Cheap Costume: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

The hero has to go into action, but doesn't have access to his official costume. So he contrives a shoddy emergency costume. Usually [[Played for Laughs]].

 

== Anime and Manga ==

* In ''[[Sailor Moon]]'', Zoisite, one of the Shitennou, dresses up as Sailor Moon, saves people from accidents he sets up himself, and stages his own kidnapping to trap the real one. However, red highlights are blue on the fake costume. (It happens in the ''Sailor Moon Plus'' fan game, too, in which he also adopts Sailor Moon's move set.)

* ''[[Dragonball Z]]'' had the "historic" recreation of the Cell games with the actors wearing plastic masks that had the yellow Super Saiyan hair.

** And were ''enormous''

*** Not even [[Fake Ultimate Hero|Mr. Satan]] was spared!

* One of Maron's heists in ''[[Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne]]'' gets complicated when her [[Transformation Trinket]] ends up in the hands of the possessed [[Victim of the Week]]. Her makeshift disguise includes an altered yukata, a (much, much plainer) handmade cross, hair extensions, and spray-on hair dye. Things get even more complicated when she gets caught in a [[Drowning Pit]], the dye washes off, and the hair extensions float away.

 

== Comic Books ==

* Seems to happen with [[Spider-Man (Comic Book)|Spider-Man]] quite frequently. Makes sense, considering he is often [[The Woobie]], [[The Chew Toy]] or both.

** In an early story arc, Spidey's costume gets trashed (again), but he doesn't have a spare and is forced to buy a Spider-man costume from a costume shop. A dunk in the river causes the cheap costume to shrink, forcing him to web it in place, which leads to further problems...

** During a Team-Up with Wolverine Spidey once found himself abroad and in need of a costume. Luckly for him he was able to purchase a reasonable imitation of a Spiderman costume in a costumeshop in Berlin. Unfortunately it had "Die Spinne" written on the back, the name that the character was known by and that Spiderman comics were sold under in Germany back then.

** The Steel Spider began as a boy in a Spider-Man Halloween costume with (non-functional) aluminum arms coming off the back. He eventually developed his own, still Spider-Man–based identity.

** In ''[[The Spectacular Spider-Man]]'', the Chameleon was a pretty convincing Spidey, except for the fact that Pete had switched to the black costume at this point. Oh, and the Chameleon had some weak imitations of the webbing, really hammed it up with the voice, and had an "insect early warning sense".

** Back in the very early Steve Ditko days, Peter Parker made his own costumes. The design was silk-screened on. And there was webbing between his arms and his side, which was a real pain to sew on.

** Fittingly, many of these cheap costumes are available to wear in the [[PS 1]] game ''Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro''.

** After he {{spoiler|escapes from prison}} he doesn't have time to do more than grab his coat, hat, mask and scarf over what he was wearing at the time, which definitely makes him fit the trope more.

* Towards the end of the ''[[Birds of Prey]]'' series, former Batgirl Barbara Gordon met with a teenage girl who was co-opting her old identity. The cheapness of the young lady's costume -- the cape and cowl of which were made from binliners - became a plot point, when it was what led Babs to figure out that she was homeless.

* At one point when Tony Stark had retired from his [[Iron Man]] identity to recover from his alcoholism, Tony had his "Recovery Armor" (basically a modernized Mark I armor) discovered by Dr. Demonicus and taken for a test run. Tony had to scrounge up costume parts of his teammates' within the [[Comic Book]]/Avengers West Coast so he can go out and get the armor back. Hawkeye mockingly named him "Spare Parts Man".

** Later on in the story, Darkwing confronts the thief while wearing a Mardi Gras mask, with a luchador's mask underneath. The thief steals both of those masks anyway, leaving Darkwing unmasked again. After a few other disgruntled superheroes capture the mask thief, Darkwing reveals that it had all been a [[Batman Gambit]], and that he was actually wearing [[Latex Perfection|a mask of his secret identity]] over one of his spare regular masks [[Mind Screw|in order to keep his secret identity safe]]. Launchpad and Gosalyn are befuddled.

 

"I'm not wearing hockey pads!" }}

** And subverted with the Joker, who denies that his suit was cheap, and it's later confirmed to be entirely custom-made, though he apparently also doesn't believe in washing it. He also implies that the suit was created from the money he stole in the beginning of the film.

** The novelization of the ''Spider-Man 2'' movie revealed that Peter got his proper costume made by a guy who specialized in wrestling costumes.

** In the unfilmed James Cameron movie script, stores began selling Spider-Man costumes based off of what they saw him wearing. Peter ruined his costume and decided to buy the store costume because it was actually of better quality.

* The "heroes" of ''[[Mystery Men]]'' all upgrade their costumes to something more impressive before the final battle.

* Subverted and combined with [[Mistaken for An Imposter]] and [[Your Costume Needs Work]] in ''[[Megamind]]'' where Bernard mistakes the title character for a fan in costume due to the fact he was at Metro Man's museum in his ''pajamas''.

* David Dunn's "Costume" in ''[[Unbreakable]]'' is a simple poncho. He probably didn't mean for it to be his superhero outfit; it just happened to be what he was wearing on the rainy night that he made his first foray into crimefighting.

* In general, it's oddly common in films for superheroes to start the movie with a sort of "dime store" version of their iconic costumes, then to switch at some point to their proper costumes. Spiderman and [[Captain America]] were already mentioned. [[Iron Man]] builds an actual iron exosuit in a cave, and he manages to create a simplified, silver version of his iconic outfit before getting to the main movie costume.

 

 

== Live Action TV ==

** Also subverted, rather humorously, in the ''same'' episode: as Angel enters a Goth club, he scoffs that the clubgoing teens are completely ignorant of how real vampires dress; almost immediately, he comes face-to-face with a young man dressed identically to himself!

** Oz might just win the prize of cheapest costume ever. Remembering how they changed into their outfits before, Xander dresses as [[James Bond]] and Willow as Joan D'Arc. Oz? A name tag that identifies him as God.

 

== Literature ==

 

 

== Webcomics ==

* In ''[[The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob]],'' when Bob gains [[Flying Brick|Super Powers,]] he cobbles together a costume that doesn't look very impressive. When he later loses said powers, he comments that his one regret is that he used a permanent laundry marker to make the "B" logo on a perfectly good shirt.

 

 

== Western Animation ==

{{quote| "[[Berserk Button|IT IS NOT]] [[Crowning Moment of Funny|ON THE WRONG SIDE!]]"}}

{{quote| '''Terry''' (to Bruce Wayne): Who's "D. Grayson?"}}

** Which was actually nifty [[Foreshadowing]], {{spoiler|Batman hired the villain under a different identity as part of a [[Batman Gambit]]. He ''had'' to lose his cowl to succeed in the plan and came prepared.}}

** [[Zorro|Black cloth mask with eye slits?]]

'''Lisa:''' I don't think the real Radioactive Man wears a plastic smock with a picture of himself on it.<br />

'''Milhouse:''' He would on Halloween. }}

 

{{reflist}}