Designer Greg Broadmore gives us the low down on his retro sci-fi universe, high end collectibles and his latest creation; the Unnatural Selector ray gun.
What have you brought to show us today?
“This is the Unnatural Selector from Doctor Grordbort’s, which is the world of retro science fiction universe that I sort of [created]. We do a series of collectibles from it. We’ve done three metal and glass very highly limited edition art piece ray guns and this is basically the latest and greatest in that group. These are incredibly rare, there are only 50 of them and they are incredibly expensive because they are ridiculously hard to make. But they are great fun.”
What type of character uses such a weapon?
“It is actually the weapon of the main character Lord Cockswain who is this giant buffoon of a man, a great white hunter. He’s just an idiot on a rampage … It is a bit of play on Darwanism. If you take the concept of natural selection of all life forms being selected by the environmental pressures it is the complete opposite here, where this is just a tool designed for a hunter to go out and wreak his [havoc] … Lord Cockswain is a naturalist and the naturalists back then was someone that was [aware] of the natural world, but they had no qualms about blowing it into pieces.”
As the creator and designer, what does it take to make something like this?
“This design started out as a simple sketch in a comic-style book Doctor Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory, which is the book that I wrote and illustrated … This was definitely a brave and ambitious thing to do – to build something of this scale and complexity. Once that happened I took the original basic design from the comic book and just embellished it and built it up and added many layers of detail and illustrated both sides. The design evolved through several stages to the point where I had very detailed drawings of both sides that I could give to [our model maker].”
Elements of it seem futuristic and a little Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
“For me the inspiration comes from the turn of the last century to the thirties, it is sort of the technology of the WWI era in a way of that kind of meeting of the industrial age and then the rocket age and then radio technology in some of it. The inspiration originally came from stuff like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers because that’s the age of rocketry and electrics sort of starting to take place. It is that era of technology, but it is also playing to the hokey science fiction of that era. There is nothing real about it. It should look like its real, but a lot of the concepts talked about in the catalog are all out [dated] scientific ideas that don’t make sense anymore.”
With the growing popularity of your ray guns, why not try mass production along with collectibles?
“The problem with these is that you can’t mass produce them. Even if you could mass produce this rifle even as a toy, you still couldn’t sell it as a reasonable amount of money. The thing with these is that I really want them to feel real. They have to feel like they have a history. I don’t want them to feel like a collectible, I want them to feel like one of the props from one of the movies we make. When you see it on the mantel piece – for a second when you walk into this person’s house where you have it sitting on your mantel piece or your desk it is going to look like something out of your attic.”
