Halloween Costumes Enter The Age of Television

So today for your Monday Morning Funny, we continue with the parade of bad Ben Cooper kiddie Halloween costumes.

When some of us were kids, sitting around our newfangled COLOR TV sets, we were treated to a cornucopia of family programming such as The Brady Bunch, Gillian’s Island, Adam-12, Emergency and Dragnet. There was also Love American Style (truer than the red, white and blue), Laugh-In and Happy Days. Here are a few blasts from the past –

Suicide may be painless but the changes this costume brings are too many to count but I’ll give it a go. The drawn on lapels, the painted on buttons and belt, the standard name across your chest so people know for sure who you are and the slick plastic jumpsuit. The mask is also terrifying in a dead corpse way and doesn’t convey the hard-working, army doctor feel.

What is wrong with just going to the army/navy store, buying some Army greens and putting a red cross on them? OR if you really want that M*A*S*H feel, pair those with a bathrobe, cowboy hat and a martini glass for that dashing Hawkeye Pierce look.

Moving on to the land of WTF, I give you The Love Boat, Exciting and New! Oh yes, come aboard, we’ve been expecting you!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you – Captain Stubing! The happiest Captain ever to sail the Caribbean with a bunch of horny and angst filled passengers. Oh and that wacky crew! Who could forget perky Julie the Cruise Director, Issac the wise-cracking, hip bartender (Look at how progressive we are! We have a black bartender to liven up our white crew! It’s almost like The Mod Squad!), Doc the ship’s doctor who we know is smart because he wears glasses and of course Gopher who grew up to be a Congressman!

The thing that’s most terrifying about this costume, aside from the slightly creepy pedophile Uncle mask is the jumpsuit itself. A life saver? Really? You put a giant, round life-saver on the front of this costume with a big picture of the whole cast? I suppose since the creepy mask has the hat on, people will be able to pick your character out of the handy line-up you’ve provided them. GAK!!!

Again, white pants, white shirt, white sailing hat, black shoes – you are done. What is so hard?

Next time? A potpourri of horror from films, to music groups to puzzles. Yeah, the strangeness continues.

Ben Cooper Meets Aquaman

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to Aquaman, founding member of the Justice League and the Prince of Atlantis. He can swim, breathe underwater, communicate telepathically with fish and is the one member of the Justice League that I would bet bats for the other team.

I admit I had a bit of a crush on Aquaman when I was seven. He had that swoopy hair, the tight outfit and he hung out with dolphins. Chicks dig dolphins. Just sayin’. Now my childhood fantasies of a seashell marriage under the sea with an alleged bi-sexual, trans-species hunk has been destroyed with this cheap and cheezy costume. Just as a note for the distant future to all the little boys out there. You will NOT get laid in this outfit. It isn’t chick bait, it’s just creepy.

As creepy as this little kid with his Frankenstein’s Monster meets the creepy Stephen King Clown from It costume. Creepy Frankenstein clown – that’s what the picture on his chest says to me! “Yeah F-you Ben Cooper and your freaky lame costumes. I will never get laid in the future because of you and your candy sucks!”

The Horror of Halloween Costumes Past – Pt 1.

Happy Samhain to everyone! That’s Happy Halloween to any of you muggles or non-Celtic folk out in cyberspace. The Celtic New Year is here, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is thin. As evidence of this, I bring you the horrors of bad kid costumes past. Not only today but for every Monday through the month of November.

You see dear readers, each November I am entombed in writing solitude, banging out another first draft of a new novel. I know I have been remiss in the writing department this past month due to moving, work and acting commitments. So I am writing all of my November blogs in the last week of October and putting them on auto-post (yay for technology) so I don’t let you all down again.

So today for your Monday Morning funny – Halloween kid costumes. Personally I was tired of haranguing everyone again about “sexy” costumes for females that have become standard fare nowadays for anyone 12 years of age and up.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was Ben Cooper. No, not the western actor from Bonanza, but the company that made those plastic jumpsuit costumes for kids. You probably wore one of these if (a) you grew up in the 50’s, 60’s or 70’s, (b) your parents had some cash to spend but no creativity or (c) they shoplifted from K-Mart. These costumes usually consisted of a plastic mask that had two eyes holes and a hole in the mouth that always made the mask look like some demented sex doll and a plastic “coverall-style” costume.

The costume itself was a jumpsuit that tied in the back. Nine times out of ten it didn’t reflect the physical outfit of the character. Instead it usually featured a picture of the character with their name written in large letters for good measure. Case in point – the She-Hulk:

Hey, I had no idea Bruce Banner aka “The Hulk” had a girl friend, let alone that she was a green gal with bad Howard Stern hair. However you can see where the front of this costume just has a slightly better looking picture of the character on it and lists the character name. I suppose just painting yourself green and wearing ripped clothes was just too hard.

In this Spock (from Star Trek) costume, I see trends even more horrifying.

Not only do you have a picture of Captain Kirk and a couple other cast members in the upper shoulder of the costume (neither of which is Spock by the way) but the colors are garish. To add insult to injury, they are from the first Star Trek movie. The one we never speak of – Star Trek The Motion Picture. It was so awful I try to erase it from my memory just like Godfather 3 or American Pie: Band Camp 5. To me, The Wrath of Khan was the first Star Trek movie. I really don’t want to be reminded of the original movie with its shallow and lame Veeger plot. If you have no idea what I am talking about, read the Wikipedia cliff notes.

This suit not only has the Starship Enterprise smack dab on Spocks chest but there is some kind of eclipse/corona effect coming from his crotchal area. This really creeps me out especially since this costume is designed to be worn on a little kid.

Shudder. Next Monday – Ben Cooper takes on the world of comic books and loses.