People In Rubber Suits - Television Tropes & Idioms

The original Man In A Rubber Suit, Haruo Nakajima.

"MAN IN SUIT! MAN IN SUIT! MAN IN SUIT!" Harry Knowles on (classic) Godzilla

Aliens with two arms, two legs, a head and about six foot tall, 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:

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.
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. This troper heard 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.
- And it's not strictly tall people; the Quarks, robots of the tall hunchbacked Dominators, seem to be played by dwarves.
  - Children, actually.
- 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.
Star Trek mostly has Rubber Forehead Aliens, but some (the Gorn, for instance) are of this type.
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).
Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon went through literally dozens of these as their Monsters Of The Week.
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).
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.
Ultraman 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.
Done as a Show Within A Show segment on Doug. Doug and his friends watched a horror movie where you didn't see the shapeshifting killer monster (in his real form at least) until the end of the movie. Doug was so scared that he closed his eyes and missed the scene. He kept trying to see it but kept wimping out until the final time, where he managed to not only see the monster, but laugh as it was an obvious rubber suit with a clearly visible zipper. When he mentioned this to his friends they all admitted that they had closed their eyes too.
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
A very curious example is Dr. Dale Russel's "thought experiment", the Dinosauroid. Revised versions look even less humanoid.
- that image was nightmare fuel for me when I first saw it. Of course, I was 6, reading a dinosaur book in the dark, so...
Star Wars: Original footage with Jabba the Hutt, who was actually a large puppet with two people inside him. 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...
In the film The Bad and the Beautiful, a direactor 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 man 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).
Nobodys hasnt mention the Sleestaks from the orignal Land of The Lost TV show.