[blood splatters]

- You'll probably be surprised to know

that very little of this is historical.

- Come and get them!

- Ya, ya!

- Just a flesh wound.

[sword scrapes]

[crowd cheers]

- I'm Larry Zanoff,

Lead armorer at Independent Studio Services

the largest prop house in the world.

- And I'm Kelly Devries,

professor of history at Loyola University Maryland

and honorary historical consultant

for The Royal Armouries, UK,

Today, we're going to review arms and armor

from film and TV.

- Both from a prop maker's perspective

- And a historian's perspective.

"A Knight's Tale"

[crowd cheering]

[dramatic orchestral music]

[horse whinnies]

- [Larry] So, from a prop making perspective, of course,

this is a very difficult scene.

We have real horses charging at each other,

we got real guys mounted on top of 'em.

[crowd cheers]

If you look real good on these particular lances,

they are breakaway props

and they've actually been stuffed

with a form of dry spaghetti.

So that when it shatters,

you get that classic splintering

that occurs on camera.

Any time you can film something for real

it's better than CGI,

so that's one of the tricks we use

to be able to film a real joust

but without injuring anyone

and still get that kinda

spectacular explosion.

Very dynamic

and if gives you the feel of how much force

is behind

the lance as it hits and shatters.

Multiples upon multiples would've been created

by the prop crew,

by the prop makers,

months and months and months before.

- Not that far off from what a medieval tournament

would've been. - Correct.

- Because, every knight wouldn't shown up with

multiple lances

expecting to break them on contact.

- And you are?

- Ulrich von Lichtenstein from Gelderland.

- Ulrich vo Lichtenstein, Heath Ledger,

is a professional tournamenter.

He goes from tournament to tournament to tournament.

Well these guys, that's how they made their living.

And so they had a term for them.

They were called "free lancers".

Consequently, the term has come down

free lancers, somebody working

on contract

for victory in a tournament in this case.

[crowd cheers]

And we have to remember,

the tournaments are games.

That's all they are,

they're martial games.

Nobody is supposed to die in these.

On the other hand,

you see the blow to the face.

The blow to the face is very interesting

because when the knights were jousting

they would have a small shield on them

called a targe,

which was a target,

and the only points they could score

is if they hit that

or they hit the face.

You scored no points if you hit the torso

and if you hit the arms

you sometimes lost points.

So, this point that he takes right in the face

is very accurate.

I wonder now a days,

we're so conscious about concussion protocols

and I think,

how many of these knights getting hit in the face

say, "Oh, you get the points."

and the other guy is really in concussion protocol

at that point.

"Game of Thrones"

[intense drumming]

[arrows whizzing]

- Yah, yah!

- "Game of Thrones" is what we call medievalism.

It isn't set in the Middle Ages,

but it is using medieval weapons,

medieval armor,

medieval tendencies.

Jon's brother is running away from Ramsay Bolton

who's going to shoot arrows at him.

Big mistake he makes is he runs in a straight line.

Don't run in a straight line

if you're being shot at with a bow.

The technique here is good.

The bow is weird.

How exactly this bow is made.

But it is a longbow of sorts.

And he is pulling it back as far as he can.

And he gets quite a great distance on it.

[arrow whizzes]

The swords themselves are pretty accurate.

These are hand-and-a-half sword,

which is the most common sword in the Middle Ages.

That's not their term, that's ours.

But that meant that it could be used with

one or two hands.

And we often see the sword being wielded

by Jon or by anybody else

with one or two hands.

The other thing I like about this

is Ramsay has a dagger.

Now, it's not the way a medieval knight

would have worn it.

He would have worn it down the left thigh.

But he does have a dagger

and you can see how sharp and long it is

because that's the death dealing weapon

in the Middle Ages.

A lot of scenes in medieval battles

never shows what is probably one of the

worst things on the battle field

which is thirst.

Medieval battles were often very short,

but if it went on for very long,

the aspect of thirst and fatigue

took over so much.

We have scenes in medieval chronicles where

the soldiers are sucking the hilts of their swords

to get the little bit of moisture out of the leather

in order to keep going,

in order to not die of thirst.

- There's the one famous problem that we have

as Jon Snow's jumping up onto his horse

and he's got a floppy sword, right?

- There was a lot of talk about this on the internet.

People were going, "Oh, look,

"They forgot to put the sword into his scabbard."

But that's not true.

'Cause if you look at the clip,

you can actually see the grip of the sword

and the crossbar of the hilt

at the top of the scabbard.

And yet the scabbard is flapping around

like there's nothing in it.

There's a perfectly logical explanation for this.

The reason that it flops around like

there's no blade inside

is because there's no blade inside.

[Kelly laughs]

This wouldn't been a stunt rig

that has a handle as if there's a sword

in the scabbard

but there's no blade attached to that handle.

And there's several different reasons

why that may have occurred.

Later on in the scene,

his horse stumbles and he kinda does

one of these hero moment somersaults

right off of the horse.

[horse neighs]

That would've been a very difficult,

if not downright dangerous

thing for the actor or stunt person

to do.

And normally when you have big scenes like this

the film maker will always want to do

one or two what we call "master shots"

where it's big, wide shot

from start to finish.

And so there was no room to cut

in between him hopping on the horse

and him falling off the horse

to change out that stunt blade.

So, it's more a safety issue.

It's not an issue of neglect.

It wasn't like the prop crew forgot

about putting,

I mean, this is Jon Snow,

Longclaw is his sword.

It's made of Valyrian steel.

It doesn't flop around like that.

But in this particular case,

the safety overruled what they were doing

as far as the prop itself.

[horses galloping]

- [Kelly] "Gladiator".

We're in the middle imperial period

Roman history.

Maximus has been captured

and sold as a slave into the gladiator arena

as many slaves were.

And we see him in his first gladiatorial bout.

- The movie is "Gladiator"

and there's a lot of props in it.

But, what's the main prop gonna be?

- [Kelly] It's the gladius.

- [Larry] It's gonna be the gladius, exactly.

- [Kelly] I mean, gladiators are called gladiators

because they used the gladius.

- [Larry] Exactly.

- [Kelly] They made them in an industrial fashion

with a low carbon iron for the blade,

not particularly sharp,

and a wooden hilt

that was not particularly varied.

Roman soldiers show up,

here's your gladius.

Almost like a GI might get a gun, or whatever.

- The Roman Empire was built on the gladius,

a short, thrusting sword, and yet,

here he is with these big wide arcs,

and he's slashing and cutting.

[crowd shouting] [man grunting]

[sword slashes and clinks]

And it just wasn't designed for that.

- It would have been used behind a shield,

shield protecting the soldier,

soldier using a sharp point

to kill his opponent

or wound his opponent

and move forward.

This is not the way he would've used it.

- Are you not entertained?

- Unfortunately, we can't use real swords

in that,

in our version of the fight.

So we do things like,

we dull down the edges.

That allows the actor to have the real

weight of the sword.

Gives them the feeling of really being

in a sword fight.

We'll also make an aluminum version

so you can actually

do stage combat.

Contact with the blades.

And then we'll probably do a rubber

or maybe even a retractable.

So you can stab someone and pull it out

without actually injuring the actors.

And if you watch the scene itself,

there's that classic Hollywood,

you can almost see where the sword is going

right under the armpit of the guy on the far side

of the camera

and he kinda traps it there.

- Maximus slashes a couple of times,

which isn't real,

and then he does exactly what

he would have been trained to do

which is to thrust with those swords.

- You can see,

he's actually stabbing something.

There's a little bit of movement

in the blades.

But that could actually be from

what they were stuck in.

Chances are these were actually stuck into

a mannequin.