People In Rubber Suits - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Man In A Rubber Suit

The original Man In A Rubber Suit, Haruo Nakajima.

"MAN IN SUIT! MAN IN SUIT! MAN IN SUIT!"
—Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News on (classic) Godzilla

Aliens with two arms, two legs, a head and about six feet of height, with exaggerated features and sometimes limbs. Occasionally they have limp tails or spiky bits that flop around entertainingly. Skin colour not predetermined.

Essentially, people in rubber suits.

Examples:

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Film

Averted early in the filming of Predator. The original Predator costume was a rather goofy and awkward lizard; the crew asked for a new monster design very shortly after seeing the original. The designer decided to try something with mandibles...
In the 1976 remake of King Kong, Jeff Bridges' character reacted to the plunderers' initial disbelief upon seeing the giant ape by saying "What do you think it was? A man in an ape suit?"... which is exactly what it looked like, because it was.
The terrible, terrible version of Beowulf "starring" Christopher Lambert reimagined Grendel as a man in a rubber suit with a clearly visible zipper (it also reimagined Grendel's mother as a Cute Monster Girl who would later prove to have flammable blood).
Star Wars: Original footage with Jabba the Hutt, who was actually a large puppet with two people inside him (plus a midget in the tail). Chewie and the Ewoks count as well.
Obviously this trope came about because of Godzilla, but the reason is somewhat ironic... Originally, Godzilla was to be animated in stop-motion. Eiji Tsuburaya informed the producers that the necessary scenes would take seven years to complete, so he was instead told to create the monster another way. He came up with a new plan: instead of splicing a tiny stop-motion model into live-action footage, make a realistic monster suit and build a set where everything is tiny compared to it.. It worked.
- Applications of this method in the years after Tsuburaya's death in the Showa period turned out not to be as impressive, however...
Hyde (the Evil Twin of Dr. Jekyll) in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie combines blue screen, forced perspective and a rubber suit so spectacularly obvious that, like much of the movie, it borders on Special Effect Failure. (And borders is a very generous term.)
Five words... Creature From The Black Lagoon.
In the film The Bad And The Beautiful, a director and a producer are assigned to make a low-budget horror film about cat men, who are supposed to be played by people in crappy suits. They declare that "five men dressed like cats look like five men dressed like cats", and they make the film without showing the monsters (reference to the real classic horror film Cat People).
The 1957 movie Night Of The Demon, directed with dark understated dread by veteran Jacques Tourneur, from a story by horror master M.R. James, was considered by many to be undercut by Executive Meddling insistence on a rubber-suit demon (showing up at the beginning, no less) - YMMV.
Pearl (the grotesquely obese vampire) from Blade. It sounds like a grim kid's TV show.
The Rodents Of Unusual Size from The Princess Bride.

Close Film

Live Action TV

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon went through literally dozens of these as their Monsters Of The Week.
Kamen Rider is fond of people in rubber suits as well, though theirs tend to be a little more serious (as serious as a rubber suit can be) in comparison to Sentai.
- Justified in that a lot of the monsters are very intricately designed with a motif in mind and would be practically impossible to reasonably create without a lot of money. It should also be noted that the Heisei riders often have monsters that are CGI generated like Hibiki and Ryuki.
The Ultra Series thrives entirely on the design of ever more outlandish rubber suits. This applies to both heroes and villains.
Ryukendo, however, creates oddities such as a monster best described as a flying mood ring laser elephant.
Doctor Who, too many times to mention. For his first-ever Doctor Who story (the second-ever for Doctor Who generally) Terry Nation invented the Daleks as a way to avert the People In Rubber Suits. They still had plungers for hands. His second story (the fourth aired on Doctor Who) however already featured the Voord, literally, People In Rubber Suits. (Possibly. Perhaps the suits have fused with their actual bodies.)
- At least once, in The Ark in Space, the monster was actually made out of green bubble wrap - but considering that bubble wrap had only just been invented, the overall effect worked, if only for about five years after the episode's premiere. Supposedly the bubbles went 'pop-pop-pop' as the extras inched their way across stage reducing cast and crew to hysterics and the sound department to tears.
- It's not limited to rubber suits, either - the Krotons from the eponymous Second Doctor serial resemble walking cardboard boxes with a (sometimes spinning) cardboard diamond on top.
- Let's not even get on the Zarbi (First Doctor, The Web Planet) - giant ants with two very, very humanoid legs.
- Scared of those new series Cybermen? The original Cybermen were guys in a balaclava and a (somewhat loose) catsuit, carrying plastic stuff suspenders-like. Plus a funnel on their heads. And a serious speech impediment.
  - And they were terrifying.
Star Trek mostly has Rubber Forehead Aliens, but some (the Gorn, for instance) are of this type.
- As time went on those species that were once men in suits were replaced by Serkis Folk. The Gorn appearance in Enterprise was all CGI, for example.
Power Rangers, once a week from 1992 to 2009. Super Sentai, from 1975 to the present, with the same rubber suits from 1991 through 2008).
- Lampshaded in an episode of Dino Thunder. The Power Trio were watching an episode of Abaranger (long story) when Connor complains that the Monster Of The Week was obviously a man in a rubber suit. Kira just pointed out that it was no weirder than what they fought.
Nobody's mentioned the Sleestaks from the Land of the Lost TV shows.
Legion from Red Dwarf.
The X Files. Spoofed in "Jose Chung's From Outer Space". Scully is doing an autopsy on a Grey Alien found dead in a field, only to find a zipper; it turns out to be a rubber suit. The video footage is edited and sold as a tape of an actual alien autopsy.