For millions of kids who grew up during the 1970s and 1980s, Halloween meant one thing: pulling a thin plastic costume out of a cardboard box, tying a molded mask over your face, and heading into the neighborhood with approximately zero peripheral vision. Long before elaborate store-bought costumes became the norm, inexpensive vinyl smocks and plastic masks ruled the Halloween aisle, transforming kids into everything from superheroes and monsters to cartoon characters, rock stars, and whatever happened to be popular on television that year.
The formula was wonderfully simple. A typical costume consisted of a brightly printed vinyl or plastic suit—often little more than a sleeved poncho or jumpsuit—and a vacuum-formed plastic face mask held on by a thin elastic string. The masks had tiny eye openings and an even smaller slit around the mouth, making visibility, breathing, and eating candy surprisingly challenging. The suits weren’t much better: they were stiff, noisy, prone to tearing, and could become unbearably hot after walking a few blocks. Put one over a winter coat, as countless kids in colder climates had to do, and the illusion became even more questionable.
Companies such as Ben Cooper, Collegeville, and Halco became major names in the business, licensing an enormous assortment of characters from movies, television, comics, cartoons, and advertising. Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Darth Vader, Frankenstein, Dracula, and countless others could be found stacked in colorful boxes at department stores, drugstores, five-and-dimes, and supermarkets every October. By the 1980s, characters from Star Wars, Masters of the Universe, The Smurfs, Transformers, G.I. Joe, and other pop-culture phenomena joined the annual plastic parade.
One of the strangest conventions was that the costume often didn’t actually resemble the character’s clothing. Instead, the character’s name, logo, or even a picture of the character would be printed prominently across the chest. A kid wearing a Superman mask might have an enormous illustration of Superman printed on the costume, apparently just in case anyone was confused about who Superman was supposed to be. Subtlety wasn’t exactly the goal.
Packaging was almost as memorable as the costumes themselves. Many came folded inside shallow cardboard boxes with cellophane windows displaying the mask staring blankly back at shoppers. Seeing aisle after aisle of those expressionless plastic faces was simultaneously exciting and vaguely unsettling. For kids, however, those 
boxes represented instant transformation. A few dollars could turn you into your favorite television hero for one glorious night.
By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the familiar vinyl-and-mask combination began losing ground to more elaborate fabric costumes, rubber and latex masks, makeup kits, and increasingly sophisticated licensed outfits. Safety concerns also helped make the old designs seem increasingly outdated, particularly their limited visibility and cheaply made plastic components.
Today, surviving examples have become nostalgic collectibles, especially costumes still in their original boxes. Objectively, they weren’t particularly comfortable, convincing, or durable. But that was never really the point. For a generation of trick-or-treaters, the smell of warm plastic, the snap of an elastic mask strap, and the swish-swish-swish of a vinyl costume while running from house to house are as much a part of Halloween as jack-o’-lanterns and miniature candy bars.
