Wild thing

I’ve always thought that a child’s choice of Halloween costume speaks volumes about the way they are put together.

The kid who wants to wear what everyone else is wearing, and the kid who wants to wear what nobody else has thought of. The kid who wears a different costume to school than for trick or treating, and makes three abortive costume changes in between. The boy who wants to be a pink ladybug, the girl who wants to be 50 Cent, the mom (or dad) who wants to be Slutty Nurse… Freud would have a field day. Maybe that’s why I agonized for months over my costume choice as each Oct. 31 drew near - I’d be wearing my inside out.

My daughters’ choices this year were embarrassingly obvious windows into their souls too. My four-year-old, ever easy going, looked at our existing costume rack and said, “Um, I’ll be… a puppy dog.” Grabbed her puppy dog costume, zipped it up and said, “Yep. Woof woof!”

My almost-six-year-old, on the other hand, decided back in March that she needed to be a wolf. Not just any wolf, but a white wolf with a grey tail like Max’s wolf suit in Where the Wild Things Are.

Well, good luck finding a child size wolf suit. I tried. Since March I scoured the costume stores, rental places, catalogs, websites, eBay - you name it. No wolf suits. The closest the internet could provide were college mascot wolf suits for $1,000 each, or adult “sexy big bad wolf” costumes (perhaps so dad - or mom - could leer at Slutty Nurse.)

Fortunately, this year Aunty Alison came to the rescue, and made a Max’s Wolf Suit for the record books. We started with a second-hand unicorn costume, and dismembered it in a manner befitting Lord Voldemort. Then she rebuilt the head, added buttons and feet, and crafted a long grey tail from a costume shop “old man beard”. The claws were the crowning touch, built from a reconstituted “necklace of teeth” from the same shop. Et voila: wolf suit.

We’re certainly not the first to try this idea, but I think it came off rather spectacularly.

It looks at least as good as this version, which won some sort of award at an English flower show.

And there’s really no comparison to this big dude on the right, who looks like he’s wearing it because he lost a bet.

And if I do say so myself, I think it looks better than the Hollywood version displayed in this shot from the upcoming Spike Jonze adaptation of the book, due out a year from now:

Though I have to say that looks like fun - it stars Catherine O’Hara, James Gandolfini and Forest Whitaker as the voice of one of the wild things.

And my wild thing roundup wouldn’t be complete (and no, I’m not going to talk about Neve Campbell and Denise Richards making out in Wild Things - file that along with the nurse) without a link to the great animated version of the classic story.

Let the wild rumpus start!

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 11-02-2007 | 12:11 AM
Posted in: Kids