Boxes Full of Halloween by Todd Rodgers

Kids Halloween costumes these days have amazing Halloween costumes. They look look incredibly accurate, and generally have a price tag that really scares parents! Not long ago though, American Halloween costumes may have been far less accurate a representation of their SOURCE....but they held a hell of a lot of heart for a generation. Todd Rogers os Junk Fed takes us back to a time where the spirit of Halloween itself could stack neatly in a corner at a perfect 90 degrees..

Halloween came in a box when I was growing up. Or at least, most of my Halloween costumes did. The moment the first leaf rusted on the branch, I’d beg my parents to take me to K-Mart, Bradlees, or Zayre so I could pick though the stacks of boxed Halloween costumes. This was very important business for a kid, after all, I needed to select something representative of my persona which could stand out among the sidewalk masses on Halloween night. No easy task considering that all of the other neighborhood kids were also dragging their parents to the same discount department stores and rifling through the same stacks of boxed costumes. No matter what I chose, I was bound to meet my costume doppelgänger on some front porch. This didn’t faze me though. We’d both know who was wearing it best.

The costume selections that got my attention (and eventually my parent’s money) were produced by two rival companies, Ben Cooper, Inc., and Collegeville. There were other costumers on the shelves, including attempts by Halco and Imagineering, but Ben Cooper and Collegeville expertly tapped into what kids wanted by not only offering up the standard creeps and ghouls but by licensing cartoon characters, TV and movie personalities, and even characters from some of our favorite toy lines. If one company didn’t have the license for the latest popular characters, the other surely did. Even still, those without the official license would not be outdone and often provided a knockoff version of the year’s popular character. If you couldn’t find a Ben Cooper Batman, you could certainly go as Collegville’s, The Bat (not to be confused with The Bat from Ben Cooper’s Creature People line). Similarly, if your local K-mart was out of Collegeville’s Gene Simmons from the rock group KISS, you might be able to find a close approximation from Ben Cooper.

Batman vs The Bat

The colorful boxes were about as sturdy as a shirt box and featured a small cellophane viewing window that offering a glimpse at the vacuum formed mask within. The costumes themselves weren’t much sturdier than the boxes they came in, and consisted of a brittle plastic mask, and a rayon or vinyl jumpsuit/smock. More often than not, the smock featured a picture and/or logo of the character it represented rather than the likeness of the character’s body. In effect we were all tiny walking advertisements. We weren’t being Skeletor, Mork, or Wonder Woman; we were just part of their street teams. Of course, wearing the name of your character on your chest spared us the embarrassment of explaining our costume to clueless adults.

Adult: “And who are you supposed to be?”

Child: “Clearly, I’m a Gene Simmons from the rock group KISS (or a close approximation)!”

Gene Simmons vs Green Simmons?

In hindsight, these costumes were mostly disappointing and very temporary. When not pinching or pulling out hairs, the elastic band that held the mask on often broke, the masks cracked, and the smocks tore. Most of this occurred before the big night. From my early days as the miscellaneous Hairy & Scary monster with the itchy rooted hair that wreathed my face, to the many Star Warscharacters I’d dressed as year after year, I loved them all. They were for Halloween what TV dinners were to dinner: Not all that great, but fun and convenient.

Ben Cooper Star Wars Trilogy

I find myself browsing eBay and Etsy for Ben Cooper and Collegeville costumes, not just at Halloween, but all year-long. While I might not have had use for them when I was a kid, I find some of these costumes so alluring, that I fear for the safety of my wallet.

Here are some of my current favorites starting with the very rare Visible Man costume from Collegeville, which features a transparent mask adorned with the human circulatory system. Though it predates him by a decade, it reminds me of 1970s children’s TV personality and peppy health nut,Slim Goodbody.

Collegeville Visible Man costume via morris41

Another from Collegeville is this weird Jaws costume. I say weird, because, the mask and smock make it seem like you are actually dressing as the movie poster rather than the shark. As a Jaws aficionado, I would love this in my collection.

Thanks to Collegeville, you can be a Jaws for Halloween

The Ben Cooper Alien costume from the 1979 movie of the same name is also something to be admired. It features a partially transparent mask of the H.R. Giger designed xenomorph skull-face, and a smock featuring an illustrated side view of the creature in its phallic glory. Somewhat of a bizarre licensing choice, this one hardly seems child-appropriate considering the film’s R rating (though it does come in a child’s small). I imagine it was as popular as the Kenner Alien action figure among parents that year. Perhaps this was Ben Cooper’s way of one-upping Collegeville’s similarly inappropriate Incredible Melting Man costume.

Ben Cooper Alien via mj_var

The Welcome Back Kotter, Gabe Kotter costume from Collegeville is another weirdo, that I absolutely love. Not for the design, but for the pangs I feel for the type of kid I’ve imagined picking it out. Sure, most kids would’ve picked Vinnie Barbarino,  but this kid identified with Mr. Kotter and probably had his candy stolen as a result. Though I bet the brother and sister duos forced by their parents into the Donnie and Marie costumes probably didn’t fare any better.

Gabe Kotter by Collegevile via kentuckymantiques

I’ve always loved the Cylon design from the original Battlestar Galactica. It’s a fusion of Darth Vader and his Stormtroopers into a bulky chrome badass. The Collegeville Cylon costume does a great job of capturing the look with the requisite metallic mask and smock printing. The box itself is also a work of art and features elements of the official Battlestar Galactica promo painting by John Solie, combined with a stunningly awkward illustration of a Cylon.

Collegeville Cylon. By Your Command!

Another interesting licensing choice is the Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger costume by Collegeville. Released in 1987, toward the tail end of the boxed costume era, this one takes the prize for most inappropriate. What parent wouldn’t want their kid dressing as a charred child molester on Halloween? Nonetheless, it speaks to the rampant popularity of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies in 1987. I’m surprised Ben Cooper didn’t try to outdo this one with a Blue Velvet, Frank Booth costume complete with gas mask. What makes this costume truly special is that the box cites it as flame retardant, a common practice for boxed costumes, but ironic in this case.

Flame retardant?

Limited space, and high prices make it easier for me to enjoy these costumes from afar. Still, I long for a definitive archival book that documents them all. The colorful masks, delightfully lurid smock illustrations, and packaging design transcend their original purpose and stand as works of art. They also serve as tiny cellophane viewing windows into eras gone by. Certainly, this is worthy of a coffee-table book at the very least. The existence of such a book might sate my urge to buy every costume I find.

The trick-or-treater Gotham needs

Recommended reading for fellow vintage boxed costume junkies:

Plaid Stallions continues a terrific service of posting old Ben Cooper, Inc. and Collegeville catalog scans.

Terrence Towles Canote outlines the History of Ben Cooper, Inc. and its competitors on his blog, A Shroud of Thoughts.

In an article for Slate, Charlie Moss writes about How Ben Cooper Changed Halloween Forever.

Todd Rogers is the founder of Junk Fed. Visit them on social media @JunkFed on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Originally published on Junk Fed October 20, 2013

In 1987, Every Day Was Halloween by Todd Rodgers

The horror genre has had many peaks and valley, but when it comes to the gore and slasher genres, 1987 is about as prime a year as there can be. Todd Rogers of Junk Fed was at that perfect,formative, age at the time, and takes us back to a time to the Halloween of dreams. Find out how he developed a latex allergy, used to "worship" the dead and watched Last House on the Left with his grandmother...


By the 8th grade my horror movie immersion was at its zenith. I had a subscription to Fangoria and would supplement the time in-between issues with copies of Gorezone, among others. I had amassed an impressive mask collection from Halloweens past, my favorite of which was the full head and shoulders rotted skull mask that I had worn the year I went as Big Ben from the movie House. Freddy Krueger and Iron Maiden posters decorated the walls of my bedroom (I wasn't even an Iron Maiden fan, I just loved Eddie, the band's undead mascot), a hockey mask hung from my bedpost, and a rubber severed hand gripped the bedroom doorknob. When I wasn’t wearing my Freddy Krueger sweater, I sported a Nightmare on Elm Street 3 T-Shirt or one that featured a glow-in-the-dark rib cage. I had just moved to Connecticut with my mom after having lived with dad for a few years in Massachusetts. My mother was genuinely worried.

1980s horror movie magazines

I’ve always had an appreciation for monsters and the macabre but in my single digit years I'd get my fix from more innocuous things like the classics shown on The Creature Double Feature, Scooby-Doo, or The Munsters. I didn’t miss the opportunity to tune in to the 3D broadcasts of Gorilla at Large and Creature from the Black Lagoon. But when it came to the more realistic blood and guts kind of stuff, I was terrified. One Halloween, an older next door neighbor came up to our apartment to show off his Halloween makeup. Trying to spare me grief, my friend Aaron bounded past him up the stairs calling, "it's only makeup, it's only makeup!"It looked like one of his eyes had melted into a bloody knot of flesh down one side of his face. Terrified, I broke into tears.

Despite the risk of running into something terrifying, I adored Halloween. I couldn’t wait for late September, when the back to school hoopla was stricken from department store shelves and replaced with Halloween provisions. In my neighborhood, most of the Halloween shopping was done at the local K-Mart, where an entire oasis dedicated to all things spooky had sprung up overnight. The isles were stocked with die cut cardboard decorations like witches, arched black cats, full-sized poseable skeletons and Frankenstein's Monsters, or the strangely textured plastic popcorn decorations which looked to me like crayons melted into the image of jack-o-lanterns, skulls and ghosts. There, I'd procure the obligatory set of glow-in-the-dark fangs and a tube of fake blood gel by Imagineering. Though I had no intention of going as a Dracula, these items served as party favors to celebrate the coming of Halloween.

Vampire Kit by Imagineering

Trick or treating at the end of the 1970s into the early 1980s meant that I'd be dressed in a cheap, store-bought costume that featured a vacuum formed mask and vinyl jumpsuit emblazoned with a bright illustration and/or logo depicting the very character you were supposed to be dressed as. These costumes, manufactured by either the Ben Cooper or Collegeville companies, were the standard throughout my tenure of trick-or-treating. I'd carefully select my costume from a stack of options sold in flimsy colorful boxes with cellophane windows from which eyeless faces peered creepily. The boxes featured a blank side panel stamped with the character name and costume size, and were stocked with these panels facing out making the costume selection process like a fun version of shoe shopping.

Ben Cooper Stormtrooper costume via rebelscum.com

Not surprisingly, I tended to gravitate toward the Star Wars costumes, selecting one that would complement the one my best friend Aaron would be wearing. When, for two years in a row, he dressed as Darth Vader, I accompanied him as a Stormtrooper and then as Boba Fett. Aaron's mother and grandmother ran a Halloween costume creation and rental business out of the basement of our shared three family house, so on a couple of occasions our costumes benefited from their combined talents. One year, Aaron's vinyl Darth Vader smock was replaced with a more theatrically accurate custom job, and a few years later my Yoda costume featured cloth robes, with a built-in hunched back. With our chaperones on the sidewalk keeping a lookout for Halloween baddies, we'd stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the neighborhood kids ringing door bells and holding out our plastic jack-o-lantern buckets collecting treats that kept our dentists in business. I loved kicking though the leaves in our neighborhood on those brisk nights, face sweating under the cheap plastic mask, peering out at the other kids in their similar getups. Inevitably, two kids would pass and crane their heads to look at each other in compensation for the obliterated peripheral vision realizing that they had made identical costume choices. We were surreal in our motionless faces going door to door as miniature members of Galactic Empire, Batmen with chiseled man-chins, Strawberry Shortcakes, Smurfs, Hazzard County cousins, perma-smiling Wonder Women, or Hairy & Scary Draculas and She-Hulks with rooted curly hair. We'd press our masks tighter to our faces, allowing a clearer view through the eye-holes, and try our best not to trip on a porch step or curb and risk tearing our flimsy plastic smocks. It was unsafe, a little spooky, and inherently thrilling.

Ben Cooper Hairy & Scary Dracula mask

In the presence of my father, my fortitude was tested and primed regularly. On many occasions he'd drag me to the drive-in to see movies like Dawn of the Dead, Mother's Day, Cujo, and Christine. Also, my dad was a moth drawn to The Movie Loft on TV-38 when it aired something like The Shining or The Exorcist. I viewed all of these movies from under a blanket, or sleeping bag, covering my face when the terror was too much to bear, and all before the age of ten. My dad would explain that the blood and viscera were only special effects, but this never alleviated my fear, nor did it deter him from exposing me to such images. These movies were terror-fuel for my active imagination but were benign compared to the horror my father experienced during his draft in Vietnam, most of which replaced typical "when I was your age" mythology. For him, the horror and gore media consumption was a way to master and control his trauma. Unfortunately, being a kid, I wasn’t as well versed in compartmentalizing. I masterfully fashioned monsters and maniacs out of the shadows in my bedroom which were marginally repelled by a mandatory. In addition I'd cocoon myself under the covers to get any sleeping done. Understanding that horror would be a foundation of my relationship with my father, combined with my Y chromosome, I ultimately relented to and relished in the macabre in a sort of if you can't beat 'em, join 'em way. In the fifth grade, I acquired a book called Make-Up Monsters by Marcia Lynn Cox. It offered step-by-step instructions on how to create make-up effects for an assortment of monsters. Along with standards like Count Dracula, The Mummy and the Wolfman, it featured slightly more grotesque tutorials for things like Reptile Man, who looked like a hideous Kermit the Frog, and Dripping Face, whose face was...well, dripping. I tried out many of the books' tutorials, and did achieve some success with the ones that called for supplies within my grasp. However, when it came to creating the werewolf-which called for Dr. Scholl's Lamb's Wool for the fur and the wax that comes on the outside of cheese wheels for the teeth-I was out of luck. Mine wasn’t a cheese wheel family, and apparently lamb's wool wasn’t in high demand in my neighborhood. Unable to find the makeup supplies, I settled for my first rubber mask, a Wolfman, effectively graduating from my Ben Cooper Days.

Make-Up Monsters by Marcia Lynn Cox

Make-Up Monsters served as a gateway to magazines like Cinemagic, Starlog, and Fangoria, which offered readers a behind the scenes peek at movie magic including the very special effects that had frightened me not long before. Armed with insider knowledge on how it all worked, I became obsessed with horror movies, the gorier the better. This revelation coincided with my family's introduction to the VCR. My dad and I would frequent the local video store with a special focus on the horror section. If it was in the horror section we rented it. Unfortunately, this meant that we'd sit through a lot of stinkers, and certainly my adolescence would have been just fine had I gone without viewing I Spit on Your Grave. In the same room as my father. And my grandmother. In the 8th grade, my art class converted the studio portion of the art room into a haunted House. We created a maze through the studio by duct taping refrigerator boxes together and painting them black. We built a tiny graveyard in the corner by the kiln and painted skeletons, ghosts, and dismembered bodies on the walls in white paint that would glow when lit with black lights. I loaned my mask collection to the effort and created a generous amount of fake blood with corn syrup and food coloring. Our cast of creeps included witches, a werewolf, Jason Voorhees, a grim reaper, Norman Bates and Marion Crane. I made a Leatherface costume for myself by hand sewing a mask out of denim that I painted and shined with shoe polish to give it a leathery look. Prop chainsaws weren’t easy to come by in 1987 so I was resigned to wielding a plastic axe. For the week of Halloween, the younger classes from the school as well as students from a couple of neighboring schools would make their way through our haunted house as we tried our best to terrify them. Here, my father's questionable decision to overexpose me to horror movies at a young age served me well. Unfortunately it didn't have many other practical uses other than a few interesting conversations with a shrink.

Posing in our haunted house costumes, 1987

A video of our haunted house exists. It's a dress rehearsal shot with all of the lights on but it captures the effort that we all put into it. I find my commitment to the performance and pre-pubescent squeal of my voice embarrassing; nearly impossible for me to watch. Nonetheless, I'm glad that it exists. It's a time capsule into one of my favorite Halloweens of all time.

I entertained the idea of moving to California after high school to go special effects school and I even went as far as ordering brochures from schools advertised in Fangoria. I imagined myself as the next Rick Baker, Tom Savini, or Kevin Yagher. Around this time, my mother went from being a lapsed catholic to born again Christian. Her concerns about my fascination with the macabre were rendered as proof that she needed to save my soul and I was forced to take down my posters, and get rid of my masks and props. I packed them up and kept them at my dad's house, where my horror mania was born. Years later, my mother forced me to take down my Jim Morrison posters in a similar effort to keep me out of the Devil's hands. Her concern was that I was worshipping the dead. The Doors are one of my favorite bands, but I can't say that my fandom ever reached worship status. Not in the way a person might worship Jesus Christ, who happens to be a dead guy. Eventually, my horror mania faded. Instead of makeup effects, I opted to study art at a local college. My interests broadened and I felt that most of the horror movies released after the 80s paled in comparison to those that had come before. This is not to say that I don't love a good horror movie, when a good one comes along that is. Most modern offerings suffer from hyper-slick production, numbingly predictable plots, and inflated budgets yet neglect to tap organic fear that was so present in the iconic movies of the 70s and 80s. Still, I celebrated Halloween with zeal, planning my costumes at the close of summer. My last big hurrah was Nosferatu costume that involved teeth and nails that made eating and bathroom usage very difficult. You try unzipping your fly with Lee Press On Nails.

Nosferatu hanging with the Grim Reaper, 1997

It's probably for the best that I started packing away all of my horror business with the rest of the Halloween decorations every year. While I still disagree with my mother regarding the state of my soul, my fanaticism was becoming an eccentricity akin to people who wearing Christmas sweaters all year round. It's mostly harmless but a little bit weird. Also, I’ve developed a bit of a latex allergy. Just touching a rubber mask makes my lips go numb. I'm told that this is the beginning stages of anaphylaxis, and is likely attributable to repeated exposure to latex. Too much of a good thing I suppose. I haven't really put much effort into Halloween lately. But what I would give for an adult sized Ben Cooper costume, and a neighborhood that welcomed a costumed man in his forties begging for candy.

Todd Rogers is the founder of Junk Fed. Visit them on social media @JunkFed on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Originally published on Junk Fed October 20, 2013

CCD Live From 2015 NYCC - JunkFed...

They say you can't pick your family... and that is true. But it is also true about your booth neighbors at NYCC. You book your booth and you really have no choice on who you are going to get stuck with next to you for 4 days. This being CCD's first NYCC show as a vendor had us worried... but boy did we luck out! We got stuck next to (or rather he got stuck next to us) the cool as fuck Todd Rodgers, the creator of the custom/bootleg toy line Junk Fed! This guys products are top notch, but his nostalgia level is on 1000% all the time in all of his work. In between selling cool ass toys, prints and even coloring books (I love this guys) Todd took a minute to chat us up. You can see the video after the jump, and alos check out Todd in our 2015 NYCC Recap Movie by clicking here!