Thanks Sarnoff!
That must've been awesome. What did you do for Disney?
Here are shots of my coin,
1 and
2. I don't know what metal it's made out of, but it's about as thin as the penny, and it is not magnetic.
Like I said, there were
thousands of these coins on the "cave" set. I have no idea if the promo giveaways were from that lot, or additional coins that the production had made from the same batch but didn't make it to set, but it looks similar.
The "cave" set was huge. At the time, I was working as a PA on one of the TV shows that was filmed at the Disney studios in Burbank. A lot of PotC was shot elsewhere, but the cave had to be a built set... because there was a lot of water and the bottom had to be flat so that the camera guys didn't fall over
Rumor was it was the same soundstage that they used to film the asteroid in "Armageddon"... which required them to dig out 20 feet underground because the stage wasn't tall enough. So they charged Armageddon a million dollars or so to dig the set, then fill it up when they were done, then they charged PotC another million dollars to do the same thing. :lol
When they first built the set, it caught on fire. The whole cave is made of styrofoam, which is cut with a very hot wire making slices in the foam, then they apply a chemical to make it hard as rock. One of the wires overheated the set and the whole thing nearly went up, they evacuated the whole Disney lot as a precaution and had to start over and rebuild the whole cave.
When production was done I got to walk around the set. These coins were scattered everywhere to make up the pile that the "hero" chest of Aztec coins was sitting on. It was not the Aztec gold, this was other booty the pirates had plundered. The Aztec gold and a lot of the nicer prop pieces had already been removed. The water had also been drained out by then. My coin was one of the many, many, many leftover uncollected pieces that apparently wasn't worth returning to wherever they came from :lol (I don't know if Disney "minted" a special batch of these coins for the movies, or if they were just bought in bulk from a prop house).
