Wall-E Costume Project

Cardboard Boxes and Google-Fu


For those of you who don't know me, I am MT's husband and the dad of Alex and Isabelle. MT has invited me to expound my points of view on her blog, sort of like Rush Limbaugh, but without the cigars and the large radio contract.

Halloween has always had one central conflict for parents: store-bought costumes or homemade?

Store-bought costumes have their advantages: some nameless corporation has already done all the legwork for you, they're usually somewhat flame-retardant, and most importantly, all you have to do is shove your kid into the cheap fabric, slap the plastic mask on them, and off you go to get your kid his/her piece of the candy-extortion racket that is Halloween.

I had a few homemade costumes as a kid. For the most part we have been store-bought costume parents, because it's much easier. However, this year Alex wanted to be WALL-E. For those of you not in the market for WALL-E costumes, WALL-E costumes cost the same as a barrel of oil now, or about half a barrel when Alex first expressed his wish to be the lovelorn robot.

Besides, WALL-E consists of a pair of binoculars mounted to a box with little grabbers. We simply refused to pay the exorbitant price the Disney corporation was asking for this. Instead, we would do the classical parent thing and make Alex's WALL-E costume.

So, what to do? The first thing was to get a cardboard box, which we obtained from a local dollar store at no charge. (See, not EVERYTHING costs a dollar there.) Since we were unwilling to find a way to semi-permanently mount binoculars onto our firstborn son's skull, we opted for a pair of goggles from that same merchant. You know the type; they made you wear them in sixth grade science class so that toxic fumes wouldn't melt your eyeballs like that guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark. (He just wore regular glasses, and look where that got him.)

Once we had the box, we discovered that it went down to Alex's knees. This, MT maintained, was too long. So we trimmed it to a more appropriate size. Trimmed it down too much, in fact, so that my scissoring permit was revoked. Then I went downstairs to do my part.

Like most good IT and technical workers, I have fearsome google-fu powers. Years of experience and razor-sharp reflexes soon popped me up a free WALL-E font (it's called Gunship, if you really want to know), and a program called Paint.Net which was supposed to be much better than MS Paint, which of course Microsoft flatly refused to put into Windows. Paint.Net was better than Paint, and it did the job I wanted it to do. To wit, I created a large graphic, four inches tall by eighteen inches wide, reading WALL-E and closely enough resembling the actual logo to pass muster.

Having successfully counterfeited Pixar's trademarked intellectual property (without remorse) I scouted out a few pictures of WALL-E himself and had a look at what the plucky little Rubik's Cube-wielding drone had on his chest. He has an air vent on the left and a solar charging screen on the right. So I made copies of those. My efforts would likely meet with laughter from most professional graphic artists, but I am not a graphic artist; I am but a humble technician. Besides, neither MT nor Alex seemed to care and it's not like people are going to measure the sun logo on Alex's WALL-E chestal unit.

So up I went and made MT cut out my work, whereupon we lined it up on the box and taped it in place with strapping tape. This protects the logos from juice or soup or whatever toxic chemicals they may have in Alex's classroom. Then we took the scraps of the box we had trimmed and bent them into triangles to make WALL-E's little treads, since Pixar apparently didn't think he deserved regular feet like everyone else.

Given that my skills are better on computer art than real-world art, where my skills are at about the same level as my son's, or perhaps my daughter's, I gave MT a crayon and gave her the arduous task of coloring the treads black, which she did, and did a much better job of it than I would have ever done. Actually, she insisted; after trimming the box too short my real-world art permissions were revoked.

Now those of you who read MT's blog know that we recently obtained a new TV, which glowers down at us from on high like a moody idol. This TV came in in a huge box with an inordinate amount of packaging, including a large length of yellow plastic strapping material of the type which they probably use to restrain inmates at Guantanamo. Since it seemed to be quite strong and hardy stuff, and MT had already used it on her sign at the vax rally, we employed it to attach the treads to the box and to create shoulder straps to keep the thing on the kid.

I felt that the costume, while pretty good, needed a bit more, so I printed up a phony spec sheet which we taped to the back. Fortunately for me, someone had felt the need to not only create a logo for Buy and Large (the megacorp that created both WALL-E and EVE) but upload it to Pixar's Wikia web site. So while my spec sheet for WALL-E is largely my own creation, it does have the correct BaL logo and the correct ersatz New Jersey city that Pixar decided was this megacorp's home.

Alex does possess an electric robotic grabby arm that MT got him for Christmas last year. This would do to provide the illusion of a WALL-E style robotic arm. However, there's only one, so we'll have to assume that after the close of the movie WALL-E fell victim to some sort of horrible accident. But be that as it may; we have a costume for Alex that we quite enjoyed creating, was a challenge to make, and gave Alex what he wanted for Halloween without costing a lung.

The final result:





And of course, Isabelle in her Little Mermaid costume, just cuz she's cute (and demanded to wear her costume because she saw Alex wearing his.



Links I am putting in here because MT insisted and I value domestic peace (she says they are related links):

Halloween doesn’t have to be a frightening: Autism, Gluten & Casein Free treats, Sensory Issues & other demons in the dark

GFCF kids can enjoy Halloween too: Dealing with Special Diets- Gluten & Casein Free & Food Allergies at Halloween