1962 Grants Halloween Ad

Yesterday's post about Ashland Oil featured an idealized illustration of kids trick or treating in 1962 wearing charming, homemade costumes. Today's post reveals what kids were really wearing for Halloween in 1962: costumes based on TV characters.

Below is an ad for Grants that ran in the Journal back on October 29, 1962. As you can see, Hanna-Barbera ruled the roost with Yogi Bear, Fred Flintstone and even Fred's bitter half Wilma serving as costume designs.

As usual, I scoured eBay to try and find some photos of costumes shown in the ad that somehow eluded the dumpster in the last 60 years.

The Yogi Bear mask is better-than-the-average, although his hat color is a little offbeat, not being the usual green. The rest of the costume is a surprise to me; we had the Yogi mask in the Brady Halloween Costume Stash®, but I did not remember what the rest of the Yogi get-up looked like. It was long gone early in the game.

It's the same thing with Fred Flintstone. By the mid-1960s, all we had was the mask.

I was fairly surprised to see a Wilma Flintstone Halloween costume. What little girl would want to be a nagging prehistoric housewife on Halloween?

Little girls back then (and now) probably would prefer to be Cinderella. Alas, I could not locate an exact match of the Cinderella costume. Sorry!

As for which costume that the average all-American boy would prefer, I would guess: the astronaut. Here's a better look at one.

Lastly, here's a spread showing some of the costumes in color. It appears here courtesy of monstermasks.blogspot.