We’ve heard Doctor Who and Star Trek fans are loyal through and through, but one Westfield, Indiana resident just might take home the award for “World’s Biggest Fan.” Transforming his entire basement into a homage to both franchises, Todd Spann has recreated iconic sets, including a Doctor Who-themed computer room, a TARDIS, and parts of the Starship Enterprise.
Local Indiana news channel WTHR interviewed Spann about the project, and he took them through his entire creation. And before you take a peek, bear in mind he had zero construction experience and did the entire project all by himself over the course of two years, with not much money to spend on it.
This guy’s basement could be a museum one day, I’m calling it now.
Thanks to his father, Spann had a love of sci-fi from an early age, and it shows. The recreated sets are nothing short of amazing. They have mechanical doors that slide open for goodness sakes, just like on Star Trek!
The Star Trek and Doctor Who experience
Let’s take a bit of a closer look, starting with the Star Trek portion of Spann’s basement, which includes a Star Trek-themed theatre controlled via knobs and gadgets on a console. This portion of his basement took him about 6-8 months to complete:
Then there’s the Doctor Who section! It’s literally as if you’ve walked onto the set of the series. I’m thinking he should get hired as a set designer for one of these two franchises because clearly he’s got the brain for it.
One may wonder how a man with minimal construction experience could build something so detailed and intricate. According to Spann, it was a lot of reading, researching, and getting permission to dumpster dive for random items that could be built into something.
"Designing it? A lot of Googling pictures, printing out pictures, sitting in the basement staring at everything, thinking, ‘How is this going to work?’ A lot of measuring. A lot of trial and error. You set something up and think, ‘Well, that’s not going to work.’ You tear it down and try something else until I got it to where I was happy. […] I actually got permission to dumpster dive, so 30 percent of this basement is actually from dumpster diving. […] I’m a computer specialist. I didn’t know how to drywall, put up walls. I just did a lot of reading, research and asked a lot of questions on forums and got responses. I did this for me. I didn’t expect publicity and everybody sharing it, so I was totally shocked."
And while the entire project may look complete to the outsider, Spann claims that there’s more he wants to work on. Perhaps he’ll create the Millenium Falcon interior next!
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