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See also: Musical Instrument Museum Debuts “I Am AZ Music” Exhibit See also: Alice Cooper: No More Mr. Bad Guy
When Alice Cooper, Phoenix’s resident lord of the underworld/radio personality/Christian activist, pops up in the Tim Burton new flick, Dark Shadows, what he’s wearing should look mighty familiar.
The duds, modeled after his 1970s leather daddy motif, have been on display at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix since its I Am AZ Music exhibit opened earlier this year. Surrounded by memorabilia from his years (including a promotional inflatable pencil from the “School’s Out” marketing blitz), the costume is one of those used in the film, a humorous take the English goth-soap Dark Shadows from the ’60s and ’70s.
“[The outfit was] made specifically for Alice to wear in Dark Shadows by [costume designer] Coleen Atwood,” MIM curator Cullen Strawn says. “It’s based on an outfit he wore in the ’70s.”
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Starring frequent Burton collaborator Johnny Depp as a 200-year-old vampire trying to make sense of the ’70s, Dark Shadows looks promising from its trailers. It’ll have to really push it to live up to Cooper’s greatest cinematic performance, though. In 1992 he appeared in Wayne’s World, which is widely regarded as a masterpiece on par with Bergman’s Seventh Seal, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, and Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca.
Cooper has visited the “I Am AZ Music” exhibit, says Strawn. He was familiar with all the materials he lent, but got a kick out of seeing that inflatable pencil.
“He hadn’t seen one of those in a couple of decades,” Strawn says.
Dark Shadows is in theaters now.
The I Am AZ Music exhibit is located at the Musical Instrument Museum.
