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My Best Halloween Costume Ever.

It's raining. I stayed home from work today, "sick," and aside from catching up on zzzz, did some mindless web browsing that somehow landed me on Amazon. After lamenting the end of Amazon's long partnership with Toys 'R' Us, I found myself checking my Amazon account information, which makes little sense since I haven't ordered anything from there in months. Interestingly enough, they've got this section that lets you review every order you've ever placed with them, and I found myself trying to connect the dots of my itemized orders from as far back as early 2000. Lots of fun. I found all of these Christmas presents purchased for nieces and nephews, not to mention several attempts on my behalf to rape the system and cash in on Amazon's clearance sales. Twenty Emperor Palpatine figures, scored for 99 cents each! A dozen Furby Babies...5 bucks each!

There were also remnants of obsessions (mostly) past. I don't know what intentions I had for Charmander earrings, nor do I remember ever receiving them, but there they were, all pewter and now forever "out of stock." Give it a shot if you've spent the better part of the Internet age ordering from Amazon; this section is a nice trip down Remembering Things Street.

Tonight's Halloween Countdown entry details the story of my greatest Halloween costume. It's a tale I've mentioned in small bits during previous articles, but this is the whole disjointed shebang.

That article seems very conducive to a blog survey about your best Halloween costume, but I think we've done that like sixty times already. So just use the comments space to talk about your past Halloween costume stories in general. Best, worst, mild, whatever.

Posted by Matt on 10/17/2006. E-mail me!



Discussion Thread: 90 comments

My best halloween costumer had have in the 1st or 2nd grade when i went as Mario (complete with tail and ears). I had the overals, hat, painted on mustache, everything. My little borther even went as Luigi. It was infact quite possibly the best costume ever. The only annoying part was that the tail made sitting kind of difficult.

Chestnuts roasted by y2kdread @ 10/18/2006 2:36 AM

Nice to see Ralph get his due after hearing so much about him. All of the old articles featured at the bottom are especially good too.
I’ve mentioned all my costumes in old threads…Goodwill prom dress + Karo syrup = Carrie was a favorite. I have to find something for the office party (we’re doing it the Friday before :/) that strikes that perfect balance of dressed up enough to be in costume but not so much that it looks like you’re trying too hard, which is difficult if not impossible.

Chestnuts roasted by squee4242 @ 10/18/2006 2:41 AM

My plastic half-bag, half-mask I had in elementary school was Robocop. Also, for some reason I could almost swear that I had a Snow White one too, but that doesnt make any sense. Last year’s Scorpion to my roommate’s Sub Zero was pretty cool too. This year I think I’m going with Ernest P. Worrell, so when kids come to trick or treat, they can have no idea who I am supposed to be.

Chestnuts roasted by Tommy @ 10/18/2006 2:55 AM

I agree, this was a really cute article.

Sadly when I was a little kid I always wore dimestore affairs. I was some weird stuff though, like the green M&M.

Chestnuts roasted by lala @ 10/18/2006 5:02 AM

Great article. Definitely brought back memories of what it was like to be a kid as anything else on this site… very poignant. And I mean that. Hopefully I spelled it right as well.

Chestnuts roasted by mike f. @ 10/18/2006 7:48 AM

Think I’ve only ever once dressed up for Halloween. Pathetic as it was, I went in a Scream mask like everyone else that year. Nearly suffocated in it, too. But! But! It wasn’t just the mask, no. I’d managed to get hold of a cape, a big rubber axe, annoying black claws, and two tubes of fake blood, one of which I still have to this day. So that was both my best and worst attempt.

However, there was another time years earlier, extraordinarily similar to Matt’s.. It was a generic ‘fancy dress’ deal, since we don’t really celebrate Halloween here. Rather innovatively, I grabbed a hat and a big ball of cotton wool and called myself a ‘train-driving hare’. Got to parade on stage and all. Only I screwed up and went back on stage after everyone else had climbed down, causing me lifelong embarassment, deep mental scarring and a fear of combining cotton wool with stages that lasts to this day.

The intermission pictures were great. Wish I had a collapsable cup.

Chestnuts roasted by onslaught86 @ 10/18/2006 8:00 AM

I loved old school TRU, mostly because of the toys, but also because I shared the same name as it’s spokes person. I was in my local TRU a few weeks ago and I noticed they were rearranging the store. It look like they were going back to the old school aisle. I was excited.

My favorite costume would have to be…I think beetlejuice. My dad loved halloween and he always went all out getting us costumed upped.

Chestnuts roasted by Geoffinsanity @ 10/18/2006 8:22 AM

Most of my costumes in elementary were super duper last minute. I was usually a ghost in a flowered sheet, or a hobo, or a “punk rocker”. When I was in sixth grade, my last year of trick-or-treating, me and my friends got to go out alone. We called our costume “weirdos”. Mostly we just made our hair all crazy and sprayed it with the colored hair spray. Then we wore bright obnoxious clothes and heavy make-up. Not the coolest costume ever, but we thought we were so mature around all the littler kids.

Chestnuts roasted by kb @ 10/18/2006 8:56 AM

Matt, this was the best, most heartfelt entry, ever. Take a bow Matt.

WARNING: SHAMELESS PLUG! Please visit my myspace profile and hear some creepy tunes!

Chestnuts roasted by Jerry @ 10/18/2006 9:00 AM

My fav costume was being a bat. Homemade costume, my mom is a great seamstress. Added cat ears for that “Fruit bat look”. It was so neat i wore it two years in a row. I won a prize – a Scrabble game and a 25 dollar gift certificate for being a vampiress one year. Sure its a typical costume but my hairdresser did my hair/makeup/nails and my mother let me borrow her black velvet cape so I was dressed to impress.

My plastic costume? Moosel from the Wuzzles. I LOVED the wuzzles and demanded to be a wuzzle instead of wearing the bunny costume my mum made. I suck. The costume sucked. The mask sucked. but I was Moosel. why the hell anyone would wanna be a moose/fish is beyond me.

Chestnuts roasted by kittycatgirl2k @ 10/18/2006 9:05 AM

No pic of Ralph? Are you freakin’ serious? C’mon!

Chestnuts roasted by Nizzler @ 10/18/2006 9:57 AM

Thanks again for clearing up another mystery of my youth. Trips to Toys R Us were very rare when I was a kid. Being the oldest of four kids, I have the feeling that Mom would rather have had fully reenacted Civil War battles in our living room than take us out in public, especially to a toy store. I had to settle for the action figure aisle at K-Mart….
The few times that I got to Toys R Us, though, I remember the overwhelming sense of awe, the sights, the smells, the endless rows upon rows of toys. They had blue wire bins to hold all the toys because they wouldn’t fit on the shelves that extended from the floor to the ceiling (or at least it seemed to someone under 4 ft tall). And welcoming you to this glorious place were cartoon characters in the form of giraffes making it seem as though you had stepped into a saturday morning cartoon.
It was my nirvana.
After my largely toy free teen years, I went back to Toys R Us. Now I had my own money and countless hours to spend in what I remembered to be an inexhaustable toy experience.
Unfortunately, the sense of magic was gone. Like you said, between the electronic junk, the educational toys, and the little tiny shelves (none of which went above my head), the magic was not there.
I was convinced that I had embellished my childhood memories and that my adult brain could no longer equate Toys R Us to nirvana. Had I made it all up? Was I now too “mature” to enjoy it?
Thankfully, the answer is no. You have corroberated my memories that Toys R Us used to be way cooler!

Chestnuts roasted by Mowntandew @ 10/18/2006 10:03 AM

my best costume, though not really my favorite, would be from seventh grade (circa 1996) when i went as a baked potato. i wore a gray sweatsuit, then wrapped myself in aluminum foil. i had a piece of cardboard on my front that had cotton stuffing and little pieces of green paper on it(sour cream and chives) and a sign on my back that said “idaho baked”….sweet jesus, i was an odd child.

i still dress up every year, but now my costumes usually consist of a homemade super short poofy skirt and some kind of funky t-shirt, like a teen witch who worked at a video store or a kinda-of-skanky pirate. i think this year i’m going to be the tooth fairy…which basically means a short pink skirt, a t-shirt with a picture of a tooth on it, some wings and a tooth wand…

Chestnuts roasted by erin @ 10/18/2006 10:08 AM

My best costume as a kid would have to be the Queen Of Hearts in 7th grade. It was this big foofy dress from Spencer’s, with gaudy heart print fabric and puff sleeves. I wanted to wear it after Halloween, but I had no use for it. :)

Now, my best costume as an adult…well, it’s a toss up. In 2002, my then-boyfriend and I were a deviant Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Naughty Wolf. He worked at a porn store at the time, so it was his idea. I put Jack Daniels and condoms in my basket, and led him around downtown on a leash while whacking him with a mini-riding crop. We got SO many reactions from the crowd. Some Japanese tourists actually took video of us.

If you click on my username, you can see my second-best costume ever: Girl Scout on a really bad trail hike!

Chestnuts roasted by Raptorgirl @ 10/18/2006 10:33 AM

I think my first smock-type costume was a smurf, and not like Smurfette, just the generic smurf. My mom was never fond of those as they tended to rip too easily and the masks were uncomfortable.

I can’t think of a single year, between the ages of one and twenty-two where I didn’t get dressed up and go trick-or-treating (or beer-or-treating when I was in college). I don’t seem to recall a single really great costume though. My mom wasn’t real big on sewing, and after the age of twelve she really didn’t have much to say about our costume choices. I dressed up as a nun a bunch of times, as I bought the really good nun suit with the full habit, figuring it was something I’d get a lot of use out of. I dunno, there was maybe the year I was Pat Bennetar that was pretty cool — spiked out black wig, long black shirt with a red V-belt, short shorts over black leggings and black Adidas sambas. And Screw Me Dead Red lipstick and tons of eye make-up.

Chestnuts roasted by LemurCat @ 10/18/2006 11:53 AM

Great story. The boyscout stuff really hit home for me–that was my boyscout experience in a nutshell. It was fun until they made me do stuff, and then I dropped out.

My favorite costume as a kid was my Karate Kid costume. My crafty mom made me the black and white head band, and also sewed me some kind of flimsy white dojo outfit. I felt like I could totally kick any other first grader’s butt.

My favorite “adult” costume is my King Hippo one. Lazily thrown together(in my younger, more ambitious days, I would have shaved my head or at least bought a skull cap), but it was a lot of fun. The shorts were really loose in the waist, so as to easily fall down when somebody punches me in the stomach.

http://www.johnqcasual.com/jeff-kinghippo.jpg

Chestnuts roasted by Jeff @ 10/18/2006 12:15 PM

Though my Donatello get-up in Halloween of 1990 was pretty amazing my best costume by far was my Pepsi can ensemble for Halloween of 91′. This was no thrown together tin-foil piece of shite either but a insanely well constructed vision of artistic greatness—we used a professional photographic enlarger to detail the graphics on the corrugated cardboard/posterboard frame (thanks Dad!).

This was also the year of the legendary “Halloween Blizzard” (if you are from the Twin Cities you know of what I speak). The day started normal enough but by 6PM it was 28 degrees out with 2 ft drifts of snow everywhere! No crap!

Needless to say we had to put a giant plastic baggie over my costume to keep the Pepsi graphics from running. The most exhilirating part of the evening was when I slipped and rolled down a giant hill on someone’s front lawn—just like Chief Wiggum in that Duff suit!

By the end of the night the crew I was with gave up the “Trick or Treat!” phrase in favor of “Merry Christmas!”. We thought we were so damn funny for that.

Chestnuts roasted by Chris D. @ 10/18/2006 12:16 PM

I had this fascination for a vampire mask when i was in sixth grade. We had already played the shit out of “Nightmare”, and i remember ALWAYS being Elizabeth Bathory. When “Atmosphere” came out, and Elizabeth Bathory ended up being the most inhuman and goddamned COOL looking one, I was even more fascinated with my initial decision to pick a girl in a game.

The mask was this very demonic-looking vampire thing. With a huge gaping maw of teeth, little awful red eyes, barely a nose, and huge ears. And it was bald. I would have vivid fantasies of a full latex body suit that made all of me have similar deathly, slimy skin, and little useless arm-wings. How I would jump out of trees and scare the SHIT out of my friends. I would look up into the moon and bask in it.

Anyhow, I settled on some shitty skull mask. I wore a jester’s cap (bought from Great Escape, baby), and an old grim-reaper cloak, and I was “The Jester of Hell”. Way lamer than a monstrous demonic vampire get-up that would make me more inhuman than that girl in that R.L. Stine book, but I got hosed down with shaving cream and windex all night anyway.

Chestnuts roasted by michael @ 10/18/2006 12:23 PM

If it wasn’t for Pizza Kruger, I had a idea for a quick costume that consisted of a Reaper costume, the second Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Disk thing (The one with the arcane symbols on it), a creepy mask, and a few dozen Ace of Spades playing cards. But Freddy wouldn’t be denied this year.

But someone can use the Duel Reaper idea if they’re stuck.

ALF RULES! AND SO DOES RALPH!

Chestnuts roasted by kingklash @ 10/18/2006 12:53 PM

michael, I LOVED “Atmosphere: The Harbingers!” I was always Gevaudin, the Werewolf because I’m pretty much obsessed with werewolves. I finally found one on eBay for $20 and I try to trick my friends into playing it with me all the time. Have you played the new one that came out, like, three years ago??

Chestnuts roasted by broomstickjockey @ 10/18/2006 1:00 PM

My favorite semi-homemade costume was when I went as the Riddler from Batman Forever. My parents bought the hat, staff, and spraypainted my hair orange. We then took some green sweatpants and shirt and put question marks all over them using black duct tape.

Worst was Freddy Krugger. We got some fake skin and blood that kept falling off. We then took old workout gloves and made knives using cardboard. We had an old fedora and I wored a red sweater with blue sweatpants. I looked more like someone with a really bad sunburn then Freddy.

Other then those, we usually just bought my costumes. I’ve been Dracula, Jason, a California Raison, and some cartoon bear( plastic mask and smock) from the Getalong Gang I believe. I don’t even remember watching that show.

Chestnuts roasted by JLAJRC @ 10/18/2006 1:02 PM

BEST costume = a Beetlejuice costume my mom made that I wore for, like, 3 consecutive Halloweens…

http://i145.photobucket.com/albums/r222/EtHM777/beetlejuice.jpg

Worst costume…a self made Papa Shango/dead voodoo guy made from old sweat pants and tore up rags. I at least had a cool staff with a rubber skull on it!

Chestnuts roasted by EtHM @ 10/18/2006 1:40 PM

My wife and I love dressing up at Halloween. The most original idea we’ve been was a Mom and Fetus (umbilically attached), it got a lot of reaction.

Chestnuts roasted by Fox @ 10/18/2006 2:07 PM

My best Halloween costume was the big-assed Ghostbusters outfit I made back when I was a sophomore in high school. The proton pack I wore lit up and everything. I had two friends come with me, one made a slightly less-impressive proton pack, and the third guy wore a slime blower (which looked good but nobody knew what it was). We garnered much the same reaction from people that night that you got as Ralph, Matt, except it was from grown-ups, which kind of surprised me.

Chestnuts roasted by Timmy @ 10/18/2006 2:09 PM

I don’t think it was my best costume, but my favorite was always the grim reaper. The last year I went trick-or-treating I had a growth spurt, so I was a tall lanky and boney guy. It fit the costume well. I never actually got a scythe to carry though.

The worst one was my Frankensteins Monster costume, it was actually a cool costume, but I looked nothing like Frankie. I looked like a zombie that hadn’t been dead very long. I remember being disappointed because I had originally wanted to go as Herman Munster.

Chestnuts roasted by Deuce @ 10/18/2006 2:19 PM

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 11:32 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.