Max Rebo
MAX REBO COSTUME / RETURN OF THE JEDI / STAR WARS HALF MARATHON 2015
COMPONENTS
- Black inner tube
- black foamcore
- balsa wood
- 12" foam hemisphere (belly)
- 8" foam hemisphere (chest)
- 6" foam sphere (head)
- 3 foam cones (2 arms, 1 trunk)
- 1" thick foam sheet (ears)
- ultra-thin masking tape
- pair of fingerless gloves
- blue spray paint
- black top
- black tights
COMFORT LEVEL: UGHHH
OFFICIAL TIME: 2:43:44
I really had no idea how this was going to turn out, considering the fact that I started making it 10pm the night before my flight.
When I am building, sculpting, or drawing something, I usually deconstruct the image into simple shapes and forms. So even though I didn't have much time, I knew exactly what pieces I needed but I only had one shot.
I cut the foam shapes using a heated foam wire cutter, and I was tripping on the fumes alone. All the shapes were held together with toothpicks and smoothed out with masking tape. The hands were really a stroke of improvisational luck because I ran out of foam by that point. The whole thing was sprayed in blue primer, along with some simple shading and highlights with paint. The whole structure was EXTREMELY light and smelled EXTREMELY like poison.
The organ/piano is an inflatable inner tube with a donut ring of the black foamcore surface taped on top. I used to a miter box to saw the balsa wood into key pieces and glued them onto the foamcore.
Now, I didn't spend much time figuring out the stability of the costume. So once I started running, the inner tube (that I thought sat at my hips pretty sturdily) started bouncing up and down due to gravity. Max broke off from the piano within Mile 1, and the tube was sliding off my ass. This happened all before we hit Mile 3, and I could think was, "How the fuck am I supposed to last 10 more miles like this?"
Eventually I figured out that I could just hold Max in my hands and change my running gait to be more jumpy so the inner tube won't slip as much.
"Fun" story: when I finished painting Max, I put him in my bathroom on the toilet seat to dry and cranked up the fan overnight. When I woke up in the middle night to pee, I completely forgot he was there and so when I turned on the bathroom light and saw a figure on the toilet, I immediately thought it was an intruder and roundhouse-kicked him, and broke his ear off. :(