Kresge and Jupiter 1966 Halloween Ad

If you looking for cheap Halloween costumes for your kids back in 1966, then this Lorain Journal ad for Kresge's would have been of interest to you. Kresge's of course is the forerunner of Kmart (it officially changed its name in 1977).

As opposed to some of the other Halloween store ads that I've posted here that featured lots of TV cartoon character costumes, this Kresge's one is loaded up with generic types.

For little boys, there's an astronaut, a secret agent, Frankenstein, a skeleton and a devil. I wonder how the devil costume would go over today?

For the girls, there's a rather boring selection: a masked bride (maybe she was going to pull a heist), a fortune teller and a hatless witch.

The only true licensed costumes pictured are Lost in Space and the lone TV cartoon, Hanna-Barbera's Secret Squirrel.

Here's a portion of the Jupiter store ad from that same week. (I always thought it was strange that Lorain had both a Mars and a Jupiter store.)

I like the Tom Cat costume with its now politically incorrect image of what looks like Tom chasing Jerry with a gun!

We also have perennial favorite Casper the Friendly Ghost (we had that one for sure), a generic black cat, Dracula and the Phantom.

The Phantom? What's a comic strip character whose heyday was long past by the 1960's doing in there?

To see a neat website with a lot of vintage Halloween costumes from both the Kresge and Jupiter ads, click here.

Oh well, it's amusing to see what passed for mass-produced costumes back in the 1960's. Nowadays you see a lot of creative homemade costumes, which is a good thing.

But being raised on TV as I was, I was happy to go trick or treating as good old Huckleberry Hound.

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UPDATE

Here’s that Tom & Jerry costume shown in the Jupiter ad. Gee, Jerry looks happy that a bow-tied Tom is chasing him with a rifle.