Garden canes from Dad’s latest attempt to coax his hardy perennials through the Winter of Discontent? Lightsabres. The household’s bemused and decidedly docile brown labrador? Chewbacca. The school sandpit, scattered haphazardly with discarded Lego and decommissioned Action Men? Tatooine. For Force-sensitive youngsters of the 1970s and ’80s, opportunities to transform mundane objects of the everyday into items of Star Wars-related wonder arrived on an almost daily basis.
Daniel Dresner, however, went a step further than most. As a student in early 1980s Manchester, he felt – and there’s no easy way of putting this – the pull of the Dark Side. Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi seeks not these things. What Daniel needed were some cereal boxes from the Cheetham Hill Co-op, a tin of car spray and several cut-up copies of The Guardian.
Over to you, Daniel…
TOMORROW NEVER DRIES
“The Empire Strikes Back. By far the most sophisticated, attractive, and engaging film of the only movie trilogy worth speaking about. Such subtle design. A revelation. And it provided closure to a mystery that had bothered me for two – maybe three – years.
Was it the immense size of the Corellian Star Destroyers that weighed on my mind? Constructions so huge that – according my late father – the final hull plates would have been put in by the children of the engineers who had installed the plates they were connected to? No. Was it the thought-provoking depth of the philosophy behind The Force, or the question of who was Mark Hamill’s tailor? No. What about the puzzle of how, given an entire planet to land on, Luke Skywalker managed to crash his X-Wing just down the swamp from Yoda’s bivouac?
No.
I lay awake in bed wondering how Darth Vader took his mask on and off.
Then came the revelation in The Empire Strikes Back. We saw his Dark Lordship sitting in a pod as the helmet was lowered onto him. The mask and the helmet were separate!
So… the game was on. My Darth Vader Mark 1 mask was about to take shape. After all, I’d already made an Alien head from copper wire, five kilos of plaster and some leftover teeth casts from me Da’s dental surgery, so how difficult could Darth Vader cosplay actually be?
(NB Cultural historians should emphasise that ‘cosplay’ is a term contemporary only to the 21st century. Before our sudden transformation on the 31st of December 1999 into a peaceful, well-fed and disease-free world of gleaming glass towers and sleek air cars, we called it, ‘dressing up’. And the height of sophistication was an upside-down washing basket on the head, arms outstretched and cries of ‘Exterminate’ in an accent that belonged more to Jesmond than to Skaro…)
Darth Vader Mark 1 was made during a temporary sojourn to Israel. And was a disaster – although my girlfriend was kind enough to be wowed, and posed for a few pictures with a black skirt standing in for his cloak. The evidence may exist… but I’ve failed at the old adage of making a retrieval system rather than a filing system. I remember the helmet (note: not the mask) would not have looked out of place in the Brontë Museum’s Howarth display cases, filled with similarly dainty bonnets.
But all was not lost. The decision not to completely bin Mark 1 might have been influenced by the fact that I’d cannibalised my only pair of sunglasses for the lenses of the mask’s eye pieces. I say ‘cannibalised’ as though I’m in the same league as Ian Scoones and Matt Irvine, delving into a huge Airfix kit for just the right vacuum-formed wossname for Doctor Who! Still, after me Da’ had taken the time, expense and trouble to post the mask to me in the UK, I tried again on Mark 2, with the lenses as my starting point. This was a tad more work than Doctor Fettle regenerating a whole new Oddbod from a dismembered finger…
The parts:
- Balloon
- Cartridge paper
- Car under-body spray (Mmmm! That smells nice)
- Cereal box cardboard (Likely purchased at the Co-op Shopping Giant on Cheetham Hill)
- Clip-on Polaroid sunglasses lenses
- Coat hanger
- Felt tip pens (For tubes in the mask…not for colouring anything in)
- Masking tape (Far too much of it for a student budget)
- Newspaper (Probably The Guardian…well, I was a student. Forensics experts can analyse the photograph and do the typeface thing if they want to confirm)
- Plane blade
- Plant pot…or at least the rim from a plant pot
- Saucer
- Stockinette
- Varnish (Mmmm! That smells even better)
- Wallpaper paste
The whole process was documented on a Kodak Instamatic camera.
Figure 1: Strips of newspaper, soaked in wallpaper paste and built up in layers over a balloon for the general mask. Most of this would be cut away, but it formed a good base to work with.
Figure 2: What’s that? It’s his nose! Thank goodness he’s not taller!* The eyes and nose holes have now been cut out in the hope that they would fit – and that I’d be able to see out of it.
*Favourite line from Spike Milligan’s Q6
Figure 3: Touch and go at this stage. Still, if I got bored with Darth Vader, I could always go with Howard the Duck.
Figure 4: Aha! It’s starting to take shape. Spot the felt tip pens? And note the rhombus on the chin, to be cut away and replaced by a plain blade for the luxury of breathing. The rim of a plastic plant pot would then be cut off and fastened around the forehead of the mask, with the helmet resting on that.
Figure 5: The full costume! Ready for the Festival of Purim 5783. Regular Doctor Who Magazine readers will have no interest whatsoever in knowing that that the boots and gloves were part of my 30mph phut-phut moped pilgrimage from Manchester to the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition. Oh, and a mask-making tip: black under-body car spray, designed to protect from gravel chips, coats well and is good at smoothing out tape joins. But the coating never actually dries…
Still, here’s Darth Vader Mark 2 in 2022! I’ve cleaned him up a bit…”
Thanks, Daniel. The Dark Room is a collaborative effort. If anyone would like to contribute their own childhood photos from the era, I would be utterly delighted – please drop me a line using the “Contact” link at the top of the page. Thanks so much.
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