Commander Keen!

Over the past little while, I’ve been putting together my Commander Keen cosplay costume for Anime North, which will be my first ever convention! I suppose it’s a fairly obscure reference that only nostalgic MS-DOS gamers will understand, and that small demographic includes myself – so I went for it.
You wouldn’t believe how impossible it is to find a football helmet in Toronto.
First of all, we (my friend and I who has thoughtfully joined me on my helmet quest) thought, hey! Let’s find a used one somewhere for cheap!
We went to thrift stores, and they told us they weren’t “allowed” to sell helmets, due to safety reasons. In fact, they’d probably had a monster shipment of excellent helmets that were sent to the crusher that morning. Damn!

Next, we tried the internets. Ebay, Craigslist, no luck. Ebay has listings of stickers of helmets, posters of helmets, even ties covered in football helmets. The actual helmets they have generally are over $100, which is outside of our little budget. We bidded on older, used helmets because we figured we were just going to paint over them anyway. Most of them ended up selling at almost $70 though, so we didn’t go back to eBay for a while. We called up at least 45 sports supply stores around the area, and had no luck (unless you count about 3 stores selling brand new $200-$300 helmets as luck). Turns out, we had to go back to eBay to find one and got it for about 30 or 40 bucks, shipped. We also got a pogo stick for Keen, which I am slowly but surely learning how to use without falling on my ass.

Here’s some photos to show our progress with the helmet! It’s all finished now, for the most part.

The helmet as it had arrived.
The face guard took about 3 hours (swear to our personal jesus monkey, I’m not exaggerating here) to pry off, and we even broke a pair of pliers in the process!
Yay!

All done!

That’s pretty much all for now. The rest of the outfit is pretty simple – blue jeans, and a purple.. almost pink, shirt with “GOODBYE GALAXY!” emblazoned across it in large lettering. Fun!

***UPDATE: Anime North Aftermath!

So, I’ve been able to rest a bit after the crazy weekend.

It was awesome. What a great first convention experience.
I was surprised people recognized my costume (around 20 people came up and told me) and about half of that took photos too!

You can’t quite see it in these photos, but my shirt says “Goodbye, Galaxy!”

I had a great time and got a ton of pics of other people’s awesome costumes, which can be seen here: http://s282.photobucket.com/albums/kk277/Catwafer/?start=all
(Not 56k friendly!)

Good times!

And here’s even more Commander Keen goodness from Comic-Con.

Retro video game characters, at MY comic book convention? It makes no sense, but it’s more likely than you think!

More to come when Commander Keen invades Fan Expo at the end of August 2009