The Surprising Stories Behind 8 Movie Props You’d Recognize

You remember the whisper at the start of Citizen Kane — “Rosebud” — and the sled that turns out to hold the whole meaning of the film. Here’s the thing most people don’t realize: the balsa-wood sleds you see thrown into the furnace at the end were built to burn, and burn they did. A handful of sturdier sleds were made for the earlier scenes, and those are the ones that survived.

One of them was nearly tossed out during a 1984 cleanup of the Paramount lot. A crew member who knew director Joe Dante loved old movies offered it to him, and he quietly kept it for decades. In July 2025 that very sled sold at Heritage Auctions for about $14.75 million — at the time, the second-most-valuable movie prop ever sold.

Judy Garland’s ruby slippers are maybe the most beloved shoes in America, and in 2005 one of the surviving pairs was stolen right out of a small museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The thief, a man named Terry Jon Martin, smashed the glass with a hammer because someone had convinced him the rubies were real. When a fence told him they were only glass and sequins, he got rid of them — and they stayed missing for thirteen years.

The FBI finally recovered the slippers in a 2018 sting. Then, in December 2024, they went up at Heritage Auctions and sold for a hammer price of $28 million — $32.5 million with fees — making them the most valuable piece of movie memorabilia ever sold. Not bad for a pair of size-five shoes that spent more than a decade who-knows-where.

“The stuff that dreams are made of,” Bogart calls it, and the black bird at the center of the 1941 mystery has a weight you can feel on screen — because it really was heavy. The lead statuette stood about a foot tall and tipped the scales near 45 pounds, solid metal rather than the lightweight resin a studio would use today.

Only a couple of the lead birds are known to exist, and the one confirmed by Warner Bros. records to have appeared in the film sold at Bonhams in November 2013 for $4,085,000. If you ever wondered why the actors handled it so carefully, now you know — drop that thing and you’d break a foot.

The flux-capacitor DeLorean from Back to the Future is one of the most recognizable cars ever filmed, and it took more than one to make the trilogy. The crew built around seven in all — the main “A,” “B,” and “C” cars, a couple of desert versions, and even a fiberglass one for the flying shots. By the end of filming, most were worn out, picked apart, or wrecked.

The original hero car was in rough shape until a volunteer team led the restoration around 2011. Today you can stand right next to it at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, gull-wing doors and all. A handful of the others survive in private collections; the rest, sadly, didn’t make it.

You probably didn’t expect to cry over a volleyball, and yet Wilson — the ball Tom Hanks’s stranded character turns into a companion by smearing a face on it with his own bloody hand — got to a lot of us. There was never just one Wilson; the filmmakers made roughly a dozen to match the different stages of weathering and that straggly grass “hair.”

One of those production volleyballs came up at a Prop Store auction in November 2021. Expected to fetch maybe $80,000, it sailed past that and sold for more than $300,000. A simple sporting-goods ball, turned into one of the most moving performances by a thing that never says a word.

Harrison Ford’s brown felt fedora is practically a character in its own right — the one that stays on his head through every tumble, or gets snatched back at the last second under a closing door. The hats were made by the Herbert Johnson company in London, shaped and reshaped until the brim sat just right for the camera.

In August 2024, a fedora that Ford wore in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom sold at a Prop Store auction in Los Angeles for $630,000, breaking the record for an Indy hat. It came from the family of Dean Ferrandini, Ford’s stunt double, which is a nice reminder of all the folks who wore that hat so the star didn’t have to take the fall himself.

Before computers did this kind of thing, E.T. was brought to life by hand. The Italian effects master Carlo Rambaldi built the main animatronic model with something like 85 points of movement — the wrinkling brow, the long neck, those reaching fingers — all worked by cables and operators just out of frame. If you ever teared up when that little heart-light glowed, Rambaldi’s craftsmanship is a big part of why.

The “hero” model from Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film went to auction at Julien’s in December 2022 and sold for about $2.56 million. Not a costume, not a puppet on a string — a genuine piece of mechanical artistry that made a generation believe an alien could be a friend.

At the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the golden Ark unleashes its fury and then gets nailed into a crate and wheeled into an endless government warehouse — a final shot that stuck with everyone who saw it. The real-life fate of the screen-used Ark turns out to be fittingly careful: it’s kept in the archives at Lucasfilm’s Skywalker Ranch, looked after rather than lost.

An early prototype version did find its way into private hands. It surfaced on Antiques Roadshow, where appraisers put a jaw-dropping value on it, and later sold at auction for just over $100,000. Not quite the end of the world — just a very expensive gold box with a story to tell.