Embedded Files
A lot of science fiction productions that were filmed in England in the 1970s and 1980s had a specific visual hallmark – heavy grids employed as floors, ceilings, and sometimes walls. These things show up all over the place!
Check out this iconic (yes; a wildly overused word but appropriate here) spaceship corridor from Alien.
What were the Star Wars pallets?
What were the Star Wars pallets?
What were these grids? Custom crafted and bespoke-manufactured items? Nope!
Very simply, they were shipping pallets! Heavy, moulded plastic, shipping pallets. The things you stick a bunch of stuff on and lift up with a forklift truck, for transporting somewhere else. These are typically made from wood, but plastic ones are also common.
Indeed, you can see the areas on the underside of the pallet that are spaced to accommodate a lifting vehicle’s forks. This type of pallet is known as an open or four-way pallet.
The ones seen in movies are apparently 980mm x 1190mm in size. This differs from the standard Euro pallet, which is 800mm x 1200mm in size. It’s also a tiny bit smaller than the most common UK pallet, which is 1000mm x 1200mm.
Why use the pallets?
Why use the pallets?
Repurposed for filmmaking as set decoration, the plastic pallets were a brilliant solution to a problem. How do you fill out your spaceship rooms convincingly and at low cost?
Enter these shipping pallets. Not only were they sturdy, but they could easily be cut up and screwed together in different configurations, forming large complicated-looking grids. The holes and boxes gave a sense of visual busyness and a linear texture that’s perfect for science fiction sets.
Typically moulded in bright orange plastic, they were sometimes backlit for a spacey glow, or simply painted grey, brown, or green, and screwed into place. They looked functional and real – they weren’t like ice cube trays glued to the wall or anything like that. They were heavy chunks of plastic with a slight texture to the moulding, so they looked convincingly like beat-up metal when painted – there was a subtle irregularity to the surfaces.
On the floor they formed a fairly solid grid to walk on, but since they were plastic they absorbed much of the noise of actors’ footsteps, making things easier for sound recording teams. Fastened to the wall and backlit through smoke, they cast evocative rays of shadows. The pallets had front and back surfaces which looked completely different, doubling their visual usefulness.
And they were cheap. Very cheap.
Genius.
Here’s my 3D model of one of the Space Pallets of the 1970s.
Who used them first?
Who used them first?
It all started with a tightly budgeted 1977 film called Star Wars, which appears to have been the first production to use the pallets. It seems possible it was set decorator Roger Christian who found them and started using them, but regardless the pallets made their way into a number of memorable sets.
They appeared in Star Wars as:
The floor and one wall of the Millennium Falcon hold. (painted grey)
The floor and walls of Princess Leia’s Blockade Runner side corridors (which isn’t surprising since they were the Millennium Falcon hold set repurposed).
Possibly the bridge leading to Luke’s homestead garage (grey). The garage floor looked similar to the pallets, but was actually a different material.
The floor of the hexagonal detention block corridors. (orange, lit from below)
The floor of the detention block anteroom. (orange)
The ceiling of the Death Star prisoner cell/torture chamber. (orange, lit from above)
Death Star corridor ramp.
In fact, an entire grey-painted pallet is clearly visible in the shot where Princess Leia is zapped by a stormtrooper, albeit only for a couple frames of film.
“Let’s pack her up and ship her to Lord Vader!”
The back wall of the ANH hold (not seen here – it’s to the left of the frame) had pallets as well, though the ESB version of the hold did not.
One point of interest about this set is that it was built in forced perspective. In other words, the corridor was constructed at a normal size with seven pairs of cell doors, and from there it rapidly narrowed, with increasingly smaller hexagon wall panels. This trick made the corridor seem much longer than it really was. The Princess’ cell was the third door along on the right.
The floor panels were also faked where the forced perspective began. This screenshot, from the original 1977 movie, shows that the floor is much lighter in colour at that point.
Here’s the same scene from the Special Edition. You can see the floor colour and slope have been fixed, and the corridor has been made to look even longer.
And for fun, here’s a view of the corridor seen off-axis, from the original 1977 film. This view clearly reveals the fakery of the forced perspective set. Which was an ingenious solution for a limited budget, but also restricted camera angles considerably. This was another shot fixed for the Special Edition.
The pallets had basically three different densities of strips, which is quite apparent when backlit. This helps contribute to the visual complexity of the detailing.
This close-up reveals, for 2-3 frames anyway, a lot of details of the pallet floor. Note how some of the holes in the bars are circular rather than rectangular, indicating one of two specific types of pallet that were used. Note also the exposed plywood to the upper right. Yes, the Death Star was made of plastic shipping pallets and plywood!
What other shows were palletized?
What other shows were palletized?
Alien (1979)
The most memorable use of the pallets, other than in Star Wars, has to be Alien. Another show decorated by Roger Christian, incidentally. The pallets were widely seen lining the Nostromo’s industrial corridors and storage hangar walls. Billowing clouds of steam (CO2, really) with spotlights shining through the grids of the orange pallets – awesome stuff.
The prop makers also used sliced-up chunks of pallet to adorn Ripley’s cat carrier box.
Doctor Who (1979)
Wall panels, painted pale grey, adorned the beastly Nimon’s techno-lair in the famously not very good Tom Baker series The Horns of Nimon.
Behold my mighty oversized papier-mâché head! Fear my scrawny arms, my children, fear and tremble!
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
The Hoth hangar’s overhead gantries.
The Falcon hold floor again, but not the walls.
The Falcon’s kissing booth ceiling.
The floor of the Star Destroyer corridor.
The Bespin light sabre duel gantry.
Saturn 3 (1980)
This execrable film was initially directed by Star Wars designer John Barry and contains a number of items used as set dec in Star Wars.
You want to see Farrah Fawcett straddling a recycled Star Wars crate? An ageing Kirk Douglas thinking he can play the sexy leading man with a vastly younger woman? Harvey Keitel, badly dubbed, chewing up the scenery? An awful looking random killer robot? Then this is the movie for you!
Outland (1981)
Sean Connery engagesh in a brutal shpace fight next to a huge grid of shipping palletsh. Jusht look at them all!
The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, TV show (1981)
The BBC TV adaptation of Douglas Adams’ Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy featured a ton of pallets used as the walls of the Vogon spaceship corridor. Though because the show was done on a miniscule budget they just slapped rows of pallets in an empty studio, which looked a little unconvincing.
Return of the Jedi (1983)
The floors of the Imperial bunker on Endor were all palletized. The Falcon hold set and its floor was reused, but wasn’t seen in the final cut of the movie.
Aliens (1986)
The corridor floors and ceilings of the colony base and the Sulaco spaceship sets. Famously seen in closeup when Newt’s fingers desperately reach out for Ripley.
You can see how the paint that was applied to the pallets doesn’t stick very well to the slightly flexible plastic, and is scratching off everywhere.
Red Dwarf (1988)
Various wall panels in certain early episodes. Kryten, the first episode of series 2, for example, features the panels on both Red Dwarf and Kryten’s ship.
Who made the pallets?
Who made the pallets?
There has been a lot of discussion about who actually manufactured the pallets. They almost certainly were made in the UK, since all the productions that use the pallet were filmed there.
There have been one or two people who have claimed in forum discussions to know the original pallet manufacturer, but refuse to divulge the name of the firm. Do they actually know, or are they just pretending? No idea.
The photos I’ve seen of surviving pallets don’t appear to have obvious manufacturer marks or names on them. One theory that has some credence is that the UK subsidiary of Craemer of Germany made them. The fact that the Star Wars pallets don’t conform to Euro pallet sizing clearly indicates that a German maker wouldn’t have made them.
Regardless, it seems nobody is manufacturing pallets to the same precise design today, even though tons of companies manufacture plastic pallets. There’s a specific look to the original 1970s SF pallets, especially the rows of small rectangular holes, that you can’t seem to find anymore.
What happened to the pallets?
What happened to the pallets?
There seem to have been very few of the original 1970s/80s pallets that survived. I don’t know why. One theory is that the manufacturer recalled them and recycled the plastic, and since they paid a bounty on returned pallets, not many survived in the wild.
I haven’t found any information to back up that idea, though it sounds reasonable. Polypropylene and polyethylene are both technically recyclable plastics, though in real life they’re usually just landfilled owing to the higher costs of recycling and changes in the properties of plastic that occur after they get remelted.
Auctioneer Propstore found and bought a set of old partially-painted production-used pallets from a prop rental house (not from a pallet manufacturer) and auctioned them off in 2011. Of course, it’s not known for certain what productions each pallet was used in.
What about the Star Wars sequels?
What about the Star Wars sequels?
Sadly the Disney-era Star Wars films do not use the correct pallets as Millennium Falcon floor panels. They used some other type of pallet that looks completely different and frankly less cool. Oh well.
What did Alien: Earth use?
What did Alien: Earth use?
Production designer Andy Nicholson, who designed the 2025 Disney TV show Alien: Earth, created new sets which harkened back to the original Nostromo set from the first Alien film. Disney have published a lot of high-resolution photos of the new sets, which look spectacular, and which seem to show very pallety looking pallets. Orange with peeling grey paint, and proper slightly rounded edges. (this latter fact indicating that they weren’t laser-cut acrylic or anything like that)
Accordingly it appears his team had special replica pallets, which appear very slightly idealized and cleaned up compared to the original mouldings, made for use in the show to build the doomed Maginot spaceship. A very nice detail.
The new show was entirely filmed in Thailand, including all the interior studio work, incidentally.
From what I can tell, Alien Romulus (2024) went for a grid-like vibe in some sets, but did not use pallets or replica pallets.
Links
Links
An RPF discussion of the floor tiles/pallets. This thread includes a link to a 3D model by member pauljwiz.
https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/aliens-floor-tile.150618/
The Prop Pallet photostream on Flickr.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/89573038@N04/albums/
A fan model of the top of the pallet. (no internal structure)
3D model
3D model
A number of people have built 3D models of the infamous space pallet. Most of which look fine, but a bit low on the detail side of things. I decided to make one with a bit more detail. However, I don’t have the greatest photo resources, and I don’t have any decent side views and measurements. So there’s a lot of guesswork. For example, I’ve assumed the sides were the standard British pallet height of 150mm (5.9 inches), and that seems to correspond to the photos. Notably there are errors at the ends (an internal detail, the width of the endmost lower bars) that I lack information to fix with certainty.
This is a 1:10 sized model, and there are a lot of thin walls that would make it rather difficult to print at smaller sizes. In fact, I didn’t design it to be printable at all on a filament printer or a home resin printer. You could only print this complex design using a resin printer which has removable wax supports. But here it is if you want to play around with spacey pallets.
Let me know if you do something fun with it. It’s free, but please link back to this site if you use it. Thanks!
Version A, 23 Aug 25: first release
Version C, 24 Aug 25: third release, height and detail fixes
Version D, 24 Aug 25: four release, minor details.
Version E, 25 Aug 25: updated side holes and added details.
Version F, 25 Aug 25: fixed narrow ends.
Version G, 26 Aug 25: converted straight chamfers to pencil round.
Version H, 26 Aug 25: minor details – rounded corners on the rectangular holes.
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