Halloween Costumes

Halloween is easily my favorite holiday. There is candy, you get to dress up in whatever kind of outfit your heart desires and hardly anybody ever gets murdered by razor-blades in their Milky Way.

For someone like myself, who spends a large portion of the time upset over the fact that superpowers and interstellar travel via fancy space ships aren't real, Halloween is about as close as I'm able to get to living in a sci-fi world. Hell I'll even take a good zombie apocalypse over another week of going to work and paying bills.

The point is Halloween is awesome and my favorite, even though my wife isn't nearly as into it as I am. On the bright side, being that she doesn't care so much, she agreed to let me pick our costumes this year.

I'm not gonna sugar coat it. I spent an unnatural amount of time thinking about Halloween Costumes. I probably sat in bed and searched costumes every night before I went to sleep for a month before settling on what I wanted to do.

The thing that got me stuck for so long was this: Even though she had agreed to let me pick the costumes I've got to at least respect the fact that shes not as into Halloween as I am a little. It's all well and good for me to dress myself in a spandex Deadpool bodysuit or go as a Borg or a Dalek or something, but whatever I pick has to at least be something she recognizes and isn't so bizarre that she refuses to wear it.

So I thought long and hard about what would be a great costume, not too outrageous, and would satisfy my desire to live out my whimsical and childlike desires to dress up like cool stuff from movies.

After much consideration, I found the answer to my costume conundrum in the form of a question. What was that question?

"Who you gonna call?"  

We were gonna be the goddamn Ghosbusters for Halloween.

It was the perfect balance between nerdy and not too ridiculous that I knew it was what I wanted us to be.

The jumpsuits and stuff I could buy, and I wanted to try and make a pair of proton packs to go with the costumes.

Luckily, the internet is full of other nerds who want to make proton packs as well, so I was able to find a sweet set of schematics to follow on a site called http://www.gbfans.com/. 

I didn't think to take pictures during the process of building these things, though I really should have as it would have been great to show. I do have one picture that I took after I had cut/glued, sculpted and sawed my way through a good chunk of the building process and made the bases of the packs.

Here they are after they were put together and received their first coat of spray paint:

It took me about a month to complete both packs as well as get all the other odds and ends we needed for the costumes. In fact, I was putting finishing touches on at like 6:00pm the night of a Halloween party we were supposed to be at in an hour.

Here are the finished packs:

Emily ironed the patches onto the jumpsuits for the costumes and helped me attach the backpack frames to the pack. All in all I think the costumes came out pretty freakin' good. I had to put aside the obsessive need to make everything 100% movie accurate for the sake of time, keeping the cost of materials reasonable, and keeping everything fairly light weight. A small part of me screams inside that the guns aren't perfect and I had to use various hazard stickers I found at Lowe's instead of buying movie ones online, but I'll get over it.

Our costumes went over great, we had a bunch of folks take pictures with us, and I'm generally pleased with how everything turned out. I may be completely useless when it comes to things like fixing sink drains, remembering to make doctors appointments or responding to important mail but I'll be damned if I didn't make the crap out of some proton packs.

I've got a whole year to bask in the awesomeness in these costumes before I have to start worrying. Next year, I agreed to let her pick the costumes, and I swear to the baby Jesus I'm gonna purposefully contract polio if I have to go as something egregious like raggedy Anne and Andy.

Happy Halloween, folks.