Welcome to my documents related to the iconic space pods featured in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, 2001: a Space Odyssey. Check the sidebar to the left (or click on the three line icon) to see other related pages.
The EVA pods were, of course, mostly a clean semi-gloss white, but there are a few small details here and there in other colours. Here’s some information about some of the more subtle details.
The two multisided recesses on the earmuffs contained a bunch of small details. These aren’t very clear in the film, but high resolution photos in the Kubrick Archives show the recesses pretty clearly. They had plain white interiors, and actually contained ordinary model kit sprues with parts still on them! In fact, it’s possible to see the exact model kits that the sprues came from.
The sprues are mostly from the Renwal Polaris submarine and Airfix B-29 model kits. The large rectangular plate is from the Airfix model railway travelling crane.
The sprues were mostly a slightly glossy grey colour, suggesting that they may have been the unpainted kit parts, simply glued into the recesses. Indeed, one pod has a row of parts that are all bent and at a funny angle, probably because they hadn’t been properly glued in place and they got bumped or something.
The details are often portrayed incorrectly as being red, but in fact the only red bit is the interior of a circular component that’s the base of an Airfix travelling crane kit. Some parts, such as the starlike B29 engine cooling fins, are painted white, but that’s about it.
The recesses had no lights in them. There's one moment, where a pod is turning in space, where you see lens flare flash briefly in the spot near to these recesses, giving an impression of internal lighting. But it's an unintentional trick of the light.
Finally it’s worth mentioning that the shape of the recesses was identical, because each earmuff was cast in fibreglass from the same mould. They were just rotated 180 degrees relative to each other as well as being flipped. People often model the recesses with slightly different shapes on each side, but it's a mistake. Of course the two recesses differed in terms of their internal details.
The pod interior is often depicted incorrectly as bright red. In fact the non-black walls were all painted a sort of brick red; almost oxblood in colour. They may have used red oxide primer type paint. It only appears scarlet red in film footage because in many scenes the interior is lit by red light.
Some of the behind the scenes interior photos suggest that different parts of the interior were painted different shades of red. However, this is a result of the narrow hard-edged light source used to illuminate the set interior for the purpose of documentary photography. Other photos clearly show that the interior was all painted the same shade of brick red.
As noted, the internal light panels inside the pod produce red light when lit. However they’re opal/translucent acrylic white plastic when off. In other words, they contained red light bulbs but weren’t red plastic panels.
The manipulator controllers, sometimes called waldos, had aluminium discs on the end with large holes cut for gloves finger insertion. However, unlike the discs, the outer cylinder was a pale yellow-gold, almost champagne gold, colour. You can see this clearly in some film footage, but people often paint this outer cylinder silver.
There are a number of surfaces with engraved surfaces - the window surround and the four exhaust deflectors on each of the two earmuffs - that look like a thick flexible rubber sheet. (though they were solid fibreglass)
These aren’t pure black in high resolution photos, but are actually a slightly bluish or very dark grey colour. Much like automotive rubber or whatever.
Most of the internal control panel buttons are pretty obvious in terms of colour - they’re medium blues and greens. But there are both white and yellow buttons as well. They look similar, since the pushbuttons contained tiny tungsten light bulbs which have a very warm colour of light. But they’re definitely different. And also a reminder that you should use warm white LEDs to backlight the buttons, not cool white.
The box like structures that were the “wrists” of the manipulators were painted black internally. I've seen no photos that show what was inside. We don’t know what the internal pivot mechanisms looked like, or what else might have been in there.
The four headlamps look identical to the plug-in sealed beam lamps used on aircraft landing gear. They were thus tungsten bulbs. Bluer lights, such as HID lamps, did not exist at the time.
There’s some suggestion that they might have been tungsten halogen, but I don’t think they were. They look like tungsten filament in closeup photos, though it’s hard to tell for certain owing to subtle texturing of the glass bulb surfaces.
It’s well known that the external front panel of the pod has a lot of continuity errors in the film. We don’t have enough information on the miniatures to known what they were like close up, but the full-sized pods had basically four versions of the panels.
The pod bay pods. These had simple front panels, with a fluted tubular aluminium camera housing and no HAL camera eye. They had no black and red curved stripes around the front details, and had a grey rectangular detail above the camera.
The outer space pods. These had simple panels, with a HAL camera eye in place of the fluted camera tube. They had a grey rectangular detail and no curved stripes.
The open-arm attack pod. This one had a simple panel, with a HAL eye. It lacked the grey rectangular detail, but had curved red and black stripes.
The closeup panel. This one was a special superdetailed panel made for the end of the attack sequence. It had a HAL eye and detailed curved red and black stripes. It had a totally different set of complex details glued on, though the underlying fibreglass cast looks the same as all the others, and it didn’t have the grey rectangle detail. The trellis-like structure on the port side was made of Airfix bridge pieces, but in a different configuration than all the other pods.
The hotel room pod. This was basically one of the pod bay pods.
There was also a continuity issue with the underside of the pod. Basically we hardly ever see the bottom of any of the pods, but most of the time we see plain undersides with a recessed rocket bell that was a shallow cone scribed with a series of recesses.
However for one brief moment we see a pod underside that’s covered in details. This is one of the pods used in the space scenes. All kinds of greebly details are arranged around the cone area. It does seem strange that this is the only time we see these details.
And sadly we only see it once, in shadow, in motion, and at an angle. So it’s not possible to make out all the greeblies in much detail. I haven’t, therefore, recreated the greeblies for my large pod project, because it involves too much conjecture and guesswork.
However the tiny 65mm pod I built for the Kubrick Exhibition has the underside details, since I thought it’d be fun to add them and at that size the conjecture isn’t that problematic.
That said, the greeblies kind of don’t make any sense. Because there are no corresponding recesses on the round landing pads on the pod bay, and you’d think the greeblies would just get in the way!
The blueprints for the full-sized pods do show a few details such as sort of alignment bars or skids on the underside, but these were never made, judging by the surviving photos, and they don’t correspond to the greeblies.
Finally sometimes people paint the pod underside a dark grey colour. I’ve seen no evidence that it was grey - it just looks grey in the film because it’s always in shadow. I believe the entire underside was white, just like the rest of the pod.