October 10, 2005:
A few entries back, I expressed my disgust with Toys "R" Us's currently halfhearted Halloween section, and now that I've had the chance to check a few other stores -- including the one closest to my apartment, which I've been going to figuratively since birth -- I can say for a fact that the chain has completely scaled back on its once spooky prominence. It's not my decision to make. If people aren't spending as much money on Halloween schtuff as they used to, or if they've decided to head to more comprehensive costume shops instead, I can't blame TRU for giving us the basics and nothing more. The "playthings industry" has changed immensely since I was a kid, and it's not Geoffrey's fault that I tie so many fond childhood memories to his stores and wish they'd still fill me with bubbly butterflies.
I never went to costume stores as a kid, because as far as I knew, there weren't any. Truth was, there were costume shops, but it was a heck of a lot easier for my mother to drive ten minutes to Toys "R" Us than drive 45 minutes to some wacky store in Secaucus that a fellow member of the PTA told her about. Besides, back then, Toys "R" Us didn't skimp at all on their Halloween section. Or maybe their aisles just seemed a lot bigger to me as an eight-year-old than they do now.
Every Halloween costume of my youth came from Toys "R" Us -- at least, the ones I remember did. The best of the best was my "ALF's Cousin Ralph" costume, I believe from when I was in the third grade. See, I wanted to be ALF. I wanted to be ALF really, really bad. Save for when Batman came out and I grew insanely Joker-obsessed, ALF represents the only year that I was really adamant about what I wore for Halloween. It wasn't that I didn't usually care about my costume, just that, for the most part, I could go into any store and find something worth being. I usually didn't have much of a plan. Whatever struck me as interesting would be covering my face and private parts a few weeks later, and that was that. In the third grade, in the midst of what must be considered a religious worship of Everything ALF, I had to be him. And I didn't want that plastic smock shit, either -- I wanted the real deal. Full body fur suit, thirty dollar mask...I wanted people to confuse me with the real ALF and would not have it any other way.
Problem was, while we were able to find the official fur body suit, we could not find the mask. Considering ALF's popularity at the time, there was reason to suspect that we'd never be able to find the mask. That was my parents' argument, but I wasn't hearing it. We picked up the suit and made several subsequent visits to Toys "R" Us. The mask never turned up. I don't want to get too far removed from the real topic of today's story, so if you want to know how this ALF mess turned out, you'll have to wait until the end of the article. If you jump to the bottom, I'll destroy you.
TRU stores are synonymous with Halloween for me. Every October, I'm there at least fifty dozen times. In the past few years, it's ostensibly been to look for more spooky goods to cover on the site, and yet, almost nothing I've covered for this or previous Halloween Countdowns has come from Toys "R" Us. The reality is this: Some people carve pumpkins to absorb the spirit of the season. I just go to Toys "R" Us.
 
Which brings me to our focus. The images seen in this article come from a Toys "R" Us commercial from 1980, though the actual product section is constructed in such a way to allow the chain to easily cut and paste new items in on different years; indeed, I seem to recall the ad even though I was under a year old in 1980. The decade at large represented a serious boom for TRU, boasting both one of the most successful periods for boys' toys in history and the upstart home video gaming craze. Toys "R" Us plowed through the competition to the point where there was enough excess profits to accommodate pure "branding" ads, where they didn't even promote any actual products. C'mon, you know the song. If you were a kid during roughly the same period of history that I was, chances are good that you too envisioned Heaven as a really long avenue stocked with nothing but McDonald's restaurants and Toys "R" Us stores.
The commercial predates Geoffrey's existence as a live action anthropomorphic mascot, showing him in his ancient animated form, along with one of the first realizations of his family -- the wife, the daughter, the son. The ad plays out like a bad acid trip, and I swear I'm not saying that just for the lack of having anything else to say. I mean it, it's really weird. Charmed by the sight of an animated Toys "R" Us store that kicks it up old school with the circus stripes and the blocky lettering, we quickly enter a world where Halloween roolz and sanity droolz. Example: The cartoon store shown in the logo up top is actually a transformed version of a wolf who vomits witches and skeletons. I ain't kidding ya. It's not that kind of night.
Yeah, so Geoffrey's kids stumble across a giant cat and, doing something that would cause an absolute catastrophe in a related situation within the real animal kingdom, step on its tail. The cat hisses and appears to transform into a wolf, though I really can't be sure because we're dealing with a pretty low framerate in terms of the animation. All I know is, one minute they're stepping on this cat's tail, and the next minute a big wolf is throwing up ghosts and ghouls. Factor in the music, best described as something that would score a Leave It To Beaver sequence where Ward can't find his shaving cream, and we're dealing enough incomprehension to make our heads spin and fall off.
 
After the wolf morphs into a Toys "R" Us store, the family strolls on in. Geoffrey's wearing his old pinstripe suit, which for some reason makes me crave popcorn. They're there to check out the Halloween goods, and instead of illustrating this with a brief clip of the young giraffes perusing a pile of generic ghost masks and gorilla gloves while Mom and Dad make proud faces, they cut to a shot of a dancing skeleton over a plain back background. You know, if I was four-years-old, I would've taken that to mean that anyone who walked inside Toys "R" Us would be met with pitch blackness and dancing skeletons. I'm not so sure this is something that would make me want to go to TRU.
This all leads to a placeholder section -- a spot for Toys "R" Us to promote whatever products need promoting, and if we're talking about Halloween in the `80s, we're probably talking about plastic aprons and masks. I'm pretty sure Ben Cooper invented Halloween.
When I was really young, costumes like the crappy Big Bird outfit up above were the Halloween default. I hadn't matured to the point where I knew how important it was to throw crying hissy fits to get a more expensive and purdy costume. For all I knew, it was either one of the Ben Cooper smock/mask sets, or alternatively, Dracula makeup. Those choices battled it out often during my childhood, but on the years where I just wasn't into being all gothic, there was such an amazingly huge collection of Ben Cooper costumes to choose from. Dozens upon dozens of perfectly recognizable characters from all walks of entertainment; you simply could not think of a character you wanted to be and not find that character available as a Ben Cooper costume. That was sort of the point. Even as kids, we knew the costumes sucked. If you wanted to be Big Bird, it didn't matter if you were a sucky Big Bird. Being Big Bird at all was special enough to override any crap that came with it.
Course, as a child who had three teenage brothers and as a boy who grew up when I did, Big Bird didn't do half as much for me as Yoda did.
Admittedly, I never had a Ben Cooper Yoda costume, and yes, there were a few different versions of the Ben Cooper Yoda costume. But I had plenty of other Ben Cooper Star Wars costumes, from Luke to Vader, and if I'm not mistaken, even a freakin' Gamorrean Guard. I was such a Star Wars nut that getting these costumes in no way represented a fulfillment of my Halloween obligations. I just wanted to be Luke Skywalker. Not just for Halloween -- for everyday until the mask broke in half and I stretched too many holes in the smock to make it worth wearing. You know how some people live by their "power color?" I didn't have a power color as a kid, but I certainly felt like I could kick your ass and take your wife so long as I had a misshapen, plastic Luke Skywalker mask on. And if I was Vader? Shit dude, I'd kill your dog while I was at it.
Ben Cooper costumes typically came in small boxes that only clearly revealed what the masks looked like, keeping the ugly smocks a dark, dirty secret for every kid to get depressed about only after they'd committed to wearing the particular costume on Halloween. This explains why the more elusive Ben Cooper costumes that were displayed "open" on hangers seemed to be purchased far less often. As a child, I was okay with the fact that the smock was going to be pretty ugly. That didn't mean I needed to be reminded of it five minutes before telling Mom to break out her MasterCard.
The commercial closes out by reminding us that "Halloween is Toys 'R' Us," and for a long period of my life, I couldn't have agreed more. Click here to download the ad in all of its splendiferous Windows Media formatted glory, weighing in at a little under 4 MB. Just for the sight of the chain's "old look," it's worth seeing. Just don't yell at me when the surreal, animated transitions drive you batshit crazy.
Oh yeah, ALF's Cousin Ralph. On what would be my last trip to TRU before Halloween, the store was still sold out of full-head ALF masks. We had to think quick. My father gave me a different mask -- another alien, but one that still had brown fur to match the ALF body suit. "ALF's Cousin Ralph" was born. I was in Boy Scouts at the time, and during our big Halloween bash (so big that the parents were invited and it was held at the local church), that awesome costume bought me a ribbon, a chance to prance around on stage with all the other kids who gave a shit about their costumes and, for whatever reason, the reward of a collapsible cup.
I don't want to grow up.
- Matt (10/10/05)
One year ago on the Halloween Countdown:
The 1980s Hallmark Cards Halloween Commercial!
Two years ago on the Halloween Countdown:
Dunkin Donuts' Haunted Munchkins!
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