Fox Sports Japan is offering a freely downloadable “Foul Ball Armor” papercraft helmet for people with a lot of free time and an iron will (papercuts are serious business and you should expect a lot of them building this thing).
You’ll also obviously need access to a printer, or if you have no sense of shame, a nearby Kinko’s.
Fox Sports introduced the Foul Ball Armor in a new television ad campaign to coincide with the March 29 start of the 2013 baseball season.
As seen in the below commercial, it’s equipped with all kinds of ludicrous defenses against stray baseball hits in the highly unlikely event that they tear open a rift in the space-time continuum and come flying out of your TV while you’re watching sports. Presumably, this is a baseball only phenomenon but when the World Cup rolls around we’ll see if soccer balls can defy physics too.
The papercraft helmet took one of our staff members, equipped with an Exacto knife and glue, a whole five hours to put together, but as you can see, the results are pretty sweet. It looks like some kind of future sports football helmet. And it even comes with cool glasses!
Unfortunately, the papercraft helmet does not have the magical superpowers of its superior commercial full-kit version, but it could be useful in deflecting wiffleballs or spitballs from your more belligerent English class students, but there is hope:
If Fox Sports Japan reaches 100,000 Facebook “likes” they will apparently make the full suit commercially available, albeit for probably an insane amount of money.
Evil billionaires, oil barons and Mitt Romney are encouraged to click the “like” button immediately.
[ Read in Japanese ]
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