Today’s kids are so damn spoiled. When October rolls around and they start mulling over the most important decision of the month, “What am I going to be for Halloween?” they have little to worry about given the vast array of professional-looking costume choices they have at their disposal. Heck, these days when October arrives Halloween costume shops pop up for the month (usually in an abandoned Kay Bee Toys, which is normally just a depressing reminder of the state of today’s toy stores – don’t get me started, damnit!). Today’s kids have no idea what Halloween was like 2-3 decades ago when the only choices for costumes consisted of crappy vinyl atrocities, which rarely resembled who they were supposed to represent and fell apart after you ran around in the yard wearing them 3 weeks before Halloween (damn you, Superman costume!) Sure your parents could make a costume for you, but that never worked out very well either. After pouring through countless examples (on work’s dime, of course), I have assembled some of the best examples of these awful costumes. Click to enlarge.
Behold, Jaws! Yep, apparently the Halloween gods figured out a way to milk more money out of the (adult) Jaws sensation of 1975. Adding insult to injury there was no attempt to make a realistic shark head. The lazy bastards lifted the shark image from the poster and then used the same picture for the front of the costume.
Not to be outdone the people who capitalized on the popularity of Jaws to create the 1977 film The Deep, which really had little to do with sharks, plagiarized the Jaws costume idea and created this silly tiger shark costume. Oooh, scary! At least the “jaws” are pointed in the right direction.
“Look gang, I’m a Rubix Cube! Want to come solve me?” Seriously, did they sell even ONE of these costumes?
I don’t know which of these Peanuts costumes look worse (*cough Woodstock cough*). Years ago while looking at a giant stuffed Garfield Octopunk remarked, “You know, the larger they make a cartoon character the less it looks like that cartoon character.” Octo’s wisdom is just as relevant today. How lazy are these costumes? You mean to tell me that they couldn’t even give Charlie Brown his signature zigzag stripe?
Was there a single kid in the 70s who wanted to sport a Penny “Laverne De Fazio” Marshall” costume? Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer, oh fuck it.
So let’s say you were a kid in the early 80s obsessed with videogames. What better way to celebrate your new (addictive) hobby than to dress up as one of your favorite games? Behold, Asteroids! I’m going to destroy your ship, watch out! I bet he was the life of the party after he drank some of the spiked punch.
So gang, what were your worst costumes?
