Recently, I wrote an article about my experience as a movie armorer/historical consultant. The response from TFB readers was great, so I decided to continue discussing guns in movies. And today, I want to look at some examples of gun props that were designed and manufactured specifically to imitate some other firearms.There are many reasons to design such a prop gun - you might need to show the weapons of the far future, or maybe you have to imitate a gun you don’t have in your armory. But sometimes it is pure convenience that creates weird prop guns. MGPKI will start with an example of that: a weapon that I had plenty of experience with - MGPK, a combination of German MG 34 and Soviet PKM. It was created for the largest Soviet movie film studio called Mosfilm.In the 1960s, Mosfilm was tasked with producing grandiose movies about WWII. They routinely used hundreds of tanks and thousands of small arms. To better facilitate this process, the Soviet Army created a specialised army unit that had only one task - to participate in war movie production. Author with MGPK in 2009 This unit was given everything: an extensive collection of old tanks and thousands of vintage weapons. But there was one thing the Soviet army could not give - German blank 8mm ammo. During WW2, the Soviets captured a lot of German weapons, but the stock of blank ammo did not last long. They faced the choice - import 8mm blanks or do something unthinkable, and they picked the second option.Soviet armorers chopped up a large number of rare MG34s and PKMs, welding them together and creating the MGPK. I call it the “machine gun mullet”: German in the front, Soviet in the back. It used standard 7.62x54mm blank ammo and looked convincing only if you filmed it from the front, preferably from a distance.But most directors did not know any better, so it ended up in countless close-ups of Soviet and Russian war movies. I personally used MGPK quite a lot while working at that movie armory; it was reliable and always sparked an interesting conversation. Fake XM29 OICW Photo Credit: Still from the movie Universal Soldier: The Return (Sony Pictures, 1999) Sometimes you have no choice but to imitate the gun you need for a movie. One of the most notable examples is OICW (Objective Individual Combat Weapon), an ambitious project that combined a 5.56 rifle and 20mm grenade launcher with a ‘smart’ airbursting grenade.This futuristic weapon was featured in the James Bond franchise, ‘Die Another Day’, with Pierce Brosnan, and in part two of ‘Universal Soldier’. But the real XM29 was never available to film armories. So, for every movie where OICW was used, armorers created a clever imitation. For example, in ‘Universal Soldier’, an MP5 was used to create a firing replica.In ‘Die Another Day’, an H&K G36 was used to build OICW. It made sense, since the ‘KE’ carbine used in the XM29 was based on the G36 design. The replica was built by Karl Schmidt, the master armorer of Bapty & Co., one of the most famous British film armories, which provided prop guns for the original Star Wars movies. Photo Credit: Still from the movie ‘Die Another Day’ (MGM, 2002) According to an article in the James Bond Wiki, the prop was fully functional:“A selector switch was made to mechanically change the single trigger on the G36 to function either the G36 or the special 20mm upper firearm. Karl built a complete action with a multiple-cam rotating bolt head, magazine, and feeding system so that the fake 20 mm cartridges (with a Swanson .357 blank inside) would cycle out of the weapon.The secondary prop was made with a Micro Uzi embedded in the upper prop shell. A long Uzi magazine was also modified to slide inside the prop magazine. The lower part of the weapon was also a G36, as in the primary prop. A special selector was made to transfer trigger-pull from firing the G36 to the Micro Uzi.” The Fake Soviet M16s Fake Mosfilm M16 next to STG 44 There is another notable example of Frankenstein prop guns. While in Hollywood, ‘bad guys’ were often using AKs, imported from Egypt or Finland, the Soviets wanted to equip their made-up enemies with M16-pattern rifles. But as it often happens in socialism, logistics weren’t exactly well thought out.In the 1970s, the Soviet Union received a large number of M16s and CAR-15s from Vietnam. Those guns were given to some small arms factories and research facilities, universities that trained gun designers, and special operations units within the Soviet Army that occasionally trained with foreign weapons.The movie armories received few of those guns and no ammo. So instead of requesting more guns or importing 5.56 blank ammo, Mosfilm sent a batch of German STG 44s to the Kovrov factory for modification. Fake Mosfilm M16 in the Soviet movie ‘Mirage’ The final result looks like a strange mix of AR-10, M16, and G3 that uses 7.62x39 blanks and looks nothing like M16. It was featured in many movies and caused many gun enthusiasts to question both their eyesight and gun knowledge. To this day, nobody knows why the studio did not try to convert M16s to blank 5.45 ammo and instead desecrated rare SRG 44 assault rifles.If you want to see some of the best examples of unusual gun props, check out this article by Luke C. - TFB's Top 10 Sci-Fi Movie Weapons: Part 1.Did you see any weird gun props in movies? Let me know in the comments whether I missed any good examples.