A Hephzibah business features heroes in more ways than one.
Props and Heroes, a children’s entertainment and costume and prop-design business, will be receiving a 2022 Hero Award from the Red Cross of East Central Georgia for its charity efforts with children’s hospitals and non-profits.
While donning costumes, the superheroes of Props and Heroes visit patients at the Children’s Hospital of Georgia and have done many charity events.
“It is to bring hope and joy. As little as an interaction as there may be, there is no telling how big of a reaction will stay,” said Franklin Strausser Jr., along with his fiancee Amanda Stiles, is co-owner of Props and Heroes
The Red Cross of East Central Georgia Annual Heroes Breakfast will be Tuesday, Sept. 13 at the First Baptist Church Fellowship Hall on 3500 Walton Way Extension from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m.
Props and Heroes will also be a part of Arts in the Heart of Augusta the weekend of Sept. 16-18 and will be participating in local fairs in the upcoming months.
The business has partnered with the non-profit, Heart of a Hero.
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“We visited one child (among many they visited) who had cancer. We did this with Bryan Williams and his Heart of a Hero,” Strausser said. “Heart of a Hero was (made official) 2-3 years ago as a non-profit. But the group has been doing superhero charity stuff for 18 years. I have personally been doing stuff with them for nine years and have done hundreds of charity events, which is also where / when I met Amanda,” Strausser said.
When they visited that cancer patient, they encountered someone who was exhausted by the day-to-day and had essentially given up.
“The superheroes came in, and he was so excited. It was the first time he had made any gestures that he wasn’t sick,” Strausser said. “That one visit made him go to the next week, next month, and even the next year. We heard he is doing well. There was enough hope and joy to propel him.”
Props and Heroes has also participated in the Veterans Day Parade in Augusta.
Strausser said as a certain popular hero that he had missed one last kid in a lineup and was verging on heat exhaustion but that he ran back to that kid and gave him a high-five and a hug anyway.
“We ran into the mother of that kid (much) later… He had talked about it for two years afterward and had been going through some personal issues, and the positive attention helped him,” Strausser said.
Props and Heroes will be doing its first appearance at Arts in the Heart of Augusta this year with meet and greets in the Kid Zone of the festival with a group of four or five male and female superheroes from Sept. 16 to Sept. 18.
Though they have 40 costumes they’ve made for different superheroes and 10 performers, they get the same requests for a handful of the most popular characters.
Stiles performs as the female superheroes or female villains as well as other characters.
She has been with the company three years and also runs administrative aspects of it as well as taking care of social media.
Stiles, who also helps make some of the costumes, has the distinction of playing the company’s female superheroes.
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“It is nice being the only female superhero. I can cater more toward girls and women that way,” she said.
Stiles, who is a third-degree black belt, said, “The most fun is at the birthday parties. We use choreographed fight scenes there.”
Stiles has performed in several plays in the area and recently played a female superhero with her fiancé playing a major villain during one of the scenes.
“It was really weird to fight my boyfriend,” said Stiles, who eventually gained the upper hand at that event and defeated the villain.
“The little girls then booed the villain,” she said.
She laughed and said she asked the little girls if the villain could participate in party games. They unanimously screamed with a resounding, “No.”
Strausser said before any party, they do their best to make a costume piece such as a superhero emblem or small prop like ones used during the choreography to give to the birthday child.
Not only do they work to create the character, they add details to set the scene.
To create a portal for one scene, for example, they used a fog machine and lights and had a villainess come through the same portal that the hero did.
Strausser has been running Props and Heroes as a business since he was about 17 years old and has been making and selling screen accurate props in general since he was 15.
When he was a teen, his grandmother taught him to sew. He said he has been doing sewing and costume fabrication for approximately 12 years.
He did not like the costumes available in stores so wanted to make his own.
Strausser started hand sculpting props or soft weapons with craft materials but eventually purchased four 3-D printers to make props for heroes and other characters.
“The first true thing I made was a pistol from a video game,” he said.
One of his first costumes was from a well-known video game.
Strausser said he made it from spray-painted, cut-out poster-board pieces on black long johns. Then, he graduated from poster-board and long johns to sewing cloth and putting together pieces with EVA foam.
He has advanced in technology with the props over the years as well.
“I use Blender, a modeling program, to make the 3-D graphics to print into the props,” Strausser said.
Props and Heroes started doing birthday parties and events about eight years ago and continue to make props and costumes and sell them to others.
“I invented (artificial spider webbing) made out of two different polymers and solvents. I will be able to shoot cobwebs in the air for one particular hero,” he said
For more information on Props and Heroes, go to its Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/PropsandHeroes or its website at https://www.propsandheroes.com/ .
Ron Baxley Jr. is a correspondent for The Augusta Press.
