The Batman suit.

In 2011 one of the companies that regularly rented our studio was shooting some green screen for an auto parts commercial and I was chatting with the motorcycle stunt guy for a while.

So the story goes that a friend of his worked on The Dark Knight set and still had one of the suits, which were apparently just modified motorcycle suits. They reshaped the leather and added Kevlar and carbon fiber accents for the stunt guys to wear in the Batpod scenes to make it look identical to the mostly-rubber suit that Christian Bale wore, while still having some protection if the rider fell off the bike or something. He said the guy needed cash and wanted to sell it, and would put me in touch if I was interested.

So I'm thinking the story about being used in filming is probably half bullshit, but if it looked good enough I would buy it anyway and reached out. He sends me some photos and it looks a lot like the replicas I've seen with only minor differences, but then again the licensed replicas are supposed to look screen-accurate and there were no tags or license stamps anywhere on this one, so who knows. He only wanted $3,000 so I PayPal’d him and he shipped it out.

I still don't know whether it’s authentic or not, but damn it was worth every penny anyway. I wore it to our Halloween party, took the kids trick or treating, and attended a couple of charity fund raisers in it. The photo next to it in the pic is of my wife and I at the 2011 Halloween party the production company throws every year at the studio.

A few weeks later I bought the mannequin and a couple replica accessories, and the “Batman statue” has been a permanent fixture in my game room ever since.