For this Halloween, I thought I'd complain about the costumes available when I was a kid. Pre-made Halloween costumes from the seventies and eighties were crap. For a start, they were just a cheap plastic mask, and a sort of tunic body covering that was obviously just a colourful garbage bag.
But the thing that bugged me most about these things is their complete failure at being costumes. There'd be, say, a Bugs Bunny costume with a Bugs Bunny mask, but then the plastic garment would have a picture of Bugs Bunny on it, possibly with the words, "Bugs Bunny" on it. For one thing, it's a bad costume if you have to tell everyone what you are. But more to the point, Bugs Bunny doesn't have a picture of himself on his chest. So you aren't dressing up as Bugs Bunny so much as you're dressing up as an obsessed fan of Bugs Bunny, which is no fun.
Even to my developing mind which was still figuring the way the universe works, I could tell something was wrong with this arrangement. I couldn't really articulate it, because it's kind of an existential mobius strip: things don't usually have pictures of themselves on themselves. So I just had to accept this and not criticize my classmates when they dressed up as Darth Vaders with pictures of Darth Vaders on their chests.
Since then, I've found that others had the same problem with these costumes. Apparently they were like Scrappy-Doo: we all hated it, but didn't say anything at the time. Anyway, I bring this up because I'm amazed at how far costumes have come. Even pretty cheap Value Village costumes are much better than those old plastic monstrosities, and probably cost the same, adjusted for inflation. And they at least take a stab at looking like things, not referring to them. So that's something kids today can take pleasure in: better Halloween costumes, and better cartoons.
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