Greeblies, Greebles and Nurnies

Whatever you choose to call them, greeblies, greebles or nurnies are an essential for the serious scratchbuilder and trash-basher. 

What are they?

They’re the hundreds of mechanical-looking parts that break up the surface of a model and give it the feeling of a real, working machine. According to Frank Burton, who was a department head on The Empire Strikes Back, 'Greeblie is a word George Lucas coined on Star Wars for something you can’t otherwise define.'

When you saw those huge star destroyers hove into view for the first time and marvelled at the surface detail, what you were actually looking at were thousands of pieces of rubbish and tiny parts cannibalised from model kits and stuck to the model's outer skin. Famously, the engine ports on Han Solo's Millennium Falcon are shovels from plastic bulldozer kits.

But, while Lucas might have given them a name, they predate Star Wars by at least a decade - certainly model-makers were using them in the late 1960s and early 70s on films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and TV shows like Thunderbirds. In fact, one of the industry's most infamous greeblies can be seen in the underground (or under swimming pool) hangar of Thunderbird 1.

Yes, that is quite clearly a lemon juicer/squeezer on the wall.

But, bearing in mind that this was the Sixties, when the height of exotic foodstuffs was a Vesta dried curry in a box, how many viewers would have recognised it? And it does look like a huge extractor fan, which is, presumably, what it's meant to be as such a thing would be essential to clear the fumes after a launch. The use of greeblies like this marked the point when model makers began to shift away from the smooth and pointy rocket ships of the 1950s towards a more realistic style that emulates what real spaceships - like the Apollo command and lunar modules - look like. 

All of which brings us to another important point about greeblies - they aren't just random. The goal is to carefully choose and place pieces that imply some sort of function. 

'A lot of people really underestimate how much attention is paid when doing this,' explains Fon Davis, a retired model maker who worked on hundreds of films for the special effects company ILM (Industrial Light and Magic). 'It’s not a random collection of pieces – you’re actually trying to connect hoses to boxes to fans to vents to things that look like they’re serving a purpose. The other part of it is to make it look aesthetically pleasing, so one of the biggest mistakes you’ll see on relatively a low-budget movie made by people who are not professional model makers is, you can spot that they don’t put that thought into it.'

Incredibly, modern CGI artists still use greeblies - they've just scanned them from the model kits.

So there you have it. Greeblies, greebles, nurnies - call them what you will. But you can't ignore them. 

And here's Adam Savage to tell you all about greeblies and, in particular, the fabled 'universal greebly'. Enjoy.

Other source material here at Den of Geek.