Meredith's Magic Wheelchair, Skeletor's Throne

A couple of years ago I made a Skeletor cosplay that I'm pretty proud of.  The character is a lot of fun to play around with and gets really great reactions from the crowd wherever I take him.  I never knew how completely I would enjoy running around as a campy 80s cartoon villain, but I love it.

So when we were talking with the folks from Magic Wheelchair earlier this year about what we could build for them to unveil at San Diego Comic Con, I was over the moon excited when they mentioned Meredith, a young lady from Austin, Texas who wanted her chair dressed as Skeletor's Bone Throne.

This was already a project I'd been noodling over so I could have it for photos of my own Skeletor costume.  So as luck would have it, I'd already worked out all of the details of exactly how I would build it.  Modifying my plan to fit a wheelchair would actually be pretty straightforward.

Here's the end result:

To see how we built it, read on...

Meredith ended up being the spark behind a pretty significant partnership.  Magic Wheelchair reached out to Mattel for a potential collaboration and ended up creating a whole Masters of the Universe experience with multiple costumes* being unveiled simultaneously, then paraded through the show floor to the Mattel booth for photos and whatnot.  

The biggest thing my crew and I got out of that partnership was access to the actual STL files that Mattel uses to manufacture the toys.  That would be awesome, but Meredith wanted her throne to have the look of the old-school animated version.  So we mostly wouldn't be able to use the models from Mattel. 

Instead, we would mostly start from scratch.  The first thing we needed was reference images.  There are a few different renditions of the Bone Throne that we were looking at.  The first was this version from the original Filmation animated series:

The second was the more realistic version in this statue from Iron Studios:


This mostly matched the silhouette of the animated throne but with a  more believable real-world texture and details.

I had my guy Jeff Santos take a quick stab at 3D sculpting the more intricate bone parts.  Most notably the stack of skulls and the vertebrae for the backrest.  Here's a render with digital scan of Rachel for scale:


The skulls and spines were 3D printed in ABS plastic.  While we were waiting on those parts to come out of the printers, we cut some various lengths of PVC pipe and filled the ends with expanding foam.  Once the foam was done expanding, we carved them to look like the ends of various long bones and built a layer of Free Form Air epoxy dough over them:


The process was pretty straightforward and I completely neglected to take any photos.  At the end of the day I got this bone stack snapshot:


The next day everything had finished curing and Nick here got to spend some quality time sanding the ends smooth.  Then he found a handy box to stack them into:

At this point, the skull parts were coming out of the printers.  After a couple of days, we had enough parts to start assembly:

The one toy model we did use from Mattel was the Havoc Staff.  I did have Jeff tune up the parts below the skull to increase the poly count and smooth out the facets: 

Here's Cleveland** working on the printed Havoc Staff which he assembled with a piece of greay PVC conduit for the main shaft:


These pieces were paint prep nightmares.  Every square inch was riddled with nooks and crannies that would've taken months to clean up if we had to sand all of the print lines away.  We didn't have time for that kind of noise.

Fortunately, they also happened to be organic shapes that didn't need the kind of precision prep work we usually have to do for mechanical parts with straight lines and hard edges.  So to smooth over the print lines and add a bit of strength to the finished piece, we added a layer of Epsilon Pro, an epoxy coating designed to harden and protect foam and other materials prior to painting.

Here's Sierra applying a coat of Epsilon Pro epoxy the smooth out the print lines and strengthen the surface of the printed skull stack:


Rachel did the same to the spines and vertebrae:


The pieces were left to cure overnight:


Then these parts were stacked and glued together to begin to create the seat back for the bone throne.  Here's Madison packing the edges and filling gaps with more Free Form Air:


I've been finding more and more uses for that particular material as time goes on.  It's lightweight, rock hard, and not quite as brittle as Bondo or other automotive body fillers.  At some point during the mixing and curing process, it gets pretty sticky, so it's easy to adhere it to whatever surface you're trying to build up and it's a breeze to sand and cut it to its final shape once it finishes hardening.

Madison loves that stuff:


To give the parts a consistent surface texture, once the Free Form Air was cured, carved, and sanded down to shape, it was also coated with Epsilon Pro epoxy.  After a while, the Bone Throne parts started to take up a lot of space:


For the ribs that would wrap around the base of the seat, we started by rough cutting some shapes out of pink insulation foam from the big box hardware store.  These pieces were hand carved and sanded until they had the look we were after.  Then a few areas were bulked up with Free Form Air to help hide seams and reinforce the surface.  Here's Tia fine-tuning the sculpts:


These too were coated with Epsilon Pro for a smooth surface:


With all of the main parts printed, sculpted, sanded, and coated, it was finally time to start building the sub-assemblies that would make up the final throne.  So I started a day with this big pile of bones:


Using a combination of glue, screws, and additional lumps of Free Form Air, the backrest became a single, unified part:


The whole thing was coated with white primer before we moved it to the spray booth and gave it a generous coating of Rustoleum Heirloom White:


Same for the other bones:




Back in the rest of the shop, the bulk of the staff was painted plurple:


The big tusks that would sit on either side of the seat were also painted Heirloom White:


The next day, Madison got a jump on weathering the backrest:



This is about the same time as crunch time kicked in and I neglected to take progress photos.  We made the bottom frame that you can see in the picture above which would mount onto the base of the wheelchair and the rest of the parts would slot into it without any need for tools or fasteners.  The whole thing would fit through a standard doorway and I was pretty happy with the end result by the time we were loading it onto the truck when the folks from Magic Wheelchair passed through on their way to San Diego. 

Since I'm never 100% certain that the finished build will fit until I actually see the wheelchair in person, I ended up bringing a huge assortment of tools and supplies in case we had to do any major adjustments during the first/final test fitting.  

The next day we loaded up in my car and made the trip down to San Diego as well.  We got a later start than I wanted and ultimately didn't get into town until after 1a.m.  I was dreading having to wake up first thing on Wednesday morning to help unload all of the huge pile of tools and supplies I'd loaded into Magic Wheelchair's box truck.

But when I got into the hotel room, it turned out the Magic Wheelchair had already unloaded the truck into my room:

This part was somehow the best part:


It took some rearranging, but eventually I was able to clear off enough space to sleep in one of the beds.  The next night we finally got a hold of Meredith's wheelchair after she'd gone to bed.  So I got to stay up late in the hotel room doing the final fitting and adjustments.  Here's the ribs wrapping around the back of the seat:


The base frame fit pretty much as expected and all we really had to do was cut a few extra bone pieces to length and strap it all together:


The next morning, a crowd gathered for the big reveal at the Magic Wheelchair booth on the show floor.  Meredith was front and center:


I didn't get a snapshot of her reaction, but I did get this winning photo of her once we'd gotten her all dressed up:


Once the reveal was complete, she and the other recipients formed a procession through the middle of the show floor from the Magic Wheelchair booth to the Mattel booth.  There they posed for photos and got all kinds of attention.  Unfortunately, I didn't get any of those photos.

The whole thing was pretty exhausting for Meredith, so after a bit more time rolling around at the convention, we disassembled the costume and set it up on display at the Magic Wheelchair booth so she could go get some rest:

Taken for all in all, it was a great success and hopefully it has scratched the Bone Throne itch I had and I won't feel like I need to build one for me anymore.

Of course, I didn't end up getting any pictures of me in the throne wearing my Skeletor costume...

Stay tuned, more to come.

*We actually ended up building two Magic Wheelchair costumes in the ship simultaneously while the team in Portland cranked out two more.  I suppose I was feeling a bit cocky when I said, "Skeletor's throne will be easy.  Give me another one too."  But that one also came out great.  I'll be writing it up shortly.

**Cleveland is actually the dude's name.  Turns out he's from a different land than the one in Ohio.  

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