The Seeburg Diner Table Jukebox Remote Halloween Costume

I’m not sure where the idea came from, but hopefully Tina will clear that up in a comment to this post. Maybe she had vending machines on the brain and eventually wended her way to jukeboxes. The idea emerged; some internet research was done and plans were sketched up. One of the first orders of business was to have our son provide us with his ten favorite songs.

As you can see, he has fairly retro tastes. I guess it’s the curse of having us as parents, and no, we don’t live in a bomb shelter. Our boy picked the A-sides, and Tina researched the B-sides.

Tina did the layout for the song list in Illustrator as well as the other jukebox graphics.

Then it was off to the art supply store. Cardboard, acetate, illustration board, glue and a few other things were purchased. These used to be the staple items of the illustration field, but now our work is mostly digital ( I can’t remember the last time I used illustration board, for instance.) We were surprised at how expensive some of these things had become.

Cardboard was cut. Silver paper applied. Print-outs mounted to board. Measuring, cutting and a lot of looking around for the old compass and the universal adapter I thought I had for it. What looked like a pile of cardboard and junk started to take form. The excitement was building!

We had a hidden light mounted in the costume so once again we had a another costume that lit up which was always a hit, but we needed something else. A jukebox should have music!

I put the playlist on a Sansa Shaker, my favorite MP3 player, and attached it to a battery powered speaker for a little more oomph. These were placed in a box and hot glued to the inside of the bottom of the costume. Presto! Working jukebox! You can see some finished photos of the costume here or take a look at this brief video of the suit in action: