Tom Servo & Pearl Forrester in The Land of the Giants

We are big Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans. Big being an important point. CostumeCon was in Denver this last weekend (it is a traveling convention, so is in a different city every year), and we decided that we would like to try to do some MST3K costumes for it.

Because we are craaaazy.

If you don’t know, Tom Servo is one of the small bots on MST3K that is forced to watch (and make fun of) the terrible B-movies that the Mads (including Pearl) send to them. Here’s a picture of Tom on-screen:

He is constructed (amongst other things) of a gumball machine, a barrel-shaped money-box, and a Halloween bowl.

We wondered what it would take to make Tom Servo as a full-sized costume…and how big it would end up being so that I could actually wear it. Once we figured that out, we just laughed and said, well, that’s stupid. But then we built it anyway! Tom is 9-feet tall and 4-feet wide at the base!

Interesting fact: Most doorways and ramps are not that big. The ramp to get on the stage at CostumeCon was 32″ wide. Thankfully, the wonderful crew figured out how to get us physically into the room. We ended up in front of the stage, but the reaction from the audience was amazing (So I’m told–my head was swaddled in padding, so I didn’t hear much :-). There’s a video, but we haven’t had a chance to watch it yet.

Anna completely nailed Pearl, both with makeup and attitude. I followed her out, then sang (well, lip-synced, but the mouth does move) Tom Servo’s theme song.

The level of competition at Costume Con was unreal (I’ll update with a link when photos are posted), and we were honestly thrilled to just get the costume finished and in front of people, but we ended up winning both an honorable mention (“Science is not a Mystery”) for workmanship and an award for performance (“For Stand Up Performance”).

At some point, I’ll do another post about the construction of the costume.