Sharky's new head, sporting the glowy eyes. These have light bulbs behind them that light up, and the color can be changed from white to orange to an angry red color. They don't show much in the picture here, but out on a dance floor when the lights are down, they're very impressive. The electonics doohicky next to the head is the control for the eyes.

Here's a close-up shot of the eyes; they're actually cast with an epoxy gel substance. It took three tries to get them to look acceptable, the epoxy gel just wouldn't dry in a nice uniform fashion.

Here's a great shot looking directly down into the costume body, illustrating the many controls and batteries involved. The dip-switches control the light-up eyes, fans, and a voice box (that never got much use, since the suit muffled the sound; but it could play Mack The Knife or the theme from Jaws with the flip of a switch!) There was also a voice synthesizer hooked into the speakers to let Sharky speak in a deep voice, but again the speakers being muffled by the costume fabric prevented this from seeing much use... Besides, fursuiters aren't supposed to talk, right?

The light indicators next to the various switches are sanity-checks to see if each circuit is actually complete and getting power from the batteries. This came in handy later during Anthrocon 2003, as the suit had some serious electonic failures (couplers breaking and wires pulling loose) that took several hours to hunt down and fix... It wouldn't have been much of a big deal, except that the failures kept some of the cooling fans from working!

Side of the shark crate. When the suit showed up at Anthrocon 2003, it was hauled down the hallways and up to Sharky's room in this crate, and created a bit of a stir because everyone wanted to know what was in the crate :) It almost turned into a big disaster, however, since the crate didn't fit anywhere -- creative shifting around and lifting was needed to get it into the elevators, and it had to be disassembled to get it through the door and into the hotel room itself.

Many of Sharky's friends signed the crate, but the bulk of it was disassembled after he returned home because it was just too big to be practical to use.

Warning on the top of the crate...

Here's the whole body and head assembly fit into the crate (without the lid on, of course) -- you can see how this seemed like a good idea at the time, in terms of keeping the costume safe during transport and adding some fun mystery to Sharky's arrival. This seemed like a particularly good idea since the suit couldn't be compressed or squeezed down, due to its construction (the frame is rigid boogie-board foam, hot-glued together.)