For this Halloween edition of Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture, I wanted to do something really frightening. I’m Jason Toon, and welcome to my nightmare…
It happened at Ben Franklin. I was a kid during those years when the old five-and-dime stores were transitioning to bargain-bin dumping grounds before vanishing completely. One day, a huge pile of overstock Halloween costumes caught my eye, stacked in their gaudy Ben Cooper boxes. But on inspection, at least half of them were Father Murphy, the title character of a vaguely Christian NBC drama set during frontier days. As an actual child, I realized that grownups don’t always know everything, because what child would ever want to dress up like Father Murphy?
It must have been unsettling to have your actual human face turned into one of those cheap plastic masks with the scratchy eyeholes and the eternally stuffy atmosphere. It must have been extra unsettling when the mask looks like your empty-souled android doppelgänger. Here are a dozen costumes from the heyday of Halloween plastic, rated for how they capture the look and the vibe of their flesh-and-blood inspirations, and how effectively they curdle one’s blood.
The Beatles
The resemblance: When the Beatles first hit America, all we could see was their moptops, matching suits, and toothy grins. So they were often caricatured as looking identical to each other. These masks take some care to make them each Beatle look distinctive: angular George, sad-eyed Ringo, hawk-nosed John, baby-faced Paul. Given that the masks are also terrifying sleep paralysis demons, they could’ve been worse.
The essence: Not even in their most lysergically addled fantasias would any Beatle be caught dead in that suit: rainbow pinstripes with blue sleeves and red clown buttons, topped with a gigantic Beatles badge. If they’d actually dressed like that, they’d’ve been lucky to make it past “Love Me Do”.
Fear factor: 7/10 screams. They could just as easily be opening their mouths to chomp on your jugular as to sing “yeah yeah yeah”.
Melissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls
The resemblance: As if the designer had never seen the show, and someone who had seen it once on a black-and-white TV described the Laura character over a staticky trans-Atlantic phone connection. No wonder Gilbert described herself as “horrified” by the costume, wondering “Wow, could Lou Ferrigno be my birth father?”
The essence: Plucky tomboy Laura is entirely absent from this bulky, near-manic visage. Nothing, but nothing on the rustic Little House on the Prairie ever shone with the radioactive glow of those flowers. Was there any quality control at these companies? Or had licensees in the ‘70s not yet become notoriously finicky about how their properties were portrayed?
Fear factor: 9/10 screams, 10/10 if you’re in a cornfield at the time.
Sorrell Booke as Boss Hogg
The resemblance: Sorrel Booke was an acting prodigy who enrolled in Columbia University at 16, and earned a Master’s from the Yale School of Drama. He was fluent in five languages and sat in as guest conductor for his hometown Buffalo Philharmonic. So good for him that he found a gig that could feather his nest in Boss Hogg. Bad for him that the monstrosity on the left is actually an identifiable representation.
The essence: Again, if any character would wear his own portrait on his chest, it’s the cornpone Caesar of Hazzard County. And the white suit is recognizably his, even with a gratuitously blue bowtie.
Fear factor: 8/10 screams. He’d know where to hide the body.
Henry Winkler as The Fonz
The resemblance: The mask has the Winkler nose, the sideburns, the Seventies-Fifties hairstyle (if a few shades too dark). But why the long face?
The essence: This could have been so easy. Black leather jacket over a white t-shirt, boom, you got the Fonz. Instead we get a sleeveless smock with a picture of a guy wearing a leather jacket on it. His catchphrase is “Ayyy!” There’s no H! And the very idea of the Fonz wearing a button that says “Happy Days” makes me wonder if the costume designer was playing a game called “Give the Coolest Character on TV the Most Uncool Costume Imaginable”.
Fear factor: 3/10 screams. I’ve been to enough rockabilly shows that I’m desensitized.
Gavin MacLeod as Captain Stubing
The resemblance: When you put a fake face onto a real face, the fake face isn’t going to have normal human proportions. The dimensional ratios will be off. Even by those standards, the exaggerated chin, mouth, and nose of this mask should’ve had Gavin MacLeod suing for defamation.
The essence: Does The Love Boat‘s captain even have an essence? The Indian chief in the test pattern had more depth than this guy. I have to admit the fixed grin and bland features do a decent job of capturing Captain Stubing’s essential emptiness.
Fear factor: 6/10 screams, more for the existential implications. Like an A24 horror movie.
Farrah Fawcett
The resemblance: Is any single detail accurate here? I’m not expecting fine art, or even Madame Tussaud’s, but jeez. I’m surprised they got the number of eyes right. It looks more like the layabout male heir of a lesser 17th century noble family than the bombshell of a million bedroom walls. I posit that this mask is the reason Fawcett vanished from the public eye for several years, emerging only when someone finally reassured her that no, she doesn’t really look like that.
The essence: Of course a mass-produced mask is constrained to a certain width. Sculpting that famous hair in molded plastic would be impossible. But I’m certain any little girl’s mom could have gotten more Farrahesque results in five minutes with a curling iron, blowdryer, and hairspray. This mask’s orangey face-curtains aren’t cutting it. And if you can’t get the hair right, you can’t get Farrah Fawcett right.
Fear factor: 8/10 screams. Anybody who’d walk around with that hair is living by a different morality.
Gabe Kaplan and John Travolta as Gabe Kotter and Vinny Barbarino
The resemblance: Welcome Back Kotter‘s title character fares better than its breakout star. Mr. Kotter’s mustache and white-guy Afro do a lot of heavy lifting, so all the mask has to do is stick with those. As for Barbarino, for all the things his mask exaggerates, it minimizes Travolta’s trademark toothy smile, making it generically unrecognizable. But hey, in a pinch, the Barbarino mask could serve as one of the other two Angels in a group costume with Farrah.
The essence: As with the Fonz, the “starburst character t-shirt” approach kills the vibe. Mr. Kotter wore some gaudy suits, but nothing this ugly.
Fear factor: 4/10 screams, although the Kotter mask could push it as high as 6/10 under the right circumstances.
Paul Reubens as Pee-Wee Herman
The resemblance: The head shape isn’t right. The eyebrows are up too high.The bottom lip’s too big and the chin’s too pointy. And yet, it’s immediately recognizable as Pee-Wee Herman. Because it nails…
The essence: Paul Reubens played Pee-Wee at a cartoon pitch, so a stylized, cartoony mask makes perfect sense. And not just cartoony in a general sense, but in a way that fits his particular aesthetic. Given Reubens’s well-documented exacting standards, and his kitsch-collector expertise, I bet he was personally involved in approving it - something that almost certainly can’t be said for anyone else on this list. Maybe by the late ‘80s, the costume industry was figuring out how to do it right…
Fear factor: 1/10 screams or 10/10 screams, depending on the context. Nothing in between.
Chuck Norris
The resemblance: Nope, late ‘80s costumes were still terrible. With the caveat that this is specifically based on a cartoon version of Chuck, from his short-lived TV show Karate Kommandos, this disquieting mask has bulges and folds in all the wrong places.
The essence: Feels more like someone who’d clear out a city bus with an agitated demonstration of his “karate” moves than a former world karate champion.
Fear factor: 10/10 screams, especially if there’s nobody else out on the street.
Merlin Olsen as Father Murphy
The resemblance: I had to include the costume that took my innocence back in 1982. It’s as upsetting as I remember. I thought Father Murphy was a Little House spin-off; not actually true, but it was produced by Michael Landon, starred Little House alum and NFL Hall of Famer Merlin Olsen, and had the same gently rustic, family-friendly vibe. The mask, on the other hand, looks like a guy who’d get into a knife fight with the Chuck Norris mask in the parking lot of a White Castle. That goes double for the creepy drawing on the shirt. TRIGGER WARNING: Not even the dog escapes. That tiny portrait of it looks like it was adopted from the kennel of Dr. Caligari.
The essence: Father Murphy was a rogue with a heart of gold, delivering folksy pioneer homilies every 46 minutes. This getup is way scarier than the fearsome Olsen was on the football field. And to think, it could have easily been avoided by not making this costume nobody asked for in the first place.
Fear factor: 10/10 screams. In fact, I just realized the loud noise I’m hearing is me screaming, right now.
All right, bad Halloween costume role call! In fifth grade I was an IRS agent, complete with a (clip-on) tie and a briefcase. In sixth grade I had the “generic Halloween costume” shirt. How about you, any childhood Halloween costumes you were particularly proud of or now embarrassed by? Let’s hear ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
Remember, there’s nothing in the dark of these previous Shoddy Goods stories that’s not there in the light:
damn either of those Kotter torso designs would make a sick t-shirt