LEGO Anakin Skywalker costume

I'm a big LEGO fan, so I thought it would be cool to make a LEGO costume for Halloween one year! Episode III had just come out so I did LEGO Anakin, using one of the mini-figures I got with a LEGO kit I had.

It took two years to finish the costume- I ran out of time the first year. I improved the design anyways and it really helped to construct it with more time. I could see, turn my head, walk, even run in the costume. Everybody was surprised when this giant LEGO man came walking out into the courtyard that day at the Halloween party at work!

I designed it so I could take it apart and transport it easy. The thing is made mainly of foam, fabric and foam-core board,... and alot of hot glue! The body is simply a sandwich-board design made of foamcore that hangs on my shoulders. The hands are gloves that have LEGO-hands glued onto them. The legs have a pair of sneakers mounted into them, so anybody can wear it. You just step into the shoes and off you go! (once you learn how to walk in it.)

The head is foam pieces stacked and glued together. I could see out of the mouth opening. When I started painting the hair, I realized that if I simply painted the face, the texture wouldn't be smooth enough to make it look like a giant toy, so I covered the face with fabric. It looked pretty good that way, nice and smooth!

The lightsaber is a blue FX saber from Master Replicas. To make it look more like a LEGO saber, I wrapped it in bubble-wrap which made it look thicker and still let the light shine through.

My buddy Tommy dressed up as the real Anakin! We had fun dueling it out at the party!

There were a bunch of cool costumes that year! It's always fun to see how creative everybody is! Again, I didn't win anything in the costume contest. The "judges", who they always pick from a department we've never even heard of, always seem to vote for their friends, who we also have never heard of! Maybe they thought I bought it. However,my fellow Simpsonite and friend Karen Carnegie won in one category that year. She dressed up as a birthday cake... table and all! Woo-hoo! Represent!

Here is the min-figure I used as a model for the costume. Like I said, I had to open his mouth so I could see out of it. The rest is pretty much the same as the figure.

LEGO Anakin now stands watch over my game room. I improved the look of the lightsaber with the help of my friend/Simpsonite Nancy Kruse. She wanted me to join her troupe she was heading up for the annual Doo-Daa parade here in L.A. that year. You couldn't see the saber glow in bright light, so Nancy suggested that I cover it with blue cello-wrap they use to package flowers with. It worked! It glowed blue in the sunshine and even bluer in the dark!

Since LEGO Ani doesn't move while he's on display in the game room, I made 2 fake arms using foam rollers and hung them with bungee cords so you can fight him. Anakin's good hand can be chopped off if you hit him the right way! I hollowed out one of the arms and stuffed a red sock inside after it was mounted to the hand. If you cut it off, you can simply "reload" it!

The horror!

The spider is not to scale!

"Don't make me destroy you!"

BILL from SchoolhouseRock!

"Bill" from the old SchoolhouseRock! cartoons is another costume I came up with for Halloween. He was just a big sheet of thick foam-rubber, glued together in the right places. The pupils in the eye piece have black nylon behind them so I could see out. The eyepiece is Velcro-ed onto the foam and I cut a square out behind it so I could see through the pupils. The nose was a small sheet filled with stuffing and pulled through a slot in the foam. I put a piece of wire into his top corner to curl it over a little, like Bill's did in the cartoon.

The bill badge was a piece of cardboard covered in fabric and attached to the sash. I wore long underwear underneath to keep everything white. The eyebrows and mouth were simply thick pipe-cleaners I pressed into the foam. The brows wiggled a little when I moved!

The briefcase turned out pretty cool! I bought a case at the Salvation Army and then glued foam-core on it to make the brass buckled and locks. Then I painted it the right colors. To make it look really cartoon-ey, I painted a thick black outline on every edge of the case. I worked pretty good.

The BILL costume was really comfortable to wear too. It was really easy to dance in! That looked pretty funny by the way. People would come and talk to you over the top of it. You couldn't take a leak in it though... well not in public anyways- WHAT!? ... guess it could use an upgrade.



Bill's resting place in my garage. He has yellowed over the years. Now he looks more like a parchment bill... or law!

"Ohhh Yeah...!"

Boba Fett costume

This is my Boba Fett costume I made as a surprise for Halloween the year of 1993 (wow) I believe. All of it was hand-made and scratch built in my one-bedroom apartment in North Hollywood. Now this was before the Internet, before DVDs (WHAT?), before you could buy a full costume from some guy sellin 'em. The whole thing was built from nothing! Which is why there is no rocket-pack... for alas- I ran out of time!

The helmet was sculpted in front of my laser disc player in pause mode. "Return of the Jedi" was my main reference, along with pictures from books and trading cards I had. Eric(Thomas) helped me make a plaster "cast" of my head and I sculpted the helmet on top of it with green plasticine (I think) clay. I figured this would be the safest way to make sure that it fit on my head.

When the helmet sculpt was done- I needed help. A friend arranged for another friend of his to help me mold and cast the helmet. I need to buy everything and just bring it to his shop. I had to ask one of my friends to help me get it there. I wanted to surprise everyone at Simpsons with it so no one would know who it was until I took off the helmet, but I had to let someone in on it. Paul Wee and I had kind of talked about how cool it would be to "make-this-or-dress-up-as-that" for Halloween and once we were thinking how tough (but awesome) it would be to make a Boba Fett costume. When I told Paul what I had in my apartment and why I needed his help he nearly fell over. So at lunch one day we drove to my apartment and with Paul holding this green Fett helmet thing in his lap, off we went! When we got there, the guy thought we dropped it because of the "dent" on top. Right on!

The cast was made in a creamy brown fiberglass so it looked like it was made out of chocolate! I filled in any pits and air bubbles with epoxy putty and finished the helmet with lots of sanding and rebuilding. It was really fun to paint it in the flat colors and then mess it up with scrapes and chips and stuff. The macroscope ratchets down over the front and was built from the leg of a Transformer toy I found in an old toy box from home in North Dakota!

The armor and gauntlets and stuff were built and formed out of styrene sheets, cut and fitted together. Lots of Velcro and hot glue anchored it in place on the cloth uniform, which was made by a friend of my Mom's back home who happens to be a seamstress. She did a great job!

Now (of course) you can find unlimited reference for Boba but back then it was hard to find really detailed pics of all his gadgets and his paint schemes and stuff. I think I got pretty close.

Everybody at worked loved it! Paul was inspired with the styrene sheets approach that he borrowed my heat-gun and made his own armor and came as a Colonial Marine from "Aliens"!
Eric was working at Universal ( I think he was just starting designs on the Popeye ride in Orlando), so I drove over at lunch to show him. This is where the pics of me in the full outfit (sans rocket-pack) were taken. Eric was dressed in full-on Pirate mode that year.

That year I didn't win anything in the costume contest back at Simpsons... Pete Michaels beat everybody! He dressed up as a trashy hoochie-girl. Can't beat that! (He looked so HOT...!) It was fun getting big reactions at all the parties that year. Good times!