After completing our tour of the back studio lot of Warner Bros., we moved to some of the television sets. The first set we toured was the set of the television show Sullivan and Son. We have not seen the television show Sullivan and Son yet, but it was one of two sets we were allowed to take photos on.
Here is a picture I found online of the show. Below are pictures of my kids in front of the set.
This is what is referred to as a “dollhouse” set. It’s called that because the set has three walls (the sides and back) while the front wall is missing. The audience sits across from the set in these seats. The shows are taped before a live studio audience and the laughter you hear is real (not a laugh track). If a joke is performed and no one laughs, production is halted and the writers quickly rework the joke and re-shoot it.
After touring the Sullivan & Son set we toured two more sets. The first was the set of Big Bang Theory. Big Bang Theory has currently wrapped for the season and so almost anything that would be recognizable was covered with plastic tarps. So even if I had taken any pictures on that set (which I didn’t) they would be of rooms full of tarps.
The next set we visited was for a show called “Pretty Little Liars.” It was not a dollhouse set but rather a “practical” set, in which the rooms all had four walls. Once you get inside the set it’s like a bizarre maze. The entrance to the set was of a school hallway, with stairs that led nowhere and doors that led to people’s bedrooms. It was very strange and disorienting and I was continually reminded of how things in studios look “fake” but end up looking like real locations on the small and large screen.
The reason we were able to visit so many television sets was due to this:
That’s our cart, which had a tire blow out. (I’m innocent; I was sitting in the back!) With our cart out of service we had enough to visit the one still existing set from Friends, Central Perk.
Central Perk was the coffee shop the character from the TV show Friends frequented. The set is still fully assembled 10 years later and a good opportunity for photos. I have no idea what Morgan is doing in this photo.
At this point we moved to the museum portion of the tour. This is a lot of pictures of things from TV shows and movies so I will go quickly. Here are costumes from:
Big Bang Theory
Friends
Batman
More Batman
Superman
The Hangover
Charlie Sheen’s urn from 2 1/2 Men
Sandra Bullock’s space suit from Gravity
If you are a fan of Harry Potter, the entire second floor of the museum was dedicated to costumes and props from those films.
The last thing I’ll leave you with are these original line cartoon drawings. There were several of these (under glass) along with some storyboards from original Bugs Bunny cartoons. I really enjoyed looking at these up close.
I know the last couple of posts have been pretty picture intensive, but we saw so many cool things that I wanted to share — and trust me, we saw many more cool things that I did not include! To anyone interested in film history, I highly recommend the Warner Bros. back lot tour. We were very glad we did it.