Batman '89 Batmobile Remote (WIP Model)

[Raine24]

Hello, everyone! I've wanted a full set of '89 gadgets since, well, '89, and have recently decided to make it happen by making 3D models based on all the available reference for eventual printing & finishing. My goal is to have every Bat gadget as accurately modeled & scaled as possible and available for people to print. I'm about halfway done with the equipment in the vault door, and making steady progress on the rest of it.

For most of the items there's enough imagery out there to get pretty darn close, but the most elusive thing has been the remote for the Batmobile.

Maybe 15 years ago I saved photos of what was believed to be the base that the flip-top microphone had been attached to (the mic itself was gone) and if the thread still exists on the internet I can't find it. But I've still got the pics and have been doing my best to figure out how the flip-top would have looked/worked.

Some example pics of what I've been recreating:

And my progress so far. I've got to tighten up a lot of the details, but it's like... 95% there? It's currently scaled so that the two bottom openings loosely fit AA-size batteries to power the light (through the headphone jack on top) and I plan on designing a plug on the bottom to hold the batteries in and complete the circuit.

And of course there's the flip-up mic, where my only reference is the "Stop" shot in the movie, and this low-res montage of BTS pics:

Judging by the lack of a light on this side when he commands the Batmobile outside of Axis, it looks like they pulled a Spock for this scene and had him hold it backwards so the "interesting" side would face the camera. I'm working as best I can from the slightly out of focus and blown out screens, but I think I have the basic geometry of the mic down pretty close. The bar connecting the mic to the hinge pin is a total mystery so is mostly a placeholder right now, but there does appear to be a large tab on the side to aid in opening it. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that my estimated dimensions almost perfectly matched the existing base model and needed only the smallest adjustments to slot into it.

I need to tweak the mechanism, but I think I've got the basic idea figured out for how it's sprung between positions and retained in the base. I did a few extra renders to demonstrate my idea of what the prop would have looked like.

And that's my progress so far! If anyone has dimensions, knows what model kit parts have been glued down to it, has more pics, or even just better versions of the existing pics, it would be much appreciated so very much. Thanks for looking!

 

[Raine24]

Does anyone have 4k caps of this shot? In FHD I can't tell if he's opening it up or just miming the action....

 

[gregday]

Interesting. So the narrow "Batmobile Remote" like what comes with the 1/6 Hot Toys figure is just wrong, and a misreading of the flip-up part of this gadget?

 

[Raine24]

I can't say 100% that this was the original piece, but I believe it to be. However the Hot Toys remote and all its derivatives (like the NECA and Beast Kingdom remotes) seems to be totally invented from the "Stop" shot alone, and doesn't even really match that all too well. If Jazz Inc's frustrations are any indication, the bulk of the archival material WB has available for '89 is basically what we have: press photos and screengrabs.

Licensees have to make do with those in lieu of cataloged props or blueprints. Or, much like the Master Replicas -> The Experience -> Diamond Select pipeline, make use of a previous licensee's interpretation?

 

[batfan10]

Does anyone have 4k caps of this shot? In FHD I can't tell if he's opening it up or just miming the action....
View attachment 1699048
View attachment 1699049

Its hard to tell on the 4k as well. But I was able to grab this shot in higher quality!

Edit, also looking at the shot in slow motion (and the way he's holding it) it does look like the base is wider but I think he has his index finger on a button that triggers the voice mode, as the light dims on when it gets closer to his face (as if he was pressing to activate)

 

[Raine24]

Part of figuring out the flip-mic was placing my digital duplicate in his hand and working from there to match what can be seen. Based on higher quality screens with a hefty gamma boost, I saw that I had the remote slightly askew which had some knock-on effects on the mic's height and depth. But even with the rotation off it looks like I still had the remote scaled correctly! Don't ask me how, I think it was just luck.

But I've fixed the rotation & mic dimensions and now... check this out:

The battery housing top & bottom align perfectly, the c-channel lines up, and his index finger is on the button. I had a really, really good feeling about this prop all those years ago, and it's genuinely exciting to see it appear to be the real deal. I am so pumped!

Does this mean that the gas mask is the only '89 gadget that doesn't have an acceptable replica floating about?

 

[Raine24]

Oh, and better quality version of the flip shot shows that his left hand doesn't flip open the top. He snaps it open with his right thumb or it's sprung to open and his right thumb is just holding it down till the right time. I'd bet on the former... but considering how unorthodox so many of this movie's props are, I wouldn't put too much money on that bet.

 

[nick daring]

Such an elusive prop!

Iwas part of that original thread!

I love the idea of a weird flip top piece attached to the Thuth prop. If anything it's more fun than the boxy Hot Toys design.

It'd be nice to have something that at least has the detail and industrial fussiness of the original sketch and fit the style of the rest of the arsenal.

 

[Leatherwing]

This thread is blowing my mind. I had always assumed the prop to be straight and narrow, but now that you've pointed it out I can definitely see what you're seeing. Good eye, guys!

 

[Raine24]

Good news! Most (if not all) of the plant-on parts are from Plastruct, and I've ordered the ones I could track down in their huge catalogue. At least one of these parts (PBJ-10) was used on other props/models on Pinewood productions in the '80s, like Aliens and Outland, so there's some contemporaneous usage going on even if I don't have all the details yet, which adds a nice layer of validity to this. My preliminary diameter for the the half sphere in the bottom "knob" came out to .6 inches, which sits almost exactly between two of their hemisphere sizes. There's only a 16th of an inch difference between them so it seems my scale estimate was really close!

Either that or reeeaaallly far off. We'll see.

I've ordered what I've been able to ID so I can get accurate measurements and refine my model. I also ordered enough extras so I can do a scratch build in addition to a full 3D print. Yay! Then I can figure out which hemisphere is the correct one, which will give me the ID of the ribbed tube on the bottom knob and I can work on IDing that, same with the half-round tube that caps off the thing.

I think some other Plastruct parts are in the tracer's antenna, but I won't be refining that model until I'm satisfied with the remote.

 

[Raine24]

The parts have been received! Now I can finally put my micrometer to use.

You know how you can understand, intellectually, how big something is supposed to be but still be shocked, emotionally, at its actual size? That's me right now. These parts are so small that the 1/16th difference in potential dome sizes looks friggin' enormous when all it read as before was a rounding error somewhere.

Regardless, I plan my next post to feature a revamped and accurately scaled remote model, and hopefully soon after I can recreate the Thuth prop pics but with a complete remote. Fieldsheer gloves included.

 

[gregday]

If you ever decide to do a run, I’m 100% in for one.

 

[Valor]

This is awesome .... I went the other way.

 

[Raine24]

I'm still hard at work on the revamped model, but with real measurements in hand the threshold for Good Enough is no longer "good enough", it's now "perfection". The digital versions of the found parts do look nice, though, complete with tooling oddities and ejector pin marks!

Meanwhile, I thought it'd be cool to throw my other models together in a quick & dirty group shot and inspire myself to keep at it. Even if I can't find my tranq gun and finished batarang models, this is the first time I've seen any of my vault models together like this and it's pretty darn satisfying.

 

[Funky]

Man, even the new Neca utility belt got it wrong.

 

[Valor]

So, this doesn't feel like a scratch-built object. It feels like it was something they modded. Like a photography battery pack or something? You can see artifacts of tape that was likely covering labels before this cast was made. Thoughts?

 

[JamesM242]

I agree with your assessment, but have nothing to offer except that cap on the top strikes me as odd.

 

[13doctorwho]

I'm on the fence about this. We see so little of this in blurry blow ups, I'm not sure it is the actual item. I acknowledge that the other replicas out there are guess work (and probably wrong), but I feel this isn't anymore concrete. It's an interesting direction, I'm not saying it's wrong, but I think we'll never know for sure (unless a collector that has it and has been hiding it away comes forward).

Still a cool project.

 

[MaxPower89]

I think it’s just something that never got used on screen. I don’t think it’s the Batmobile communicator. What we can see of what he holds looks nothing like this thing. This looks like some weird thing they were using for fabrication purposes that never got fully realized.