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Residents of Clemmons West who may have thought they heard a F-14 Tomcat whizzing around the neighborhood collecting Halloween treats last Monday were delighted to see Maverick and Goose stop at their doors.
Maverick, Tom Cruise’s character in the movie “Top Gun,” was actually Liam Bethune, and his dog, Lexi, was Goose, played by Anthony Edwards in the film.
Liam is a sixth-grader at Meadowlawk Middle School who has Down Syndrome.
His father, Brian, said that Liam saw “Top Gun: Maverick,” the sequel to the 1986 smash over the summer “and absolutely loved it.”
“And I’ve probably watched the original over 100 times, so I told my wife that’s what I want him to be for Halloween.”
Bethune said he ordered the flight suit off of Amazon and found an old motorcycle helmet, made some decals on his Cricut machine to put on the helmet.
He had already asked his brother about using the golf cart to go trick-or-treating because his wife is five-months pregnant and his mother had recently had knee surgery.
“That’s when I came up with making the F-14 using my lawn mower trailer,” Bethune said. “I had actually started to use cardboard from work but a coworker told me he had a bunch of wood in a burn pile. So I went over to his house and he had a bunch of plywood. I just started to build off pictures of a F-14 and using stuff that was laying around work. I did buy some lights for the jet engines from the dollar store. I probably have a total of 10 bucks in the plane too. Since I was making the F-14, from original movie, I had to have a Goose. So I found a dog helmet off Amazon for cheap and painted her a Goose helmet to be his copilot.”
Bethune said that that it took him about three days to build the jet and a week or so to complete the work on the helmets.
“The neighbors loved it and he was the talk of the street,” Bethune said. “We had one woman go get her husband that was inside to come outside to just look at the jet. My wife posted on our neighborhood Facebook page thanking neighbors for their kindness towards Liam and for making this a great Halloween.”