Farscape IASA Recorder
I am a major Farscape fan and have been wanting to expand my collection of props from the show. Unfortunately very little has been identified as a "found" prop so I've taken it upon myself to find what I can. John's recorder is the first thing I found. I started by screencapping every shot of it I could find from the series:
Armed with as much reference as I could get I turned to that excellent helper of the prop community, Google. A few minutes of searching narrowed down the manufacturer (Sanyo) and three possible model numbers, TRC-530M, TRC-580M and TRC-590M. I wasn't able to find any that have the words "voice activated recording unit" like in picture 5 but the closest was the Sanyo TRC-580M. There may be various versions of the 580 depending on when/where it was made or the shows prop department may have added them for the production. Either way I'm fine with the one I found. A quick search around Ebay got me a slightly used one for about $20 with 2 cassettes included.
The cassettes I got aren't accurate to the show. Crichton's tapes were clear through, mine have a black piece on the inside.
The only other things I had to add were the black square covering the Sanyo logo on the front and the IASA sticker on the back.
I made the sticker from a logo I found years ago online. The original logo file didn't have the blue lines on the globe in the center so I modified it myself. Here's the final file I came up with, feel free to use/share it but please don't sell it:
I then went through and collected the audio from every time John spoke into the recorder and recorded it on to mine. As a final icing on the cake I met up with Ben Browder at Dragoncon 2010 and got him to record a unique message for me: "This is John Crichton. If you get this message, send chocolate, toilet paper, beer and most importantly, milk."
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