The Milwaukee Art Museum inspires the V mothership
TV aliens are flying around in a structure very similar to a Milwaukee landmark
The aliens have landed!
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Alien visitors in the early ’80s TV series V never quite instilled true terror in viewers the way something like Steven Spielberg’s grounded-in-reality Close Encounters Of The Third Kind did the previous decade. But if last week’s premiere is any indication, things might be different with ABC’s re-boot of V. These visitors dress like us, they want to settle the health-care debate, and—most disconcerting of all—they zip around in interstellar Milwaukee Art Museums. Talk about hitting close to home.
Santiago Calatrava’s MAM design has always had a sci-fi vibe—it kind of looks like Cloud City, the place where Lando screwed Han Solo over in The Empire Strikes Back. But last Tuesday, we laughed out loud upon getting a first glimpse of the interior of V’s mothership, which might’ve seemed very familiar to anyone who has walked MAM’s Schroeder and Baumgartner Gallerias. Even the ceiling was a dead-ringer for our Burke Briese Soleiel.
Turns out that the mothership’s resemblance to the Milwaukee Art Museum isn’t just a coincidence. OnMilwaukee’s Tim Cuprisin V emailed executive producer Steve Pearlman about the similarity, and he confirmed that “the designs of the white hallways in the Mothership were inspired” by MAM. Apparently the show’s production designer showed photos of the museum to the show’s director and producers, and “we loved its scope and the simplicity,” Pearlman said. See how the MAM-inspired ship looks tonight when V airs at 7 p.m. on ABC.
