Halloween

Some serious time and effort went into the creation of Scott Holden's incredible Halloween costume -- Han Solo on the back of his tauntaun from The Empire Strikes Back! Scott created the piece for the Zone Ball, a Halloween bash thrown by a Sacramento, CA rock station that draws over 12,000 visitors for the annual event.

The tauntaun costume is a scale-model of the real thing, with the wearer's legs supported by stilts within the frame of the body, while Han Solo's legs that straddle the back are bogus. Scott discovered the hard way that putting the costume on is a two person job, as his first test-walk with the costume found him tipped over and pinned overnight in his garage! Details of Scott's innovative DIY Star Wars creation can be found on the blog Incredible Stuff I Made.

You can see the costume in action in the video below:

By: Jen Yamato

If you're still on the lookout for the perfect movie-themed jack o' lantern patterns for Halloween, look no further because we've dug up something for everyone. Are you a stickler for the rules of Halloween (i.e. don't blow out the jack o' lanterns til after midnight...)? Try the bag-headed Sam from Trick 'R Treat. Jedi in training? Carve the Death Star so you can practice infiltrating it. Bonus: you and Lego Luke Skywalker can even blow it up once Halloween's over!

Personally, I always went for the grotesque or ironic celebrity pumpkins. One of my best Halloween creations was a glowing, sultry J. Lo pumpkin. (The best part was watching her wither and decay the next week. So evil!) I've always sworn by the patterns over at Zombie Pumpkins, where you can find just about every movie icon you can imagine. Download SUPER easy patterns like Freddy Krueger, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the Joker, Jigsaw's puppet, Gremlins, and even assorted characters from the Harry Potterverse. (An Albus Dumbledore to protect your porch!) And yes, folks - they've even got new patterns from Twilight, Zombieland, and Michael Jackson, circa Thriller. Too soon?

Read on for more -- and the Death Star jack o' lantern -- after the jump.

There are probably a lot of reasons why the Ben Cooper-style Halloween costumes went out of vogue over the last twenty years, but Retrocrush is more than happy to remind us of our dorkier days-gone-by. Bruce Zalkin has a pretty extensive photo collection (he sold the real ones off in 2003) of these chintzy reminders of a simpler time when kids could publicly humiliate themselves by begging door-to-door for Bit-O-Honey while dressed like Twiki from Buck Rogers. Of particular interest for SciFi Squad readers are the unintentionally funny interpretations of beloved characters found on the Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Star Trek, and Superhero pages (although there's still something kitschy-awesome about that Alien costume with the picture of the Alien's head on the smock).

Kids today will never know the distinct please of having your plastic mask break during a regular trick-or-treat session, and then having your face stabbed for the remainder of the night with a jagged plastic shard from the broken edge--all because you wanted to be Aquaman (a character who doesn't even wear a mask) for one night. My blood for a handful of Smarties? Totally worth it.

Being a theatre person, my mother always opted to make a costume for me or use make0up to transform me into whoever I wanted to be that year. She never bought me any of this crap, which I thought was impossibly cool at the time, and I was always a little jealous of the kids that got to run around the neighborhood in this plastic junk. Now, I can thank my mother for preventing me from wearing a V.I.N.C.E.N.T. costume and setting myself ablaze by passing by the open flame of a jack-o-lantern. Thanks, Mom!