Disney’s Buzz Lightyear Suit – How It Works: A blog about how the suit actually works along with some details in how the movie was made.
Buzz Lightyear Costume and Space Ranger Armor
Buzz Lightyear of Star Command is a Disney Tv show and has been on for a few years now. The show is based off the movie Toy Story and is about Buzz Lightyear, and his adventures as a Space Ranger. As you know, Buzz Lightyear has some pretty cool toys he uses to fight evil and defend the universe… well, mostly the galaxy. How does one build a Buzz Light year costume? What would be required to make it look really awesome? What do you need to be safe? This article will help answer those questions!
The Helmet:
Obviously most of the work in building this costume will be put into making the helmet. In fact, if you’re not familiar with working with fiberglass, this project may be more than one person can handle. The helmet itself is very large and requires an extended face plate design. The face plate extends out beyond where your nose will be so that it can look like Buzz’s helmet from all angles. If you are going to spend countless hours making this costume, you might as well do it right!
Disney’s Buzz Lightyear Suit – How It Works:
A blog about how the suit actually works along with some details in how the movie was made.
“Buzz Lightyear of Star Command” is a new TV series that has just been released with the same main character as “Toy Story”. The catch-phrase for the series is “beyond infinity”, and it is based on Buzz Lightyear’s belief that he is a real space ranger, not a toy.
With this series, Disney/Pixar has created a new version of Buzz’s suit, with some pretty cool features. I have always been interested in how things work and thought it would be fun to write about how the new toy version works (which you can buy at Toys R Us) and compare that to the new CGI Buzz suit.
Because I don’t know everything about this topic (just what I have read), feel free to email me any corrections or additions you might have. Also, I would love to hear from anyone who worked on the show or movie and can add something from their point of view.
Before we start, one thing you will notice is that I refer to “Buzz” as if he were a real person. This is because in my mind he IS a
In the movies Buzz Lightyear is the ultimate space ranger. He is strong, smart, has great weapons and an impressive suit that provides him with just about anything he needs to survive in space or on alien planets. I’ve always wondered how a real life Buzz Lightyear suit would work, so I did a bit of research and found out! This article will explain how the suit works in the movies and then go into a little more detail in how they actually made it.
In the first Toy Story movie Buzz Lightyear’s suit is basically just a costume. It had no real functionality other than making him look cool. In the second movie Buzz gets upgraded to a suit capable of space flight and even laser guns. The spaceship does all the work for him, but we can all imagine how cool it must have been for Woody to see Buzz fly off into space!
In real life, making a suit with such functionality would be impossible. At least not until we get some awesome new technology that can make us fly or allow us to breathe in space. Also I don’t think any human could ever lift himself off the ground like that so he would need some sort of propulsion system too which would probably weigh more than his body and thus negate any possibility of flight anyway… But
The Buzz Lightyear suit is based on a real space suit with some modifications to account for the requirements of the movie. In particular, the legs and lower portion of the torso are shortened in order to make it easier to work with in front of a blue screen.
The suit is made out of nylon/spandex body-suit material and is covered over with a set of plastic pieces that you can see in the above picture. The shoes are built into the boots and are hollow. When all put together, it weighs about 20 pounds.
The details of the suit were created using 3D computer imaging and then molded into plastic pieces for use on the suit. The helmet is affixed by Velcro and snaps to the head gear. The helmet has two small LCD screens (one for each eye) that display images that allow Buzz to “see” what he’s looking at. Unfortunately, they do not shoot lasers out of his eyes like in the movie (darn!).
In addition to this suit, I also have an animatronic Buzz Lightyear costume that was used in the live shows at Disney World and Disneyland.
Buzz Lightyear is a toy. The Buzz Lightyear suit that Tim Allen wears in the movie Toy Story is not a toy. So it’s only fitting that an animatronics company would build it: Walt Disney Imagineering.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the design of the Buzz Lightyear suit and how it works. We’ll also talk about how Pixar created the animated version of Buzz Lightyear for Toy Story.
Toy Story was released in 1995, so there may be some changes to the Buzz Lightyear suit since then. Also, there are more than one Buzz Lightyear suit — one for each actor who plays Buzz (Tim Allen, Patrick Warburton and others), as well as one used for special effects photography. I have no idea which one is pictured here!
You are wearing a Buzz Lightyear costume, you go to the wood and see some kids playing. You want to scare them to death, so you take out your laser gun and yell: “To infinity, and beyond!” Well, the kids run away like crazy, but then they start laughing. You know why? It’s because you were wearing a Buzz Lightyear costume.
A movie with spaceships and aliens is going to need some cool costumes, especially when most of the characters are aliens. In Toy Story, Pixar had to create a toy that looked like he was from space. At first it looked like this:
The original Buzz Lightyear was based off of one of the artists who worked on the movie. One of his friends sewed him up a homemade space suit for Halloween, so he could be Buzz Lightyear for a night. They called him Fake Man. Pixar used this as a starting point for their suit design.
That said, I wouldn’t call the suit “advanced” in any way. In fact, I’m pretty sure it is possible to make a similar suit using off-the shelf materials and making the electronics yourself. There are dozens of articles on projects like this on the web.
For example, the first time I saw someone using a microcontroller to power their Halloween costume was over 10 years ago at the Maker Faire. In fact, they were using a PIC16F84 with a very basic program (probably written in C) that pulsed LEDs sequentially across the chest of their Buzz Lightyear costume.
In fact, this same idea has been used for several other costumes, including a Pac-Man costume and a Tetris costume. If you want to learn more about how this kind of project works, there is an excellent tutorial here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Halloween-LED-Tetris-Costume/.