Welcome to Vintage Halloween Bags Pt 4! If you’re interested in seeing the other 3 parts, click here, here and here. Otherwise, let’s get into this!
DURACELL GARFIELD HALLOWEEN SAFETY SACK
Duracell is back to ensure America’s children survive the darkness of yet another Oct. 31st, only this time they’ve enlisted Gar “Halloween” field, wielding the patented Durabeam we saw in the last batch of Halloween bags. If you don’t get the reference, watch Garfield’s Halloween Adventure. That’s his real middle name!
Love me some Garfield and adding him to the bag was a great idea. However, I feel like there’s a missed opportunity here. We’ve got tips about flashlights, costumes, traffic and checking your candy, but somehow not one single warning about hiding your lasagna or the dangers of Halloween falling on a Monday. Garfield is right fucking there! Know your audience, Duracell…
ARBY’S TRICK OR TREAT SAFETY BAG
Next up, we have a very bizarrely classic bag from Arby’s. I don’t know who Arby’s hired to design this one, but they decided a cheap plastic bag for children needed some Art Nouveau flair thrown on it. The contrast kills me. This isn’t some perfume advertisement, or theater poster. They sell roast beef sandwiches. It’s very classy for something that was meant to hold 37 pieces of candy and will eventually get a hole poked through the bottom by a Tootsie Pop stick.
Aside from the very artsy border and tree, I do love the illustrations of the trick-or-treaters. Very old-school Halloween, leading me to believe this was a late ‘70s piece. I’m not quite sure what’s going on with the vampire. He looks like he ate Pac-Man. Maybe it’s a cape? Maybe Pac-Man met someone higher on the food chain?
DUNCAN HINES
Halloween safety brought to you by chocolate chip cookie mix and peanut butter! The best thing since Clark Bars (in case you missed it, we learned way more about Clark Bars in Pt 3 than anyone could ask for.)
If peanut butter and cookies aren’t your thing, surely you can be won over by a silly ghost. What is going on with this with ghost, anyways? First of all, I love him. He looks like a plastic ghost you dangle from the tree in your front yard. And second, he has fuckin’ gemstones for eyeballs. Or is he just really high? Am I high? Hard to tell, but mixing a jar of peanut butter with a box of chocolate chip cookie mix sounds like a pretty good place to start.
WENDY’S SAFETY TIPS
This one is so good! A bright yellow bag, cartoony ghosts, spooky tree, witch silhouette, jack-o’-lantern. Just adorable!
Then the safety side. We aren’t worried about safety here yet because CHECK OUT THAT WITCH! Straight out of your 1st grade classroom! What’s in the bag? Candy? Victims? Dave Thomas? Dead leaves? ALL OF MY FAVORITE THINGS!
Perhaps the most ambitious of all the safety tips I’ve seen yet. Check out the first bullet... Hey kids! If you’re not with an adult, draw two identical fucking maps and give one to your parents. Seems like an insane amount of administrative work to demand from a child before trick-or-treating. I’m trying to get a bag full of Reese’s and Wendy’s has me doing cartography homework? Wild.
AMES
Ending things on a soft one… good ol’ Ames department stores. Back in the day, Ames was my shit. It felt like the ultimate toy store. They had an absolutely wild array of toys. I’d never been to a Toy-R-Us as a kid. Ames took the place of it. And man, is it missed… I still remember the last time I was ever in that store before the big shut down. I bought a baggy pair of Jordache jeans and a skateboard and absolutely inconvenienced everyone involved. I didn’t have enough money not once, but twice so I had to leave the store twice and grab more cash from my folks who were sitting outside in the car. I could tell between the cashier and my folks’ faces, they really enjoyed all of that and did not want to yell at me.
Anyways, the bag. It’s a clown and a dog. The clown is kind of hard to make out because the highlights are a slightly darker hue of orange. It gets kind of lost in the background a bit. It doesn’t help that the bag is older than dirt, faded and missing a bunch of ink from the design. I kind of like it that way. The fact this cheap plastic bag survived at all feels kind of special.
LINGERING THOUGHTS/CONCLUSION
What should you do with your lasagna before heading out to trick-or-treat? Hide it. Duracell won’t tell you that, but I will.
Did any kid actually draw a map? I was probably six—I didn’t even know where I was.
Was the Duncan Hines ghost high, or were you? No further questions, thanks.