Young Frankenstein Used the Original Frankenstein Lab Equipment
Brooks wrote that Young Frankenstein production designer Dale Hennessey, fresh off of 1971’s Dirty Harry, built an incredible Frankenstein’s castle set that “looked like it was made of sweating stone, like it was in the mountains where a mist had settled on the surface, leaving it all wet.” It was 15,000 square feet and 35 feet high, occupying Fox’s enormous Stage Five.
The production filled it with laboratory equipment from the original 1931 Frankenstein, which that fim’s brilliant designer Kenneth Strickfalden, who was in his 70s, had kept stored in his Santa Monica garage. “These were the contraptions that made the scary lightning zaps and conferred the entire set with a pulsating eerie glow.”
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