Lefty Limbo

With Halloween around the corner, I’ve thought about what I want to dress up as. But with all my energy and time funneled into my mini-me, dressing up this year is simply out of the question.

Meanwhile, I have had some time to reflect on how it used to be going Trick-or-Treating back in the ’70s and ’80s when I was a kid. Back then, unless a kid was totally imaginative and original, they’d end up with a store-bought 2-piece costume which consisted of a plastic face mask (held in place by an elastic string) and a rubbery “smock” which wrapped around the body like an apron, tied in the back with a drawstring.

Plaid Stallions has always regaled me with the best pop-culture snapshots of the ’70s and ’80s, and in the Halloween costume department, they’ve struck gold once again with the 1981 Collegeville Costumes Catalog.

Man! What I would’ve done to be a caped Kraken (at left, bottom right costume) from Clash of the Titans, one of my favorite movies that year! Geez.

Yes, costumes have come a far way in both quality (and price) since then. Kids these days are treated to some great costumes which are both comfortable and realistic. Back in the day, that “smock-n-mask” combo was pretty much the standard, and the best costumes were usually the ones depicting the most popular characters of the time.

So what about the not-so-popular characters? Retrocrush’s Worst Halloween Costumes Of All Time has perhaps the best sampling I’ve seen of vintage costumes that make me say WTF(!) Funny thing is, they’re so classically bad that if one was to wear them now, they’d be a hit. C’mon, who wouldn’t want to be Asteroid for Halloween, huh? =)

You can blame the movies and Kenner© toys for my childhood Star Wars obsession, but it was all my dad’s fault for getting me into WWII military aircraft, specifically the American B-17 Flying Fortress, B-24 Liberator, and the B-25 Mitchell. He’s a huge WWII buff, and as early as 5–6 years old he already had me watching such wartime classic films as The Longest Day, Bridge On The River Kwai, Tobruk and countless others, which he swore were the best films ever made.

Anyways, here’s some more true gems that I’ve scanned from That ’70s Box, whose page I may as well turn into a blog of its own, since I have so many papers left to scan. Click on either picture for larger images and more info. Unfortunately, neither of them have a date written on them, so I can only guess, judging by the detail, that they were probably done 1978–’79, which was around the time that my dad got me this big, beautifully illustrated coffee table book on American bombers of WWII. Ugh, I wish I could remember which book it was. Nevertheless, that book totally inspired me to take my own fantasy flights on paper.

Once again, thanks to my Mom working as a librarian at UCLA, I had more than enough paper to draw on in my childhood. The drawing below was done on one huge piece of paper which I had to scan in 4 sections and piece together. I labeled it as a 11×17 on Flickr but it’s actually bigger than that.

Enjoy!