Hi-yo, Silver, out with the old and in with the new! Ke-mo sah-bee’s garb is getting a serious upgrade in Disney’s new version of “The Lone Ranger.”
Finding the perfect hat to re-create the iconic look was quite the task for the movie’s costume designer, Penny Rose.
“The original TV ‘Lone Ranger’ is just kind of stuck in a time warp. I didn’t really feel it was relevant,” she says. “I felt we had to give it an authentic, real look.”
1938 Lee Powell in “The Lone Ranger” serial (Everett Collection)
1939 Robert Livingston in the serial “The Lone Ranger Rides Again” (Everett Collection)
1949 – 1958 Clayton Moore in “The Lone Ranger” TV series and the film spinoffs “The Lone Ranger” and “The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold” (Everett Collection)
1981 Klinton Spilsbury in “The Legend of the Lone Ranger” movie (Everett Collection)
Rose tried out more than 50 hats for actor Armie Hammer, who plays the Lone Ranger, before ultimately choosing a Stetson, the legendary cowboy brand.
“He’s 6-foot-6, as you know,” says Rose. “But he has a small head. So getting the proportions of the hat was very complex.”
For the final version, Rose tweaked the shape and brim of a unique Stetson. While the exact custom hat is not available for sale, you can buy a similar style, the Seneca, for $119.99 at stetson.com.
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The Lone Ranger’s mask was also an ordeal. Director Gore Verbinski assigned Joel Harlow, head of makeup and prosthetics, to create the mask. It took Harlow 15 versions before he’d created one they all agreed properly conformed to Hammer’s face.
“Gore had specific requests as to how much of his eyes we see, how far down on the nose we go, how much of his brows we see,” explains Harlow. “Because it’s very, very tricky to get that shape. It can so easily sort of shift into superhero, I found. The farther down on the nose I brought it, the more like Batman it looked. So you’re walking a really fine line.”
Consequently, Harlow had to avoid referencing the original mask too closely and focus on making it feel like a “real element” in the movie.
“What we ultimately ended up doing was creating a sort of understructure, and then molding the existing leather on top of it,” says Harlow.
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“So it still conformed, but it looked and moved like leather.”
The ultimate result is a Lone Ranger far less cartoon-like than the original. “Until recently, you can look at a movie and tell when it was made, even if it’s set in a different period,” says Rose. “[For example,] Elizabeth Taylor’s ‘Cleopatra.’ It doesn’t actually look at all like ancient Rome. It looks like a 1960s version of it.
“I’ve designed [‘The Lone Ranger’] to look like it is 1888 in the Midwest,” she says. “I had no pretense of creating a fashion or an iconic look.”
‘Ranger’ was always a ‘head’ of his time
Take a step into the past and see how the hero’s iconic mask and hat have evolved through the years.
Powell’s mask covered more of his face than other versions.
Livingston’s tilted hat makes him look more like a gangster than subsequent Lone Rangers.
In his autobiography, “I Was That Masked Man,” Moore notes his mask (seen at right in the 1956 movie) was originally purple because it delivered a more textured look in black and white.
“The first mask was slightly smaller and covered less of my face. The mask was made of plaster, molded right to my face, then covered with purple felt,” he wrote. “I developed the molded mask. In previous movies, masked men had trouble moving around because the mask hindered their vision. But with this mask, I had no trouble at all. I could see a punch coming from the side, or I could look down and see my toes.”
Moore wore many masks in his years as the Lone Ranger — the Smithsonian owns one, and another was sold in a Sotheby’s auction in 2000 to a Chicago woman for $30,000. One of Moore’s white Stetsons sold for $7,000 at an auction last month.
Moore also explained in his book why the famous hat never fell off during fight scenes: “That’s because of a little trick I learned from stuntman Tom Steele. I took a rubber tube, the kind you would use as a tourniquet — it was about as thick as your little finger — and put that on the inside of the hat band. Then, when I put the hat on and pushed it on, it made the hat tight so it wouldn’t come off.”
Despite a similar look for the Lone Ranger, the movie was a mega-flop.