Wario

My kids have been fans of the Nintendo Mario games for years and years, so naturally enough the idea of going as one of the characters from that series has come up several times.  For 2012, my younger guy decided he wanted to be Wario.

Of course, there are commercially made costumes for this popular character, but while we don't entirely avoid such things, we would rather do it better.  The hat and gloves (and maybe the mustache) were obtained that way, but the shirt and overalls were done to a higher standard.

My wife found a pair of appropriately sized overalls, and to be honest I don't really remember where.  There's a better than average chance that they came from the local Goodwill store, though.  She also picked up some Rit purple dye.  This way the costume was not merely presentable, it was tough enough to stand up to the rough treatment it would endure.

The dying process is quite straightforward.  Follow the package directions and you're probably going to get good results.

The boy is way too thin for this character, but a pillow helped a bit.

























While Wario was in town, he made a special guest appearance on the Annoying Orange show, too.

The Annoying Orange

"The Annoying Orange" is a YouTube series and for a little while it was on television, too.  It tells the story of the adventures of Orange and his fruity friends, all of whom he manages to annoy on a regular basis.

My son just had to be this character.





Now, there's a fundamental problem with this.  The boy is shaped more like a string bean than an orange.  And if I WERE to get him into that rounded a shape, he wouldn't fit through doorways.  In addition, Orange's face takes up his whole body as seen here:

Yes, this is one ugly customer

So I thought to myself that perhaps we'd be better off just painting the kid's face orange and letting it go at that.  Of course, that would leave the rest of his body to deal with, and who would guess what he was anyway?

But then it hit me:  Since this character is best known from YouTube, why not take advantage of that?  We made his costume not so much the Orange itself, but the entire web page!

I downloaded the HTML source for an actual Annoying Orange video and got to work on it.  I'm a techie by nature, and modifying the page a bit was not too difficult.  Actually, the hardest part was coming up with amusing responses and names for the posters.  Then I loaded the modified page in my browser, took a screen shot and printed off a greatly enlarged copy of it.  I glued the many sheets of paper thus generated to a piece of foam core.

I also took enlarged pictures of a few of the other characters in the show.  Passion Fruit, Pear and Mini Apple.  These were also printed and mounted on foam core, and I attached these to bamboo skewers to hold them in place.

To top it off, we replaced the video thumbnails and descriptions on the right side of the page with costumes from previous years.  Each one has the 'run time' of the video shown as the year.  It was a lot of fun to reminisce during the process of coming up with these.

Of course, in order to 'wear' the costume, some straps were needed, but a couple of old belts hot glued to the back of the foam core did a pretty decent job of this.

Finally, we got back to 'paint his face', but now anyone who is the least bit familiar with the character in question knows exactly what's going on!