Ben Cooper made cutting your mouth open fun

Stuck on what to wear for Halloween this year?

Remember those Ben Cooper costumes from the 1970’s? Made of extremely flammable plastic and featuring a hard shell face-mask held onto your face with think elastic, these costumes were famous for the wide variety of licenced characters you could dress up as from film, TV and comic books. What always got to me was that the chest usually depicted a cartoon image of each character and his name! Like Batman on a Batman costume with the word BATMAN over his head… I mean, the REAL Batman doesn’t have to do that, why should I?

But what I remember most about these costumes (aside from trying to wear them under my ‘street clothes’ in case I needed to change into a superhero on the fly) was the little gap in the mouth that I would habitually cut my tongue on. It was such a gestalt memory of my generation that it made it onto the Adult Swim cartoon Venture Brothers when hank dressed up as Batman.

Erick (Monsterama2000) is writing up some great pieces on the Ben Cooper costume phenomenon featuring some rarities such as the two above that I highly recommend, check it out by clicking on the banner below: