California License Plate 2SAM564

Jeffrey:
I’m a pretty big movie fan and I watch a lot of movies and. I guess, also TV shows. And when you’re watching movies and not much is going on in the film, your eye catches texts and tries to pick up Easter eggs. Right?

John Lagomarsino:
Surely you’ve all seen an Easter egg or two in a movie.

Billy Disney:
Yes. I’m trying to think of ones that are words.

Adrianne Jeffries:
The only thing I can think of is we just watched, we finally got through season 4 of Big Mouth. Whenever they cut to a scene at school, there’s a marquee outside the school and you pretty much have to pause the show in order to read what’s on the marquee. And it’s always a goof.

John Lagomarsino:
Oh, that’s funny. Well, Jeffrey likes to seek out things like that and he thinks he might have found a new one.

Jeffrey:
It started with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I watched that when I was a lot younger. It was this one episode where this one character is taking over a vehicle with magic powers and controlling it from inside the car.

Audio:
Turn.

Jeffrey:
And this is a vehicle called the Xandermobile. It’s only mentioned a few times and only in a few scenes and there’s nothing really noticeable about it, except for it being very pink. We get to see its license plate and for some reason, it just burned into my head. 2 S-A-M 564 or 2SAM564.

John Lagomarsino:
This is a California license plate, 2SAM564. Here’s an image of the Xandermobile.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Looks purple.

Jeffrey:
Yeah.

John Lagomarsino:
It’s pink.

Billy Disney:
Yeah.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Sedan, Ford. Buffy’s in it.

John Lagomarsino:
And for some reason, this license plate stuck out to Jeffrey and he just tucked it away in his brain.

When you saw Buffy, you just memorized the license plate from the first time that you saw the Xandermobile?

Jeffrey:
I guess, yeah. I was just trying to pick up on Easter eggs, I guess.

John Lagomarsino:
Right.

Jeffrey:
Because you know how, in Pixar movies they’ll have that code, A113 or something like that.

John Lagomarsino:
Are you guys familiar with this?

Adrianne Jeffries:
No, I was going to ask.

John Lagomarsino:
So A113 was a classroom number at the California Institute of the Arts where a lot of Pixar staff studied character animation and those animators went on to work at Pixar and well, worked that number A113 into various places in almost every Pixar movie, it appears. So it’s Andy’s mom’s license plate in Toy Story.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Okay. So with Easter eggs, we’re really talking about inside jokes.

John Lagomarsino:
Sure. Yeah. So this is the thing Jeffrey is looking out for when he’s looking at license plates in movies.

Jeffrey:
And then I was watching A Star Is Born.

John Lagomarsino:
This is the 2018 remake, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper.

Jeffrey:
And I noticed that license plate 2SAM564 on the car.

John Lagomarsino:
So the license plate shows up in that movie at the very end on a red pickup truck.

Jeffrey:
I was like, “That seems familiar.” And I looked it up and I was like, “Right, that’s the same license plate from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Adrianne Jeffries:
This person should become a detective.

John Lagomarsino:
Yes. This blows my mind that he was able to hold the Buffy license plate in his head and make a connection like this.

Regina Dellea:
I don’t even know my own license plate.

John Lagomarsino:
No, I don’t know mine either.

Jeffrey:
Then literally just two days later or something like that, I was just watching another movie for fun for the first time Matchstick Men with Nicolas Cage and Sam Rockwell. And I saw that the car in that movie had 2SAM564 as a license plate. And I was like, “Wait, wait. What is going on? Is there some kind of deeper meaning behind this?”

Adrianne Jeffries:
Do you have a picture of that car?

John Lagomarsino:
Yes.

Adrianne Jeffries:
It looks similar to the Buffy car.

John Lagomarsino:
It’s not pink.

Adrianne Jeffries:
I’m so bad at cars. I know, but it’s the same-

John Lagomarsino:
Really different grill. That’s not-

Adrianne Jeffries:
It’s different. It’s different. Yeah. You’re right. It’s different. It’s not a truck though.

John Lagomarsino:
Right.

Jeffrey:
And then through Google searching, I found that it was also in Ray Donovan. I have not seen that show. Oh, it was in fast and furious. I think that’s the most common one that shows up when you search for it. It’s in that scene where Paul Walker leaves the movie series and his car that he’s driving has that license plate.

Audio:
Hey, thought that you could leave without saying goodbye?

Jeffrey:
It’s in a movie called A Cinderella Story. I have not seen that, but I saw this on a subreddit that was called MovieDetails. They tried to mention that the license plate 2SAM564 has deeper meaning because the gift was for a character named Sam. The problem is that this license plate has appeared in media before that movie, right? So I think it was just a coincidence.

Adrianne Jeffries:
And he’s never noticed a license plate showing up in multiple films before.

John Lagomarsino:
Nope. This is the only one he’s ever noticed. He did the Googling and here’s what’s weird about it. It’s you can Google the license plate and you will find a couple mentions, but usually they’re in Wikis where it’s, the Buffy Wiki will have the Xandermobile listed and it’s just one of the facts that its license plate is 2SAM564 and then in Fast And Furious, in a different Wiki, it’ll list the car that has the license plate 2SAM564. These are all individually siloed pieces of information.

Billy Disney:
Right.

John Lagomarsino:
But no one seems to have made the connection that Jeffrey has.

Billy Disney:
Yeah. Because I’m looking on Flim, Flim.ai…

Adrianne Jeffries:
What’s that?

Billy Disney:
… Which is a website that lets you search stills from films. I know about this, actually because of Andy Baio linked it on his website. Shout out Andy, friend of the show.

There are a lot of license plates on here. So if you search license plate on Flim, you get… It seems like I can scroll basically forever. They keep coming. And I’m super far down the page. It keeps giving me more results. I haven’t seen this license plate yet and I haven’t seen a ton of other patterns. So it’s not like, oh, every license plate — it’s not like it’s 555 in a phone number or something.

John Lagomarsino:
Right, right.

Billy Disney:
Where it’s a thing that like all films do.

Adrianne Jeffries:
I found two websites for reporting bad drivers in California. One of them is rate-driver.com and the thread is about movies. One person says this plate is also on the red Mustang in 13 Reasons Why, which is a TV show. And then, on baddrivers.com, there is what appears to be a real report.

John Lagomarsino:
What is baddrivers.com supposed to be?

Adrianne Jeffries:
It looks like a crowdsourced database of bad drivers that you report by their license plate.

John Lagomarsino:
Oh, so this isn’t like a social network for bad drivers.

Adrianne Jeffries:
No. It’s like a form. Report a bad driver, license plate, type of bad driving event.

John Lagomarsino:
Who does it say the bad driver was?

Adrianne Jeffries:
A man, white male, late 40s, full beard, medium build. And it’s a Mercedes-Benz. August 21st, 2019. Is that-

John Lagomarsino:
That could have been Ray Donovan who was driving a Mercedes.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Okay. The 2017 TV series Manhunt, according to trivia on IMDB, the end scene, the license plate of the Volvo is 2SAM564.

John Lagomarsino:
You all are basically finding what Jeffrey did, where there are these-

Adrianne Jeffries:
He found all of these?

John Lagomarsino:

He found most of them. Yeah. There are these pockets of knowing that this license plate is in individual places or there’s a connection between two of them, but not any roundup about why this plate would show up in multiple shows or who’s putting them in these productions. Why

Jeffrey:
Is this one, the one that’s being used. And is there some kind of deeper meaning behind SAM or the numbers or anything. I’m still a little interested in figuring out this license plate.

John Lagomarsino:
Are there any theories here?

Adrianne Jeffries:
Well, it doesn’t… it sounds like… Okay, I would say my theory is, we haven’t found the original appearance of the license plate yet and there’s an original that everyone is calling back to. But my other theory is also that it’s just a license plate that is used in films and…

Billy Disney:
Yeah.

Adrianne Jeffries:
… He happened to notice it. And there may be other examples of license plates that are used across unrelated films and TV shows that just didn’t jump out at him for whatever reason. But that it’s not that weird.

Billy Disney:
Right. I think sometimes you see this with other things that appear in films, like products, like a brand of soda or… Actually Sam, Adrianne’s husband, did a video about—

Adrianne Jeffries:
Morley cigarettes.

Billy Disney:
…Yeah, did a video about Morley cigarettes when we were all at The Outline, which is, that’s a brand of cigarettes that shows up in all kinds of films. So I think it’s a thing that happens with certain props that are just heavily circulated. So maybe it’s that, but I don’t know. I’m going to all my go to resources. I’m on TV Tropes, I’m on All of The Tropes, which is just a spinoff of TV tropes. And those sites are both incredibly comprehensive. You could read all about Morley cigarettes on there if you wanted to, but there’s nothing about this license plate number.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Yeah. And it does sound like a thing, a call sign or something.

John Lagomarsino:
Do you have a theory? Why are these all the same?

Jeffrey:
You know how some places have random name generators or random Pokemon team selectors. There’s just a lot of random generation websites, right? I thought there was maybe a random license plate generator website that would commonly, or defaults to this one for some reason.

John Lagomarsino:
Like it wasn’t so random, yeah?

Jeffrey:
Yeah. I guess, I don’t know.

John Lagomarsino:
But Jeffrey’s top theory is that a single prop department or production company keeps reusing the same physical license plate over and over in different things.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Right. Is it always California?

John Lagomarsino:
It is always California. Yes.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Got it.

John Lagomarsino:
So your working theory though, is that this is a single prop department that is reusing literally the same license plate.

Jeffrey:
Currently, it is. Yes. But again, I don’t really know how prop departments work in film and TV, right? If it’s just one production company that’s behind all of this, that would explain it. But I don’t believe that is the case.

Billy Disney:
Okay. Because that was one of my other theories. It’s someone’s kind of signature that they’re sneaking in.

John Lagomarsino:
Right. It’s your calling card or something.

Billy Disney:
Right. It’s like their way of sneaking their signature in there.

John Lagomarsino:
Yeah. That is not the case. These shows and movies were all made by a huge variety of production companies in different places around the world over many years. Like Buffy, I think the first appearance of the Buffy plate was in 2001, A Star Is Born was in 2018. We’re talking about two decades of this plate being used in TV and film.

Billy Disney:
Okay.

John Lagomarsino:

So at the end of our conversation, I did that thing that we always do, that we always regret doing. And I promised Jeffrey, I would find an answer.

Well, I think that’s enough to go on and you with any luck, the next time we talk, hopefully I have a complete open-and-shut explanation for this.

Jeffrey:
That’s excellent. I love to hear back and hear what you find.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Such confidence.

Regina Dellea:
Easy-peasy.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Coming up, John hits up everyone’s favorite place, the DMV.

Billy Disney:
Hi listeners. It’s Billy. I just want to quickly thank everyone who has participated in our Patreon. If you don’t know, this show is produced by the four of us that you hear on it. We’re completely independent. And in order to support that effort, we’ve set up a Patreon. It’s at patreon.com/underunderstood. You can find a link to it in the show notes. And if you pledge on there, one thing you can get access to is Overunderstood, which is a bonus show that we do every week, regardless of if Underunderstood is currently in season and we have over 50 episodes in there already. That show is a bit looser. It’s more conversational. And it’s a bit more of an open dialogue with our community.

So if you’ve already contributed to Patreon and you’re part of that community and you’re in our Discord, thank you so much.

And if you haven’t yet checked it out, go there, dip your toes in. You can see what’s on there without actually having to pledge. And if you do pledge, you could just do it for a month, pay us $5 and get access to 50 episodes and then totally bail on us. That’s fine. I mean, it’s your life. Live your life how you want, but if you choose to stick around, there’s a great community there and we would love to have you and we really appreciate your support. So, I don’t know. If you haven’t yet, maybe go take a little peek. Patreon.com/underunderstood. All right. Back to the show.

John Lagomarsino:
Hello again.

Regina Dellea:
Hey.

Billy Disney:
Hi John.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Hello.

John Lagomarsino:
I have an answer for Jeffrey.

Adrianne Jeffries:
What!

John Lagomarsino:
But before I get to what the actual answer is, I do want to say upfront that this is a little weird for us because the answer to this one is very much on the internet.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Oh.

John Lagomarsino:
This is a findable answer for once, but this is also a case where Googling this particular question will not produce the answer even though all of the pieces we need to answer it are out there on the internet. So I think this is a fun exercise in the failings of Google and search to deliver an answer to a specific question.

Regina Dellea:
Feels Like we can get some good SEO from this show page.

John Lagomarsino:
That could be a bonus for us out of this. Yeah.

Billy Disney:
Yeah. Let’s squeeze the Google juice from this.

Regina Dellea:
Ew.

John Lagomarsino:
Gross.

Billy Disney:
All over ourselves.

Adrianne Jeffries:
The Google milk.

Billy Disney:

Yeah. Let’s drench ourself in Google milk. All right, John. You’re the truth udder. Don’t make us squeeze the answer out of you.

John Lagomarsino:
Let’s move on from this extended metaphor.

Regina Dellea:
Yeah, it’s really gross.

John Lagomarsino:
The way I got to the answer was the old fashioned way. I thought I should talk to some experts. Hi, is this Joey?

Joey Dillon:
Hey, how are you?

John Lagomarsino:
That is Joey Dillon.

Joey Dillon:
Sorry, it’s a little noisy. I’m little on location outside of the lobby and there might be some vehicles going by.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Ooh. What location?

John Lagomarsino:
Joey was calling me from the set of Westworld.

Billy Disney:
Wow.

John Lagomarsino:
Yes, he is working as an armorer on that set.

Joey Dillon:
I’m working in the film industry as an armorer with the weapons, gun training.

John Lagomarsino:
So just some context here. I spoke to Joey before a lot more of us learned about armorers after the fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins on the set of the movie Rust. Joey and I spoke before that, that was not part of our conversation and we basically just spoke about how his job as an armorer relates to his involvement with props.

Joey Dillon:
That falls underneath the umbrella of the property department. And so, other times when there’s no guns working, I’ll work day playing as props, and sometimes, some shows, I’ve been an assistant prop master.

John Lagomarsino:
It sounds like Westworld is the perfect gig for Joey specifically.

Joey Dillon:
I start growing up watching a lot of Western movies with my dad and then I started playing with some cap guns and I moved my way up to some small revolvers and did some quick draw and guns spinning. So I got really good at it and then I fell into a job at a Wild West park and did the stunt shows, comedy shows and did a gun spinning act. And then once I started training actors, I met some people that said you should actually do some of the gun work on set. And then eventually got into the union and started doing all weapons, modern and antique. And then that got me to meet a lot of prop masters who hired me and they said, “Well, do you like doing props?” I said, “I love doing props too.” And that, so they said, “Well, if you’re open to doing props and not just guns, you’ll never want for work.”

Adrianne Jeffries:
Now he’s in the prop game.

John Lagomarsino:
He’s in the prop game.

Adrianne Jeffries:
So, how did you find Joey?

John Lagomarsino:
Yeah, so the reason I wanted to talk to Joey specifically is that he worked in the props department on A Star Is Born.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Aha.

Joey Dillon:
I worked a bit on props. So, I was between doing gun work for movies and so it was, I was available. So, on any of their busy days, when they needed an extra set of hands as a prop guy, I jumped in with them. So I didn’t work the whole show.

John Lagomarsino:
So Joey’s been around the block and he knew all about how license plates wind up on cars in movies.

Joey Dillon:
I have done a lot of props on other shows where I’ve had to stick a lot of license plates on a lot of cars. So any car that is seen by camera needs to have its real license plate taken off or a fake license plate just stuck over the top. So, depending on how close up it’ll be, a lot of times, if we remove the license plate, we put it on the passenger seat floor so that it doesn’t end up with us by accident over night and the owners wondering where the plate is.

John Lagomarsino:
Did you all catch that? That any plate on a car that’s visible in a movie needs to be swapped for a fake?

Regina Dellea:
Why?

John Lagomarsino:
Well, we’ll get to that. It seems like real license plates are not used in legitimate movies and TV shows, which was surprising to me.

Regina Dellea:
Yeah.

Joey Dillon:
A lot of times we just stick it right over the existing plate, because it’s easier and quicker that way and at the end of the day, you just go around and pull them off. And then it’s very difficult because you’re working 12, 14 hour days, these drivers who have sat in their car most of the day and used very little are just ready to go home. So, when they call cut, it’s a mad dash to run down all these license plates and you never get them all. So there’s probably a lot of plates on the freeway that have blown off when the trailers are pulling the cars and stuff.

Adrianne Jeffries:
That’s really weird.

Billy Disney:
So I guess this is something I never really thought about. He’s basically saying, in a lot of these films, that the cars and their drivers are essentially just extras they’ve cast. Right.

John Lagomarsino:
Right.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Yeah.

John Lagomarsino:
But this stuff about needing to replace all of the license plates on any car that shows up on screen. Another veteran, Layla Calo-Baird told me something very similar.

Layla Calo-Baird:
I do props. I do set dressing, decorating, graphics, the lot of it. I’m also in the film union in Massachusetts, 481. And so there I am a set dresser, props and a set decorator.

John Lagomarsino:
You might know some of the stuff that Layla has worked on.

Layla Calo-Baird:
I worked on Little Women. The most recent one, not the ‘93 version. I worked on Hubie Halloween. I also worked on CODA, which went to Sundance and got bought by Apple for crazy amounts of money, which is really exciting. I’ve worked on a lot of Hallmark Christmas movies.

John Lagomarsino:
Nice. Yes.

Layla Calo-Baird:
Yeah, my mother-in-law loves those ones. She tells all her friends. She’s like, “My daughter-in-law worked on this.” And I’m like, “ugh, yeah, you know.”

John Lagomarsino:
Layla told me basically the same thing that Joey did. That for any license plate shown on film, she won’t use a real registered number. Why can’t you show real license plates in a movie?

Layla Calo-Baird:
It comes down to it being some number that you could track back to someone. What you can do is search for that person’s license plate by the number and see who owns the car. Therefore, it’s revealing personal information about someone. That is why we also have to use fake phone numbers as well.

John Lagomarsino:
From what I can gather, it’s not illegal to put a real plate in a movie, but it does open up an uncomfortable situation where someone could hypothetically find out who owns a fancy car in a movie or something by looking up the plate number.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Also with phone numbers, they want to make sure that the phone number doesn’t connect to a real person. So if the phone number is a big deal in the movie and a bunch of people watch it and then they’re like, “Ha-ha, let’s call the phone number and see what it is in real life.” And then some poor person gets harassed.

Billy Disney:
And the phone number thing still happens sometimes. There are phone numbers in movies.

John Lagomarsino:
It just happened in Squid Game by accident.

Billy Disney:
Yeah.

John Lagomarsino:
They had to edit it after it was released to remove a real phone number that was being spammed. So anyway, I explained the whole thing with our license plate to Layla.

Layla Calo-Baird:
Interesting. What was the plate again?

John Lagomarsino:
2SAM564.

Layla Calo-Baird:
Interesting because a lot of the time, if we’re making license plates or gravestones or posters, graphics, wanted posters, we usually use something that is funny to us, our own small Easter eggs, whether it’s a friend’s birth date or name and birth date or a date that means something or something like that. So I wonder if it’s the same prop person, which I’m curious now. I want to research that and see if it’s the same prop person that’s on all of them and it might just be part of their kit and they just keep using it.

John Lagomarsino:
Does that mean that you have some license plates in your kit that you go to?

Layla Calo-Baird:
I do.

John Lagomarsino:
You do!

But we know that’s not the case. We know that there were different prop people on all of these movies and TV shows. So it’s not a single kit that’s being used here. And very few of those people, I looked, very few of those people in those departments are named Sam. So if there is some in joke happening here across different prop people, it isn’t super obvious.

Adrianne Jeffries:
But is there anyone named 2Sam?

Billy Disney:
But there’s also the number. We haven’t really addressed the number, right?

John Lagomarsino:
2SAM564?

Billy Disney:
564.

Adrianne Jeffries:
May 1964.

Billy Disney:
Or leetspeak, maybe. Will that be in leetspeak. S-B…

John Lagomarsino:
Does every number have a letter in leetspeak?

Billy Disney:
S-B-A. 2SAMSBA or ZSAMSBA.

Regina Dellea:
Yeah. I was going to say you’re skipping the 2.

John Lagomarsino:
Okay. So whether or not this is an in joke, which we don’t really know yet.

Billy Disney:
Or leetspeak.

John Lagomarsino:
Or leetspeak. I was intrigued by the fact that Layla has her own collection of license plates.

Adrianne Jeffries:
I was also intrigued by that fact.

Layla Calo-Baird:
I have Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts.

John Lagomarsino:
And how did you pick the numbers on them? Or did you pick the numbers on them?

Layla Calo-Baird:
I think I used something like my sister’s birthdays and their initials but not together, but I put them into the DMV, made sure they weren’t registered vehicle things. And then I made the plates. Mine are far more generic than a lot of people’s because I don’t have raised lettering, but I’ve painted it to look like it’s. So from a distance it looks great up close-

John Lagomarsino:
Oh, so you made it yourself.

Layla Calo-Baird:
I did.

Adrianne Jeffries:
And she didn’t actually register the plates.

Regina Dellea:
Right I’m confused.

Adrianne Jeffries:
So that plate could have become registered after she made her prop version?

Regina Dellea:
Yeah. How do you know that that’s allowed?

John Lagomarsino:
Yeah. It sounds like she has to check them fairly often to make sure that they haven’t been used, but she is aware right now that they are not registered.

Adrianne Jeffries:
So there isn’t a reserved block of numbers the way there is with phone numbers.

Regina Dellea:
Yeah. I would think you would want to future proof it.

John Lagomarsino:
I agree that seems like a risk. Yeah.

Billy Disney:
So I’ve noticed— I don’t— This is a weird admission, but this is just like my broken brain. I’ll be in my garage and I’ll be like, “How could I spice it up in here?”

John Lagomarsino:
Oh my God.

Billy Disney:
And so I just wondered, I was like, “Are there people on eBay that sell lots of every license plate from every state?” And there are. And it’s not that expensive, relatively speaking. It’s like $200 for all 50 states. I didn’t actually do it, but I run through these hypotheticals in my mind all the time like, “What if I wanted to put every license plate in the country, in my garage?” So yeah, I know it’s very easy and impossible to get old license plates. And it’s not… If it’s illegal to sell them, it’s not on the tier of illegal that eBay polices, which they police a lot of things these days, so.

John Lagomarsino:
Right.

Billy Disney:
I would think if it was, it wouldn’t be possible.

John Lagomarsino:
Yeah. And beyond old license plates, there are these places that will make really convincing good looking license plates. Layla told me about this.

Layla Calo-Baird:
A couple friends have them and I’ll borrow them from them. They’ve purchased them from prop houses in California. And so they have their own sets that are actually really good versions. So I’ll borrow those from them from time to time.

John Lagomarsino:
And these are actually the plates that Joey uses most of the time.

Where do you turn to get a license plate that you can use on film?

Joey Dillon:
Yeah. So there’s a few different prop houses that have a graphics department that will create them for you. I have worked predominantly with ISS or Independent Studio Services and their graphics department. Whatever state and era you need, they also have shelves and shelves of plates that have already been made and rented and brought back so you can purchase or you can rent. And so it could be that some of these times when you see a plate over and over again, it might just be because there’s just a limited amount of that state and era plate on the shelf that a prop master keeps grabbing, renting and bringing back. And then also perhaps there is a limited amount that is available to, as far as numbers that are usable on the plates.

I did touch base with the graphics department at ISS. And they confirm that they strive to make sure they’re DMV clear, but that they would print whatever numbers you want and if it was a vanity or something else and then it would be up to me or our department to figure out if it was clear or not or if that we’re just cool trying to do it, I guess.

John Lagomarsino:
So this is like all kinds of license plate talk, which is great. But what I hadn’t gotten yet was how this specific plate wound up in so many movies. It sounds like there’s a fair amount of latitude. So why is 2SAM564 in so many places?

Well, all of this talk about the DMV got me more interested in California license plates themselves. So I’m going to drop a link in Slack right now. Take a look at the Wikipedia page for vehicle registration plates of California and scroll through this and tell me if you see anything.

Regina Dellea:
So, a demo plate?

Billy Disney:
Hey Wikipedia.

Adrianne Jeffries:
So you’re going to tell me that the answer to this was hiding in plain sight on Wikipedia.

John Lagomarsino:
Not quite.

Billy Disney:
Whoa, wait. There’s a bunch of SAMs in here. SAM123, 1SAM123, 3SAM123, 2SAM123, 4SAM123, 5… Wait, what?

Adrianne Jeffries:
Yeah. What’s with all the SAMs.

John Lagomarsino:
So, what are you looking at here?

Billy Disney:
Okay. So, this is basically a history of license plates in California, right? With visuals to accompany it. So these are all of these styles of license plates that have ever existed in California, presumably, organized very nicely. And once you get to the section that’s 1963 to present, the first license plate listed under that starts with SAM. It’s SAM123 and underneath it are a bunch of license plates that include the word SAM going into 1998 to late 2000.

John Lagomarsino:
Yeah, there are SAMs everywhere.

Billy Disney:
Oh yeah.

Regina Dellea:
Like Lake Tahoe version, 3SAM123.

John Lagomarsino:
Yeah.

Billy Disney:
Samaritan?

John Lagomarsino:
So this is pretty curious. A bunch of the plates on the page have SAM on them. And if you search for these plates specifically on Google or whatever, you’ll eventually find yourself on the website of the California DMV, specifically this PDF.

Adrianne Jeffries:
A PDF.

Billy Disney:
Oh, do I have Adobe Acrobat installed?

Adrianne Jeffries:
The answer was hiding in a PDF.

Regina Dellea:
It’s where all the answers are hiding.

Billy Disney:
Okay. So this is a DMV PDF from California Department of Motor Vehicles and… Wow, okay.

Adrianne Jeffries:
SAMs all day.

Regina Dellea:
None of these have started with 2.

John Lagomarsino:
That’s true. Yeah.

Regina Dellea:
It’s always been 1, 3, 4, 5, 6.

John Lagomarsino:
Mm-hmm.

Regina Dellea:
No 2s. So it feels like maybe that’s an impossible one to get.

John Lagomarsino:
Well, this PDF is really interesting. At the top it says California Department of Motor Vehicles, sample license plate order form. So apparently, you can pay the California DMV $12 and get one of these license plates that range in era and unused numbers, like 3SAM123, 4SAM123, 5SAM123, 6SAM123. The SAM apparently is short for sample.

Regina Dellea:
Ohhh.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Ohhh.

Billy Disney:
Ohhh.

John Lagomarsino:
That was so satisfying.

Billy Disney:
Everyone needs a side hustle. I don’t know.

John Lagomarsino:
This is so weird. You can just buy a $12 license plate that isn’t a real license plate from the California DMV. If you want to use it for schools or students may request a free current sample license plate by including a written request on school letterhead. I don’t know why, but you can buy these things and they’re samples. But what is not on the page still is the one that we’re looking for, 2SAM564. So, I cannot buy that license plate sample from the California DMV. So, I reached out to them directly and they declined an interview.

Billy Disney:
The DMV declined an interview?

Regina Dellea:
You have to wait in line.

Billy Disney:
Yeah. There’s a long line. Get in line, buddy.

Adrianne Jeffries:
What did they say verbatim?

John Lagomarsino:
They sent me a written statement. “License plate number 2SAM564 is on the list of reserved license plates for the motion picture and television industry.”

Adrianne Jeffries:
Oh, so there is a block of numbers.

John Lagomarsino:
Yes. It goes on. “This list is managed by the DMV and includes auto, commercial, trailer, motorcycle, police and government license plates that have been cleared by the DMV to be used in motion pictures and television.”

Regina Dellea:
So it’s not the same plate.

John Lagomarsino:
Not the same physical plate, no. The plates on this list are exclusive and are not used by any other vehicles. The department only authorizes configurations that would not be produced in a regular sequential series. This is to ensure that law enforcement can easily identify the difference between a valid sequential license plate and license plates used by the television and movie Industry.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Okay. Another good reason.

John Lagomarsino:
They didn’t come out and say this, but I think what this means is that the 2 at the beginning…

Regina Dellea:
Yeah.

John Lagomarsino:
… Followed by three letters can’t happen in a real license plate in California.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Yep.

Billy Disney:
Oh.

Adrianne Jeffries:
It’s weird that neither of the prop masters you spoke to knew about this.

John Lagomarsino:
I also think that’s really weird. They both seem surprised by this in a way. They had never thought about this. They just go to the prop distributor who gives them a license plate that they say is clear and that’s the end of it.

Billy Disney:
Yeah. They’re busy. And they’re part of a big, well oiled machine. They don’t have time to think about this stuff.

John Lagomarsino:
Yeah. They just know that they’re not supposed to show real license plates on film.

Billy Disney:
Yeah. Right.

John Lagomarsino:
I did follow up with the DMV to ask when 2SAM564 was added to their list because the earliest that we could find it was in the Buffy episode.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Mm-hmm.

John Lagomarsino:
Yeah. So they responded unsatisfyingly. “The license plate configuration was first introduced in 1980. Unfortunately, the department does not have any specific information as to when 2SAM564 was added to the list of license plates reserved for the Motion Picture and Television industry. It is still on the list for motion pictures/television use.”

Regina Dellea:
It’s probably in a filing cabinet somewhere.

John Lagomarsino:
We’ll never know.

John Lagomarsino:
So that’s our answer.

Billy Disney:
Wow.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Nice. It wasn’t really on the internet.

Regina Dellea:
Yeah.

Adrianne Jeffries:
It wasn’t until you got the response from the DMV that I felt like I had clarity.

John Lagomarsino:
Okay. So, this license plate being involved in this list is not readily available on the internet, but what’s interesting is that there are more of these plates floating around that people have noticed. 2GAT123 is one of those and that’s actually one of the ones on the Wikipedia article listing, The history of California license plates.

Regina Dellea:
What is GAT short for?

John Lagomarsino:
Oh, that’s a good question. Didn’t even cross my mind to ask that question. I don’t know.

Regina Dellea:
I think it’s Gatorade.

John Lagomarsino:
So 2GAT123 been in Mulholland Drive, The X-Files, L. A. Story, Beverly Hills Cop 2, and Crazy/Beautiful. The website 2gat123.com is someone’s personal website and that person has a whole section dedicated to various types and designs of license plates. So this one version of this has some internet juice, but 2SAM564 just doesn’t. And it took Jeffrey just randomly noticing it for us to put that together.

Billy Disney:
So, it’s not yet an intentional thing, but it could be because it’s a reserve number to be used and television and film. So I don’t know. I’m just saying, I know there are a lot of like film and TV insiders who listen to our podcast. Podcasts are becoming a source of finding things to adapt into films and television. I’m sorry we haven’t had anything good yet and this still isn’t something, but you can take this little meme of a number and make it something that’s more frequently used in TV and film.

John Lagomarsino:
I like this idea because it means that every time this plate now appears in a new movie or TV show, we can just assume it’s a reference to our podcast.

Billy Disney:
Exactly.

Jeffrey:
Can you hear me?

John Lagomarsino:
I can. How are you?

Jeffrey:
I’m good. How are you? [crosstalk]

John Lagomarsino:
I gave Jeffrey a call back to let him know what I had found.

John Lagomarsino:
I think I have some good news.

Jeffrey:
Great. Let’s hear it.

John Lagomarsino:
So the cool thing about…

John Lagomarsino:
I stepped him through what Joey and Layla told me about how license plates on cars and movies generally need to be fictional. I showed him that PDF from the DMV laying out the sample license plates.

Jeffrey:
Okay. I see. And, and SAM is sample, I guess. Right?

John Lagomarsino:
Exactly. So SAM is not a person’s name. It’s sample.

Jeffrey:
Interesting.

John Lagomarsino:
But I had also looked into the prop fabrication house that Joey mentioned, Independent Studio Services, and their graphics department, Studio Graphics. So for the last part of this, I was like, “What happens when you call ISS to get one of these things made?” And they were super nice.

It turns out they will just fabricate a license plate for you with the text that you need to be on it. You give them the era and the state you want and the text you want on it. And they will make a stamped plastic version of the license plate that looks pretty legit.

So like, after talking to these people, I want to show you this, check it out.

Jeffrey:
Wow. You could say that’s the actual license plate from whatever film that you find it in.

John Lagomarsino:
I guess we could say that.

Studio Graphics was able to make our very own set of California license plates stamped 2SAM564.

And I got two copies of this and one of them is going to go to you.

Jeffrey:
That’s amazing. No way.

John Lagomarsino:
Yeah.

Jeffrey:
That’s a story to tell to anyone who sees that.

John Lagomarsino:
For sure.

Adrianne Jeffries:
Underunderstood is John Lagomarsino, Regina Dellea, Billy Disney and me, Adrianne Jeffries.

John Lagomarsino:
Special thanks this week to Celeste Arias.

Billy Disney:
If you have a question that the internet cannot answer, we want to hear it. Email us at hello@underunderstood.com. We might just make an episode out of it.

Adrianne Jeffries:
If you can’t get enough of us, we have a Patreon where you can get a whole second show that comes out every week. You can sign up at patreon.com/underunderstood.

Billy Disney:

Thank you for listening. We will be back with a new episode in two weeks.