Coolest Homemade Captain Planet Halloween Costume Idea

Halloween has been my favorite holiday ever since I can remember. I love the weather change in Ohio when it starts to get cold outside and the leaves change color. I can smell it in the air when Halloween is right around the corner. I think I got the love for Halloween from my Mom because she always made my brother and me costumes when we were younger. She always put a lot of work into our costumes and never bought us any store ready costumes.

I love Halloween because it allows me to stand far above everyone else in terms of the effort I put forth in my costumes. Halloween is the one day of the year when you get to be whomever you want and go all out and over the top. How can it not be the best holiday?

This year, I had some trouble settling on one specific idea for a costume. I always try to do something original and something that is either big in pop culture or something that was big in the late 80’s or 90’s (when I was growing up). My girlfriend gave me a homemade Captain Planet Halloween costume idea. At first, I thought this would be a fairly easy task to put the costume together, but as I found out, it was hard to find all the right “pieces” to make the costume authentic.

The first part of my journey was to find clothing to make the “blue skin” of Captain Planet. I searched near and far at Wal-Mart, Target, and the Salvation Army to find a jump suit, light blue tights, or an outfit remotely close to the light blue skin needed for the costume. I ended up getting a tight fitting woman’s long sleeve shirt from Goodwill and white tights from Wal-Mart. I then bought RIT navy blue and teal liquid dye and dyed the piece of clothing together in my kitchen sink. This was fairly easy to do but hard to determine the correct time in which to keep the clothes in the sink to get the optimal color. I used makeup from the Halloween store to create the blue face paint. I had to mix in white paint to lighten up the color to make my blue shirt.

The next part was getting all the red pieces of clothing for the costume. I knew the easier way to make the top was to get a red shirt and to cut it. My girlfriend helped draw the outline on the shirt and then I cut it to make the top. I was able to find red “dress” gloves from the Halloween store for the costume. The hard part was finding what to wear for the bottoms. I originally searched for woman’s underwear but after buying a pair and bringing it home, “bikini cut” does not work. I was able to find men’s athletic sliders, or spandex, in the underwear section at Target. I rolled them up to the shape needed to look like Captain Planet.

As far as the boots or socks go for the costume, red soccer socks work just fine. I have two pairs on over a pair of women’s slippers so that I could walk around outside without worrying about stepping on anything dangerous.

The finishing touches were the yellow globe on the shirt, the emblem on the belt, and Captain Planet’s green hair. For the hair, I had an old mullet wig that my girlfriend helped to cut and trim into the shape of his hair. I then used green hair spray and covered the wig itself. For the yellow planet, I used the outline from a CD, which was the perfect size to make the globe. I used a pin and attached it to the shirt. I free hand cut the yellow emblem for the belt and made it big enough to cover an existing dress belt I had and used it to cover the buckle on the belt.

The costume was a huge hit and was pretty easy to make. I did put in a lot of effort traveling to different stores to make sure I nailed the costume with all the correct pieces of clothing for the costume. In total, I probably spent $50 to put the costume together and 4-5 man-hours of searching for the clothing and finally assembling it. I highly recommend this to anyone in their mid to late 20’s that grew up with this awesome cartoon.