99% Invisible - 190- Fixing the Hobo Suit

Episode Date: November 25, 2015

Superhero costumes for TV and film used to be pretty cringe-worthy. Lately, however, super outfits are looking much better. Costume designers are learning new tricks, and using better technology, but there has also been a change in attitude. They are … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When you're a comic book fan, there's always a surge of excitement when they announce a film adaptation of the character you love. The chance to see your hero punch and twist and leap to the air just makes you getty. But there's always that fear. That Hollywood is going to screw it up. That the screenwriter won't get the

character the way you get the character. Because you know how it's supposed to be. You know Mary Jane came after Gwen Stacy. It doesn't make sense the other way. But the first indication whether you're going to be buzzing with eager anticipation while you're in line on opening day or dreading each step while you're in line on opening day because let's face it, you're gonna go no matter what. But that first indication of how good or how bad it's going to be happens months before when they reveal the design of the suit. Superhero suits made real with real fabric and real people are very hard to design, but we will judge them nonetheless. That is our job.

Either I've gotten much more mellow over the years or the suits have gotten much, much better. Eric Mullinsky has noticed this too. Eric has done a couple of great episodes for us at 9.9 P.I. over the years, but now he has his own podcast called Imaginary Worlds, about sci-fi and other fantasy genres, how we create these worlds and why we suspend our disbelief. This is an episode that he produced in 2015 about designing comic book costumes for movie screens, and I really like it and I know that you're going to like it too.

It's called Fixing the Hobo Suit. B. Let's not stand on ceremony here. Mr. Wayne. If you haven't seen the Dark Knight Rises, Tom Hardy plays the villain, Bane. And for some reason, he did the voice as a cross between Sean Connery and Darth Vader. Given that the character is supposed to come from a fictional Latin American country, it was a very weird choice. Oh, you think darkness is your ally? Are you really adopted the dark?

But it was so weird. It was kind of amazing and led to all these really great parodies. I guess there. I believe I would like two packs of Chickaloo sauce. Thank you. I don't much, man. You should have respected my author at our... Woo! But for all the buzz around the voice, I was surprised more people didn't talk about the costume, which I thought was ingenious.

So in the comics, Bane looks kind of like a Mexican wrestler. He's got a black hood over his face, with a white design in the middle that kind of looks like a Mexican wrestler. He's got a black hood over his face with a white design in the middle that kind of looks like a skull with red eyes. His strength comes from tubes going to his back that pump him full of liquid steroids. In fact, his shoulders are so huge and bulked out. Artists like to draw his head below his neck.

There's no way he could do a literal version of that. But that didn't stop Joel Schumacher from trying in his 1997 catastrophe Batman and Robin. Behold the ideal killing machine! I call this little number. Bane. Of course, Christopher Nolan's Batman took place in kind of a semi-realistic universe. So he and Lindy Heming, his costume designer, turned Bane's liquid steroids into a gas that he enhails.

But it doesn't make him super strong. It actually dulls physical pain. His breathing apparatus is the same shape as the design on the hood in the comics, but the breathing apparatus is black and the design on the hood was white. Of course, he's not wearing a hood in the movie, instead we see the actors bald head. So if you squint, Bane's head in that movie looks like the exact same design as the comics, but the negative image of it. Of course, it couldn't give Bane like cartoonishly huge shoulders, so instead he wore a coat that had a very high round wool collar that gave him the same silhouette as the comic books. Like I said, it was a brilliant design solution.

Superhero costumes used to be cringe-worthy. Even the cool ones like, you know, Batman from the Tim Burton films, the costume was so bulky. Michael Keaton couldn't turn his head or fight unless the bad guys basically ran into his fists. So what happened? How did the costumes get so much better? I'm Michael Wilkinson and I'm a costume designer for films.

Michael worked on Man of Steel and the upcoming sequel, Batman vs Superman. He got a lot of heat for the new Bat suit because the first images, it looked like Ben Affleck was wearing a thick rubber cowl and wouldn't be able to turn his head which would feel like a step backwards. But newly released images, show the dark night turning his head. I feel like hopefully when the world has a really good look at the cowl that Ben wears. I hope people like it because a lot of work went into the construction of that. There's all sorts of amazing things going on inside that cowl that make it easy to move in and have a full range of expressions. Superhero Cosm used to be just stand-alone works of fashion,

which over time became dated or cringe-worthy, even if they're designed by a genius, like Edna Mode and the Incredibles. This is a hobo suit, darling. I know you can't be seen in this. That won't allow it. What do you mean? You designed it.

I never looked back, darling. The strikes from the now. It will be bold, dramatic, heroic. Yeah, something classic, like a diner guy. Oh, here it brings luck to the cape and the boots. Snuck apes! One of the big changes is that costume designers are now looking more closely at the source material. When Michael Wilkinson and his collaborator James Atchison worked on Man of Steel, they

researched the history behind Superman's costume. The genesis of that idea was the circus performers, the white lifters, and the strong men had this look of wearing early wool jersey tights with their shorts over the top. So Superman's suit was kind of like a combination of the weightlifter and the ringmaster who wore boots in a cape. Also swashbuckling heroes like Zoro wore capes. So James and Michael thought, okay, that still communicates strength, power, adventure, but...

How are we going to resolve those silly red underpants? So we went through dozens and dozens of drawings. And I remember they pretty much just got smaller and smaller and smaller until one day they just kind of weren't there on the illustration and that was the look we decided to go with. What's the S stand for? It's not an S. On my world it means hope. Sammy Sheldon Diffor had a similar experience working on X-Men first-class. Now in the previous X-Men movies, the mutants were wearing these sort of black leather

outfits with just a few distinguishing characteristics. But the director of first-class Matthew Vaughn told Sammy that he wanted to go back to the original comics, when the X-Men wore yellow and blue jumpsuits. So given that obviously that is a very simplistic drawing that was on the first cover, I just started researching into the period of the time, why they were drawn the way they were, what the colours were representing, and what immediately came out was, in 1963, Dupont discovered Kevlar. It felt to me like, maybe that's what they were trying to represent in the comic. So we kind of went down this route

of seeing if that would work for us, and also what NASA were up to. The advent of the nuclear age may have accelerated the mutation process. Individuals with extraordinary abilities may already be among us. She pulled that off. The costumes look cool, very 60s. But honoring the source material is tricky. Comic book illustrators, not that they don't understand, but they don't need to make a logic of the lines that they're drawing that where it goes from the front to the back of the body round over the shoulder. It just

what looks cool on the page and sells the dynamic of the character. But when you put that into reality, you've got to follow those lines around the body 360. And those characters are wearing skin-tight clothes to show off their ridiculously well-defined muscles, which for some reason is completely believable in the comics. One thing we discovered is that no matter what incredible shape an actor is in, once you put a leotard on them, then everything is kind of smoothed out and all that fantastic definition that they've been working so hard at, is kind of negated. The next big leap away from cringe-worthy costumes was texture.

Now in the old days comic books could only be printed in a few limited colors. That's why the costumes were usually just one or two, maybe three colors, which looked good. I mean, they kind of leapt off the page. But for a movie like Man of Steel, when to get rid of Superman's red underpants and the yellow belt, the suit is very blue, and that's boring to look at in HD. So they created a silver layer that went under the blue to give it a metallic quality, and they 3D printed texture to give it muscle definition, and a pattern of ridges which creates visual

interest for lighting and cinematography, and they created a backstory to explain that texture. It was chainmail. They went under the armor people wore on the planet Krypton. Another trick, which Sammy Sheldon different likes to use, is mixing and matching materials on the same costume. With the X-Men costumes, they were layers and layers of fabrics all worked into and pieced together and then, you know, connecting things one on top of the other. So, if you stand away from, they just look quite blue with yellow bits,

but actually when you're going close, it's all kind of intricately stitched to make it textured and then panels and then leather pieces and then the the Kevlar in the middle. Part of design, if it's going to be interesting, is that you have to take risks. And the thing about superheroes is it's a fabulous arena to take risks. The problem is that these forms cost a huge amount of money. So you better make, you can take the risks, you better make sure that you come up with the goods because it's an awfully expensive process to get it wrong. Yeah, and a lot of very angry fans that will let you know if they didn't like it.

Not so much the fans, it's the producers who are still waiting on the set saying, where is it? Finally, it needs to move. James Atcherson had a devil of a time working on the first Spider-Man film, the one with Toby McGuire in 2002. He spent three months making nearly 70 versions of that suit, just trying to get the colors right, making sure the textured webbing stayed on,

and when it was finally ready, they took it for a test run. We had a stunt man on a wire, and they flew him straight into a tree, I remember. And the whole suit, I mean, half the webbing unglued from the suit. I mean, it was like, it was sort of like a terrible waffle hanging in the trees.

It was a disaster. It's funny, superheroes are supposed to seem indestructible. And maybe there's that scene at the very end where like after the superhero's been roughed up, his costume is like a little bit torn. But in real life, these costumes are extremely fragile. So the solution is to create 20 or 30 versions of the same costume. But each one is tailor-made for the specific needs of each scene. When Sammy Sheldon differ worked on Marvel's Aunt Man, even that wasn't enough. The suit has power, the man harnesses that power.

You should be able to shrink and grow on a dime. So your size always suits your needs. They want some ones to kind of, you know, turn over and over and over. Well, I don't know what you call tumbling. And they put in a rubber floor and then they kind of go, well, he can't do it in these boots and you have to go, okay, we have to whip up a pair of boots that look identical to the hero pair,

but almost like barefoot. It's a grueling job. And Michael Wilkinson says, you really need to sort of step back and realize that this is really a conversation. It's happening across time among designers. You know in Asian art, where over the centuries you take the figure of Buddha or something like that,

and over the centuries they are refining, they're putting their own sort of stamp on these cultural figures. It's kind of like that I feel without making it too grand, without superheroes, because you know, each iteration of a superhero reflects a lot about the society in which the iteration was born. He's been giving this a lot of thought because he designed the first movie version of Wonder Woman, who will appear in Batman vs Superman. For Michael, this was a dream assignment. The Wonder Woman was super close to my heart growing up.

She was the one that really captured my imagination in the strongest way. Really? There's something about Linda Carter's performance. They really crossed into this kind of magical world. I was fascinated by her backstory. I was lucky enough to actually work with Linda Carter on a film called Sky High, where she played the principal of a high school for superheroes. So I had a kind of seminal experience shopping with her on rodeo drive that I'll probably never really get over. It was very

exciting. I mean, I think the reason why costumes have gotten so cool is because the designers are now constantly asking themselves, why? I don't think you can just get away with doing a unitalied with the funny helmet. I think you have to make sense of why is that person wearing that suit? What does he do with it? Does he have a power? Or is it something that the suit gives him? And then all those questions lead you on to, how does that work? That's one of the reasons why I love the New Daredevil series on Netflix.

In the first season, there are actually separate episodes to answer all those questions. Why does he need fighting sticks? Why does he need a padded suit? Why does the suit have to be red? Why does it have horns? My grandmother, she was the real Catholic. She used to say, be careful of the Murdoch boys, they got the devil in them. The evolution of Daredevil's costume becomes the story of the character realizing who he truly is. The costume is like an expression of his real self, the one that he has to dig down and find below the surface of his alter ego, Matt Murdoch. The best costume designers are storytellers.

The fans will nitpick, but I don't really feel like there are any wrong choices. So long as they make us believe something that's wonderful and ludicrous at the same time. I remember spending many, many, many nights in a loft in Manhattan trying to get the right color screen printed onto those suits. So New York is my favorite city in the whole world. Yeah, that's great. It's funny too because I'm because of those films, those Spider-Man films, when I walk around New York and I've lived here now for 11 years, every so often I look up and I just imagine how great it would be to see Spider-Man swinging through those those canyons of skyscrapers

Yeah Seriously, it kind of bums me out that we don't see him up there every so often going Now go on, you're no suit will be finished before your next assignment. You know I'm retired from hero work. As am I, Robert. Yet here we are. E, I only need a patch job for sentimental reasons. Fine. I will also fix the hobo suit. You're the best of the best.

Yes, I know, darling. Fixing the hobo suit was produced by Eric Mullensky for his show, Imaginary Worlds. Right now, he's in the middle of a five-part series about the cultural impact of Storm Wars. Of course he is. It's a really great show. Find it at ImaginaryWorldsPodcast.org.

So Eric and I both really love the music of Melodium, aka Laurent Gerard. Laurent turned 40 this year and released a new Melodium Electro album to celebrate called Friendly Vehicles. Right now that album is pay what you want on V Bandcamp or you can get all 29 of his albums for 88 Euros, which is insane to me. It's totally worth it. Make sure you let me know if you buy his whole discography because you and I should be Twitter friends at the very least if you do that. Get more melodium in your life at melodium.bandcamp.com 99% invisible is Sam Greenspan Kurt, we're all on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram and Spotify.

But you can listen to every single episode of 99% Invisible at 99pi.org. Radio til the end. From PRX.