kitakaze -- I liked all of Rick Baker's suits. With the earlier ones it would always depend so much on how it was lit and edited. But imagine one of those werewolf suits walking in the distance as a guy with a shaking and out-of-focus camera bounced up and down. No one would (or could) notice any flaw or stiffness to the face. And IF you were already predisposed to believing that real werewolves did indeed stalk that area, you might just swear you'd filmed a real werewolf.
However, upon close up examination of the suit you'd find it wasn't real at all. Too bad we can't do that with Patty.
Crowlogic -- Actually the red ape didn't have anything to do with the BBC. A guy gets a budget to work within and comes to America to do his documentary based on his ideas. He talks to OPTIC NERVE about suits and interviews JOHN VULICH. Optic Nerve gives him a red ape suit to use that's hanging up in the shop.
The idea is to show a simple hair suit walking that's a totally different color and doesn't even have feet that match. Reveal to the audience what IT REALLY LOOKS LIKE and
then show it FROM PATTERSON'S CAMERA POV. The audience is supposed to see that even this suit looks halfway decent when filmed the way Patterson shot his suit.
That was the idea anyway. Unfortunately this producer had no clue about how the Bigfoot community would later grab stills of the red suit when he was deliberately
showing what it looked like INSTEAD of using the images from the Patterson POV camera. He gave the Bigfoot world waaayyy too much credit for insight. The main skill of Bigfoot investigators is finding ways to deny the obvious.
For example: The hair of the "Mr. Spock" headed Orang really is similar to the hair used on that "David Cassidy" headed red ape. Yet we know only one is real and the other is fake.
It's not "sheen" we're talking about on Patty. There's more to it than that. Patty does have both the shine of fake acrylic fur and other attributes that combined show this is exactly what it is. The CIRCLE around the upper thigh that causes the "pair of shorts" look is due to fake fur and skin being stretched tightly over the top of the thigh pad edge.
Other goofiness is seen as well. The enhancements of Patty reveal the areas that match acrylic based fake fur and not real hair. When you stretch this stuff tightly over padding you get those lines around the edges of the pads that can be seen in the film. You see it on the butt pads too.
There is no doubt that Stan Winston was right about this. I know it's hard to imagine that he'd know something about suits that a Bigfoot hunter staring at decades old impressions in the mud doesn't, but it's true.
Here's part of a flyer Janos Prohaska used to hand out. You can see some of his suits from the 50's and early 60's have a certain type of sheen to them that comes from faux fur.
Here you can see a circle around the top of my thigh. That's where the pad I'm wearing ends. Something similar happens with Patty. It never happens to any human or ape leg, however, only with suits.
I've already shown you how a circular butt pad fits over hip pads that wrap around the hips. If you look closely at this enhanced pic you can see the edges of the butt and hip pad configuration that is common on two section ape suits. When the hair fabric is glued and stitched tightly to the area the
shine makes the edges stand out. This is what is going on here.
In fact,
Bob Heironimus' own buttocks start to curve from just beneath the butt pad in this shot. At the top of the thigh pad line you may notice that his real buttocks begin. Patty's butt pad is connected to the upper "shirt" type section of the suit. Think of it like a backpack or fanny pack.
Patty's top section is nearly too short for Bob. In the ape suit world the butt section should hang lower on him and that coupled with his own squatting would make the legs look shorter.
On the RIGHT is a wetsuit that was used on VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA. When they were done using it underwater on that show they let it dry out and then took it to the stage next door for an appearance on LOST IN SPACE. The only change was a paint job. The hair suit in the other cage is padded as well as covered in a "mink coat" type of fake fur. They would mix and match various suits to make whatever goofy creature the show needed that week. That is the "cannibalizing" John Vulich was talking about.
In truth, the type of hair used on Patty is no different from the black acrylic hair used on this suit. It's just the manner in which it is applied, what it is glued to, and the padding that makes the difference.
I made the breast on the RIGHT in a few minutes. Cover your soft foam padding and (either wetsuit or fabric-covered body suit) with latex. Add your shiny faux fur in patches in various cuts as needed. This creates a Patty type suit.
Isn't it possible that since we know
from real life experience that the things seen on Patty are created by this kind of suit-making AND we know that the "mid-tarsal break" seen in Patty's tracks IS created by a person wearing over-sized rubber feet walking in the sand, then can't we stop for a second and consider the possibility that con man Patterson and his pals really did make a fake Bigfoot film?
I know that if I were a Bigfoot hunter and I saw one in clear daylight in a "hotspot" like Bluff Creek then I'd certainly be hunting in that area. But not Roger. He left and never hunted there again. Very odd.
