anything too identifying like a CPU socket or GPU. In fact there's not really anything other than power supply in that "videogame system". All four pieces of PCB are just power supply parts. There's no chips of any kind other than power by the looks of things.

 

I like how they used a band saw or similar to cut the PCB up to make it look broken, and the switches and stuff don't have any wires or anything attached to them.

 

 

Well... I mean it did transport people to some alternate world/dimension, so it had to have a pretty beefy power supply... :grin:

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That's a 4 phase SMPS buck regulator, commonly found on PC motherboards and video cards. That one seems to date around the athlon 64 era if I had to guess. If you check out athlon 64 mobos on google, you will see a lot of similar setups. They tend to have 3 phases but I saw a few 4 phases. It could be a year or three newer but it's from that era. That has toroidal inductors, which went out of favor for the box style ones, as inductance went down and switching frequency went up. It could also be a VRM module from a server. I did a quickie google search and found plenty of similar things but nothing exact.

 

The other piece of PCB has a single phase buck regulator on it. I suspect if it was a mobo or video card they were careful to only take the most generic power supply components and not have anything too identifying like a CPU socket or GPU. In fact there's not really anything other than power supply in that "videogame system". All four pieces of PCB are just power supply parts. There's no chips of any kind other than power by the looks of things.

 

I like how they used a band saw or similar to cut the PCB up to make it look broken, and the switches and stuff don't have any wires or anything attached to them.

 

Kevtris delivered once again. :D :thumbsup:

 

I just guessed audio related due to the inductors. Smaller low power audio devices (pro gear, not ipods and janky consumer grade crap) tend to have beefy parts in them. Often the inductors are excessively large if they use air cores with heavy guage wire rather than laminated steel (steel cores can impart hysteresis, saturation, eddy currents, and other non-linear effects which negatively impacts the audio performance). My 150w Sony stereo amp in my living room has mammoth sized can caps and torroidial inductors in it. The filter caps for the speaker outputs (two per channel since it's a push/pull amp design) are about 2 inches tall.

 

A bunch of buck power supplies makes sense. The studio probably gutted the psu from an old rackmount server or some electronic trash that was going to get tossed anyway...

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That, or they went to the "visuals". Let's not forget it's a movie.

 

An actual console PCB, especially a 90's one, so a 16/32bits one, would look bland.

800px-PSX-SCPH-5001-Motherboard.jpg

Sega-Saturn-Motherboard.jpg

80's one might be a bit more exciting, because thye would use more chemical caps and thicker chips, but still, nothing too exciting.[/img]

IMG_4979.jpg

733px-ColecoVision-Motherboard-Top.jpg

 

Sure, it would look more realistic, but 90% of the spectators won't give a damn about it, especially if the smashed console appears only in a few frames.

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