From Pizza Joint to Cosplay God – Interview with Tom DePetrillo of Extreme Costumes

Table of Contents

• From Pizza Joint to Cosplay God – Interview with Tom DePetrillo of Extreme Costumes
• Nothing’s sacred

Nothing’s sacred

Preparing a costume is a huge endeavor that poses unexpected challenges. What’s particularly interesting is that Tom doesn’t usually scrap his old suits, even those he’s not very fond of after the years. It’s quite to the contrary, actually – he often overhauls his older projects, constantly looking for ways to improve them, often utilizing the experience he gathers during subsequent projects.

H: What do you do with an Extreme Costume after you’ve completed your work?

T: Not all suits are the same. And no suit is ever done. I am perpetually working on any suit I have, and am always looking for ways to improve it. The Hulk Buster has been revised four times. Last year I felt he needed a complete overhaul and I invested about eight thousand dollars into upgrading him. The Bumblebee I brought with me to Pyrkon for example, could have been said to be finished last year in October, but since that point I’ve invested at least another four hundred hours into him. During Pyrkon, I was testing out the upgrades I added and I was very happy with that progress. It made the whole suit more visually appealing, allowed for a greater range of emotion, and it was more durable.

It was also interesting to hear about the matter of ownership, since not all suits he makes actually belong to him:

T: If I make a costume that’s in-house, like the aforementioned Bumblebee VI, then I own it. And so I’ll continuously bring him out to different events. While costumes like Bumblebee IV, which is the one that belongs to Hasbro, that one is around my shop awaiting for Hasbro to call me and ask to bring to a given event. They might not want it for a year at a time or they might want it every weekend. And so that would sit around doing nothing until whoever owned it asked to use it.

So, in general I prefer things that I own completely, but on the other hand, I have to remember that this is still my work and a way to provide. Making big projects for outside clients is one of the primary ways I make money besides getting paid to go to conventions. Also, we make videos and the videos then generate income, and the videos generate news and attention, and then the news and attention generate more work, so it’s a cycle I have to maintain. Sometimes I go to events that I’m not paid to go to just purely for the point of generating some additional news media.

H: Let’s say that you complete a costume and then you embark upon a new project. Do you use the previous one for spare parts or do you leave it as it is?

T: I have several rules for my shop. One of them is “nothing is sacred.” And that means that I have not created Holy Bible or a holy structure. It’s a piece of foam, aluminum, plastic, fiber glass, and other materials that I cut up and made to be that shape. And if I need a piece of it, I would take it. I try to always keep the old costumes intact. But if two days prior to a convention I discover my PA system is blown out I will totally rip out one from another suit just to make sure I have one to bring with me.

H: If you are forced to rip a previous costume apart, do you still plan to go back to it and repair it?

T: Sure, they’re all ongoing pieces of work. And after a long time I’ll retire a particular costume because my work evolves rapidly. Each suit offers many new inventions and upgrades, so the work I look at from five years ago I consider to be very subpar. We might be ten evolutions beyond that. And so something from that long ago I’d now not view as being all that valuable because it looks like old crappy work to me. Other people might think it’s very nice, it might be nicer than most of the other suits that’re out there, but compared to what my current work is, it’s not up to snuff. We are perpetually trying to be more accurate with better paint jobs, better gimmicks, and costumes being lighter and more agile. We have improved in any way we could. I do have suits that are old that I still keep around. The Hulk Buster is still often used and he was made in 2015.

The Hulk Buster costume was actually the biggest challenge Thomas has ever faced when creating and designing a suit. He had known for a very long time he wanted to make it, especially since he had always been a fan of Tony Stark and his suits from the comic books. The thing was, Iron Man’s suits come in lots and lots of varieties. There’s an arctic suit, a space suit, an underwater suit, and many others. Tom, however, wanted to create the Hulk Buster. The biggest catch there was the fact that artworks of the suit from the upcoming Avengers movie had not been released yet, so if Tom would recreate the comic book version of it, many people would simply not be able to recognize it – “What is this giant thing?” is not a question you want to hear inside a suit you’ve packed hundreds of hours into assembling. So, Tom simply decided to solve some technical problems in the meantime, which he knew he would face when building such an enormous suit:

T: How to have a set of shoulders that was six feet wide still be able control the arms and use them in a lifelike fashion? So I created an original robot called Odin. And Odin was predominantly a test-bed for how to make the Hulk Buster. When I completed it, I recorded its movement and watched the videos. I realized that he was very lacking. He could walk fine but the arms were very restrictive in their movement in my opinion and he couldn’t emote at all. So I went back to the drawing board, and then when they finally came back out with the images of the new Hulk Buster to appear in the Avengers movie, I could move forward with that design.

I upgraded him and I added in shoulders. And these shoulders moved in a lifelike fashion. So if you looked at your own shoulder and reached to the ground, your entire arm will shift downwards several inches. If you reached up above you, the arm will move in the opposite direction several inches. That entire socket will move and that’s what I wanted to recreate. And I also had to create a system that would defer the weight from the arms of the costume as much as six feet away from my shoulders back to my back. And that made this much more manageable and that’s how I was able to achieve truly giant size while maintaining mobility. That was probably the biggest challenge I ever have overcome.

The (totally insane) Hulk Buster. Source:
Extreme Costumes Facebook page

H: Is there a project that you abandoned that involved an Extreme Costume?

T: No, but there are projects I’ve done terribly that I wish I had abandoned. I had made a Hulk costume in 2008. Many people told me they liked it. I look back at that now and I cringe. I just can’t stop cringing every time I see an image of it. It was a masterful design in terms of movement and in terms of durability, however in terms of appearance it is so ugly that I almost never show images of it. Because it’s embarrassing.

Four-wheels-drive future

H: Could you say something more about your plans for the next Extreme Costume?

T: I want to make a Spider Tank. A spider tank is an original unlike a typical cosplay. A cosplay is traditionally a recreation of someone else’s work. The Hulk Buster is a recreation of a particular Iron Man armor, whereas this is going to be something inspired by many different things I’ve seen in pop culture. Yet it will be a unique creation. And it will be my first vehicle. Four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, four independent electrical motors one mounted inside each one of the four wheels. Tank that floats in the air on four extended legs with its own turret that will have a big cannon. The cannon will be powered by a compressor with a big air tank so I will be able to fire things like Ping-Pong balls and t-shirts. There will be a number of cameras and also five additional monitors to view the surroundings.

For this project, we are using a special type of steel tubing to make the skeleton, exactly the same way that one makes a race car. And after I make the entire roll cage then I’m going to start wrapping it in aluminum layer with intermittent places for heavy-duty Plexiglas. The Plexiglas will be frosted and will illuminate the entire tank similarly to vehicle you might have seen in the movie Tron. The Spider tank should be about 3 meters long by 2,2 meters wide and then maybe 1,8 meters tall. I will be able to climb into it and drive it around. I’m very excited about it, because nobody has ever done anything like this that I know of.

Everyone who’ll see it is going to think of Tachikoma featured in Ghost in the Shell. I cannot make an exact copy of it since there might be some copyright infringement, nonetheless spider tanks have been in Battle Angel Alita, Destiny, and make countless different appearances across pop culture. Thus I am not recreating a particular one, it's something more like developing a certain concept. And I would like to capitalize on the resurgence of Cyberpunk, not only with the new video game being produced out of Poland, Cyberpunk 2077, but also with the movies, books, and TV shows that bring the Cyberpunk phenomenon back. With this tank, I am going to have a ton of different handlers who are all going to be dressed up as cyberpunk characters accompanying me around.

H: So do you think that the next time we have an interview like this will you say that was your biggest challenge?

T: Well, when I’m done with it, I have an even bigger set of challenges lined up. I’m always looking forward to the future. So many people waist their lives looking back. And certainly I can go back and go “I wish I had the waistline like when I was 23.” But instead of perpetually looking back, I’m moving forward and facing new challenges. With each challenge, I’m striving to open up new ground that’s never been done before. And that’s going to be beneficial for me, my friends, and my employees. It should also open up new experiences for me.

I’m hoping that when I’m done with the Spider Tank I will’ve helped to inspire others to tackle some of their projects. I already know I’ve done that in the world I’m in today. When I first started doing this in 2009 for the Anime cosplay community no one had a giant robot like I had. I mean literarily, no one. And now I could name about fifteen different really talented organizations or individuals who are making amazing projects. And many of them told me that I helped to inspire them. And that makes me proud.

H: And this perfectly brings us to the last question. Any piece of advice to those who consider creating an extreme costume?

T: Don’t be afraid to fail. You will fail, and then you have to try again, and again, and again until you succeed. Just don’t be despaired by that failure, because no one cares about all the failures you had, they only care about the successes.

H: Perfect. Tom, thank you very much for your time. I hope we will meet again after you complete your current Spider Tank project and you will tell us even more about it.

T: Thank you. Until the next time!

After we finish talking, Tom returns to his work. Looking at his enthusiasm and the amount of effort he always puts into his projects, I am more that certain his upcoming projects will awe tens of thousands of both cosplay enthusiast and those newly introduced to this phenomenon. I can only wish Tom and his crew the best of luck, and hope to meet them again on another convention.