So, yeah, I’ve been a GB fan since opening week when I was 13 and always wanted to build a GB costume. I’ve built lots of costumes and props - Star Wars (built a Chewbacca, a scratch built R2-D2, most of a full size Jabba) and other monster stuff, but always knew that a proton pack simply required too much money than I was willing to invest to do it right, so Ghostbusters stayed on the “to do list” for many years. I mostly scratch build and try to be as economical as humanly possible, and if I can build it, sculpt it, cannibalize it or adapt something from a yard sale or Home Depot, I will. But a proton pack, well, you just can’t cut corners on, especially to have the same look as other guys you might want to do events with. And with the volumes of research to do to educate oneself on proper construction and parts, I just didn’t have the time yet, either.
So I set my sites on smaller, simpler things I knew I could pull off with a limited budget and short time. 2 Halloweens ago, my then 8 year old son wanted to be a Ghostbuster (and he’s still a die hard fan, btw), so I made him a simple kid’s proton pack, kid echo goggles and trap and sewed him a jumpsuit. We go trick-or-treating in Salem, Massachusetts, the Halloween capital of the world, so obviously the whole family needs costumes, so I figured (Hell, I’ll make myself a quirky foam rubber Stay Puft costume that will look huge next to him". These were the result of his costume and my Stay Puft Version 1:
So that was fun, but moving forward, obviously there were issues if I wanted to use this for cons, parties and appearances. For one, it was hot as hell:
Secondly, clearly it wasn’t tall enough to be anything more than a cute 1/20th scale costume. And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I really couldn’t drink in this costume (I could it a beer bottle neck in the eye hole of the mask, but that just looked creepy):
So, again lacking the desire to invest the time and money into a proper GB costume for myself, I decided to take another crack at Stay Puft. I looked at one of those inflatable Santas and thought, “Yeah, I could make one of those”. I looked into rip stop nylon prices, bought one of those Stay Puft 20 inch tall banks to use as a mapping model, got my friend Bob to donate an old Santa fan, pulled out the sewing machine and started hashing it out.
The original design was to make it about 16-18 feet tall with me as an operator in front of him, in costume (as either a Con Ed worker covered in Stay Puft goop -ie: shaving cream- or an NYC cop), with the fan on my back pack, attached to Stay Puft’s lower front belly. That was abandoned mid design for 2 reasons. One, it would just look weird with a guy between Stay Puft’s legs, right in front of his crotch with a fan plugged into his groin! And two, I decided if I scaled it down a bit, I could save money on fabric substantially and make it so I could actually be inside it.
The end result was this:
Overall, I’m pretty happy with him at 13 feet to the top of the head. He still needs a lot of upgrades and tweaks, though. I’m working on a battery system so he’s mobile without an extension cord for short bursts (right now I can stomp around in him for as long as the cord is and someone to dress the cord as I walk backwards. Most pressing, though , is a second fan to really get him inflated properly. Right now he’s using a fan built for an inflatable with maybe a third of the volume to fill.
Oh, and I fixed the “being able to drink while wearing it” problem:
