Now this is Halloween shopping, 1970s style! Woolworth and Woolco had the costumes, the candy, and even a record to supply the spooky sounds. Complete costumes for $1.83 to $3.99—and somehow those plastic masks could make the Bionic Woman look scarier than the monsters!
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I always get a kick out of those old costumes with the character’s picture printed right on the front. You weren’t simply dressed as Superman—you were wearing an advertisement explaining that you were Superman. There was actually a reason for that: Ben Cooper considered the costume front a wearable billboard, designed to make the character instantly recognizable.
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Those inexpensive costumes took more work than you might think. According to Ira Cooper, whose family ran the company, developing one normally took about nine months. Artists, sculptors, engineers, and fabric workers all had a hand in turning a familiar television or comic-book face into Halloween merchandise.
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And that Sounds to Make You Shiver record wasn’t something created just for the commercial. Pickwick was already promoting it in 1973. Before we could pull up spooky sounds on a phone, we could put a haunted house on the turntable!
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Woolworth’s American stores disappeared in 1997, but commercials like this bring back an entire way of shopping. What was your favorite Halloween costume growing up—and did it come in a box with a plastic mask?
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#Woolworth #Woolco #VintageHalloween #HalloweenNostalgia #BenCooper #1970s #TheRetroSite
Tag: Halloween nostalgia
The New Casper Cartoon Show: The Ending We Remember
If you watched The New Casper Cartoon Show on Saturday mornings, the ending probably brings back just as many memories as the opening.
These are the Casper episodes I’m most familiar with, so seeing the closing again feels like finding an old piece of childhood TV you forgot was still tucked away somewhere. Casper was never the scary kind of ghost. He was gentle, lonely, and always just trying to make a friend.
The show first aired on ABC Saturday mornings in 1963, with new cartoons made for TV along with older Casper shorts. It gave Casper a regular place in the Saturday morning lineup, alongside characters like Wendy the Good Little Witch, The Ghostly Trio, Spooky, and Nightmare the ghost horse.
The ending has that simple old-TV charm. No big production, no loud cliffhanger, just a friendly goodbye from a cartoon that was never trying to be too wild or too scary.
For many of us, this version of Casper is the one that stuck: cereal bowl nearby, TV glowing, and a friendly ghost reminding us that sometimes the nicest character on television was the one everyone else was supposed to be afraid of.
The New Casper Cartoon Show
These are the Casper episodes I’m most familiar with, and it’s good to see them all once again.
The New Casper Cartoon Show first aired on ABC Saturday mornings in 1963, with its original run continuing into early 1964. It included 26 new Casper cartoons made for TV, along with older theatrical cartoons that helped keep Casper on television for years afterward.
Casper had already been around before this show, appearing in theatrical cartoons and Harvey Comics, but this version gave him a regular Saturday morning home. Unlike most ghosts, Casper didn’t want to scare anyone. He just wanted friends, which made him one of the gentler cartoon characters of the era.
The show also featured familiar Harvey characters like Wendy the Good Little Witch, The Ghostly Trio, Spooky, and Nightmare the ghost horse.
Casper would return in later forms too, including Casper and the Angels in the late 1970s and other Harvey cartoon packages that kept him alive for new generations of kids. But for many of us, The New Casper Cartoon Show is the version that feels like Saturday morning: cereal, pajamas, and a friendly ghost who was never too scary.