Most Impressive Fans is a feature highlighting the amazing creativity of Star Wars devotees, from cosplay to props. If there’s a fearless and inventive fan out there, we’ll highlight them here.
On the day before Star Wars Celebration Chicago opened its doors, Lucky McQueede arrived at a hotel parking lot with a pile of scrap materials, five gallons of yellow paint, and just 12 hours to pull together a towering loader droid cosplay.
As it turns out, the garbage would do.
McQueede, who makes a living as a stuntman, puppeteer, and creature effects artist in Los Angeles, cobbled together a massive cosplay for the official Cosplay Competition and walked away on stilted legs with the Best in Show title.
Based on HURID-327, the massive red loader droid glimpsed at Maz Kanata’s castle in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, McQueede’s MC-219, nicknamed MAC the Loth-CAT, was actually his back-up for the contest. He intended to bring his Darth Maul cyborg cosplay, another behemoth on special digileg stilts, that he built seven years ago. But the costume needed some repairs and his makeup artist, who completes the upper half of the cosplay, got sick. So he went to plan B.
“I found all the parts for this on and off in the garbage for the last three weeks,” McQueede said, perched on a trash can and resting inside the venue shortly after winning the contest April 13. McQueede used discarded Nerf gun parts, stilts he already owned, and other pieces of mesh and metallic debris for the build. “When it comes down to it, it’s about shapes.”
McQueede couldn’t get started on the work of putting it together until he got to the convention. As part of a cargo transport for 501st members from California, Utah, and Colorado, on April 6 he hit the road, driving from Los Angeles to Chicago over several days and making stops to pick up astromechs from friends in the R2 Builders Club. During a stop in Colorado, McQueede’s father gave him the bucket of safety paint, the same hue used to mark off parking spots, and he pulled into the Windy City on the evening of April 10.
The next day, while the convention kicked off, McQueede was sitting in the parking lot of a Hilton Garden Inn waiting for cosplayers to pick up their gear and constructing his loader droid. “I had to babysit the truck so I built a robot,” he joked. He still had paint encrusting his fingernails when he won Saturday afternoon.
When he was done, MAC stood 10 feet tall, although he has a two-and-a-half foot reach with the pair of monstrous and agile arms on either side of the droid’s body. As the convention was winding down Monday, he could still be seen strutting the exhibition hall floor giving high fives. His training in Hollywood over the last 20 years certainly helped him accomplish the task in the strict 12-hour timeframe, he says, and he had some help from Katy Coleman, the creature performer who was inside the original droid suit on the set of Episode VII. That helped him figure out how to slip the body of the droid onto a backpack for support and ease of movement. “That was the key."
The royal treatment for Princess Leia
Although McQueede took home the top prize, he was just one of many impressive cosplayers on stage during the Star Wars Celebration Cosplay Contest and among fans wandering the exhibition floor all week.
Autumn Ziegler put almost 300 hours into her Elizabethan Leia ensemble, which clinched Best Mash-Up at the contest, and took a half hour just to put on. Ziegler had the idea when she was attending a previous Celebration, but didn’t get started sewing until January. To get the intricate costume done in time, Ziegler said she put in “a lot of weekends, a lot of late nights,” starting this January.
It was her first time crafting an Elizabethan gown, so she had to do hours of research and joined some period costuming groups on Facebook for tips. “It was a lot of bum rolls and farthingales,” she said. “There’s actually a lot under here just to give it the right shape.”
