• Yosmonkol@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    If you like to research the macabre, look up Elmer McCurdy, a veteran turned outlaw that was mummified and used as a side show prop for roughly 50 years. His remains weren’t burried until the 70s.

  • Evil_Shrubbery
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    2 days ago

    It’s eco friendly, fully biodegradable, and (technically) abundant.

    Honestly we should be weary cuddling up to plastic.
    (I don’t actually remember - they prob used the bones & still covered them in masks & whatnots?)

    • The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.worldOPM
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      2 days ago

      They used real human skeletons because it was cheaper to pick them up from medical suppliers.

      The actors, including JoBeth Williams (pictured) weren’t informed that they were interacting with genuine human remains until filming wrapped.

      • Ariselas@piefed.ca
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        2 days ago

        Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland also used medical skeletons. It wasn’t that long ago that they were really easy to purchase, a couple instructors at my university had full skeletons and would bring them in for class. I wanted to buy one just to keep in my closet as a joke, but beer came first.

        • ZeldaFreak@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          In Germany a school recently held a funeral for their school skeleton, which was an actual human. They suspected that this was a young Indian man. Up to the 20th century, you could easily buy a dead person from India. There are still schools with actual human remains.

          • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            I plan on donating my me to a school with human remains, for dissection in their cadaver lab. Afters, composting. Probably won’t happen, but we’re gonna try

            • Ariselas@piefed.ca
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              1 day ago

              It was pretty common up till the 60s and maybe later to get human skeletons form South Asia, they were often obtained from flood or landslide victims, and have no identifiers except maybe an inventory number.

              Modern stuff however, is obtained when someone donates their remains, and is often only held for a limited time before interred. They are anonymized to the student / researcher, but there is a record of who they were. The med school’s anatomy lab here has some pretty neat stuff (or did 20 years ago when I went), including a woman’s plasticized torso that had been sliced into 1 inch wafers, and an autopsied man who was born with his organs rotated in his body so that everything was on the wrong side. I still have the illustrations I drew from that anatomy class somewhere.

              • VinegarChunks@lemmus.org
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                1 day ago

                I’ve heard that modern cadavers donated for medical research are treated with a high degree of respect and appreciation, which I’m guessing is probably a reaction to the way things used to be.

            • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              It may have been a donation. Donating your body to science can result in you becoming a classroom skeleton, or blown up in the sky with a rocket. If you’re lucky enough, they put you in a field and let your body rot, while observing the process. You don’t really get a say in it, but cadavers are used for all sorts of things.

      • CosmicTurtle0 [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        The crazy thing is that this isn’t limited to human remains.

        Fake cameras often cost more than actual cameras. Fake food is more expensive than real food, which is then wasted.

      • UnspecificGravity@piefed.social
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        2 days ago

        The more interesting tidbit is that this is actually pretty common. The prop house using real skeletons was actually pretty common and not unique to this production. The notable thing about this film was the sheer number of skeletons that they used, so they basically scooped up everything that was out there, and how much the live actors actually interacted with the skeletons. It wasn’t particularly unusual for skeletons to be used as props.

        Really, just about any time you saw a skeleton on screen before the 90s or so, it was probably real. A lot of real world props and decorations also used real skeletons, sometimes to the surprise of the people using them. For example, if you rode the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney Land, you saw real human skeletons.

        • tmyakal@infosec.pub
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          2 days ago

          Don’t leave it all on Tobe. Depending on how recently you’ve asked him, Spielberg directed none, some, most, or all of this movie.

      • bss03@infosec.pub
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        2 days ago

        I don’t think that’s 100% true. The guy that famously (posthumously) plays Yorick ('s skull) is not anonymous. (I just have problems with remembering names.)

        Also, posthumous organ donation isn’t necessarily anonymous.