Before Spirit Halloween, before rubber serial killer masks, before parents sweated for weeks to ensure their children’s Halloween costumes were screen accurate, there was Ben Cooper. He was a man, though for most of my childhood, that name was a brand, a company, a kind of autumn wallpaper lining the shelves of Ben Franklin stores and local pharmacies every October. The Ben Cooper brand was identified by its circular logo in the corner of its boxes, like the DC Comics logo. In fact, Ben Cooper licensed DC. Ben Cooper also licensed Marvel. And “Star Wars.” And Bozo. And the Beatles. Ben Cooper licensed everyone. Even John F. Kennedy. Ben Cooper made Halloween costumes representing famous characters before most Halloween costumes were famous characters. Then, more often than not, it produced a cheaply-made plastic and vinyl costume with only a vague resemblance to that character. Dracula, which Ben Cooper licensed from Universal, was more Phantom of the Opera than Bela Lugosi. Ben Cooper’s Alien masks looked like a skull sporting a full beard. Fonzie costumes suggested a human being resembling Henry Winkler, albeit embalmed. Ben Cooper was not the only brand of drugstore Halloween costume sold from the 1930s until roughly 1982 — after which Ben Cooper, and other Halloween businesses, looked askance at the Tylenol scare that sprung out of Chicago just before that year’s trick or treating commenced, knew its days were numbered and stumbled. For decades there was also Collegeville costumes, Halco costumes; Centsable of Palatine had a license for the Jetsons and Huckleberry Hound. Ben Cooper costumes, though, became synonymous with Halloween on the cheap. In “Halloween,” Jerry Seinfeld’s 2002 children’s book/memoir, he recalls graduating from bad homemade costumes to bad drugstore costumes: “My destiny was to one day get a real Superman Halloween costume from the store. You know the one. Cardboard box. Cellophane top. Mask included.” Seinfeld doesn’t even need to mention Ben Cooper: “Remember the rubber band on the back of those masks? That was a quality item. Thinnest gray rubber in the world. It was good for about ten seconds before it snapped off that cheap little staple they put it in there with. You go to the first house: ‘Trick or … “‘Snap.’” Memories like that have become such indelible snapshots of the 20th century iteration of Halloween that decades after Ben Cooper’s bankruptcy, we’re getting a mini surge of Ben Cooper appreciation. There’s a loving new (direct-to-video) documentary from Connecticut filmmaker Rob Caprilozzi titled “Dressing Up Halloween: The Story of Ben Cooper Inc.” It makes an argument for Ben Cooper and its competitors as the catalyst for our modern-day Halloweens, no longer dominated by a few ghosts, witches, pirate and hobo costumes but corporate IPs like Luke Skywalker, Michael Myers, Deadpool. Since spring, one of the biggest successes from NECA — the leading creator of those lifelike adult-minded action figure collectibles on the shelves of Target and Walmart — is a new line of Ben Cooper action figure trick-or-treaters, modeled on the old costumes. “It’s a step back from the movie-accurate work we tend to do,” said Randy Falk, NECA’s vice president of product development. “But it’s struck a chord with so many people who probably — like my little brother and I — went to a store every year to pick out a new Ben Cooper. They could be so bizarre — unintentionally so. But there was real charm there.” In a meta twist, months before Halloween, NECA’s first and second waves of Ben Cooper trick-or-treaters were already sold out, with complete sets of the figures being resold on eBay for $500 and $600. That somewhat mirrors the fate of the costumes themselves. A few years ago, Chris Ecker, a South Elgin antique dealer, sold most of his enormous, obsessive Ben Cooper costume collection at the Kane County Fairgrounds. A display table at Kredge’s store in Minneapolis sells “Everything for Halloween,” including Ben Cooper costumes, in an undated photo. (Minnesota Historical Society) He had JFK and Jackie O costumes from Ben Cooper. He had Spider-Man and Hulk. He had a Ben Cooper of Hervé Villechaize from “Fantasy Island,” and a Ben Cooper of Charley Weaver, the pork-pie-hat-wearing alter-ego of Chicago radio star Cliff Arquette. “Ben Cooper just made a lot of truly insane costumes,” he said. “They made a George Kennedy costume, based on his 1970s series ‘Blue Knight.’ I mean, gosh, what kid in 1973 didn’t want to be a middle-age overweight cop with high blood pressure?” Ecker owned more than 600 Ben Cooper costumes — and when he was done selling that vast collection (originally sold for a few dollars each), he made roughly $10,000. The irony is not lost on him: “As a kid, I had a hand-me-down Mickey Mouse costume, and one of the cool things on Fridays was that my mom and sister and I would take a bus into St. Charles and shop at the second-hand stores, and across the street was this Ben Franklin and in October we would go in and look through the Ben Cooper costumes. It was magical, really. I also never got one because we were not affluent. That was money we didn’t have to spend.” Ben Cooper products, however, were intended to be egalitarian, cheaply made and affordably priced for most, with a design that reduced costumes to ill-fitting pajamas. Even a grandson of Ben Cooper admits in “Dressing Up Halloween” that if the boxes were never intended to be collected, the costumes were “built to last exactly one day.” An unidentified devil on Halloween in 1972. (Chicago Tribune archive) Among the stranger choices that Ben Cooper Inc. made was insisting nearly every vinyl jumpsuit depict an image of the character you were dressed as. I was a Stormtrooper from “Star Wars” when I was eight. I had a Ben Cooper mask of a Stormtrooper. But the front of the jumpsuit was not matching Stormtrooper armor. It was, redundantly, a picture of a Stormtrooper. Likewise, Darth Vader costumes didn’t offer a computerized chest plate but a picture of Darth Vader. “Planet of the Apes” costumes, doubling down, were simply an ape mask paired with a smock that depicted several apes. If there’s anything remotely controversial in “Dressing Up Halloween,” it’s this quirk. The son of Frank Romano, who designed most of the Ben Cooper costumes for 30 years, recalls in the documentary wanting to look like Fonzie, not a hall of mirrors in which Fonzie wears his own image. But there’s a reason Romano made the costumes like that. Caprilozzi told me: “The reason was, well, the mask of a Ben Cooper costume was so sweat-inducing that when a kid was not asking for candy, they wore their masks on the top of their heads.” And if you were Disney, Lucasfilm, Jim Henson, Marvel — any of the pop-culture monoliths that licensed to Ben Cooper — you insisted your characters be recognizable. Ben Cooper grew up in New York City and said his first Halloween costume was a devil. Back then, more than a century ago, Halloween costumes were made often of molded crepe. Cooper initially created costumes for vaudeville stages, working with the Ziegfeld Follies and the Cotton Club. But as the Great Depression closed venues, he made the first of several prescient business decisions. He took advantage of the rising popularity of Halloween and began mass-producing kids costumes. He wasn’t a pioneer: Ben Cooper Inc. was founded in 1937, and a decade earlier the Collegeville Flag company started making similar costumes using whatever excess fabric it could find. Ben Cooper Inc., though, made smarter bets: It became one of the first companies to license from a fledgling filmmaker named Walt Disney. In the early 1960s, Ben Cooper was the first merchandiser of anything depicting Marvel superheroes. Ben Cooper Inc. grew alongside the baby boom and the explosion of ’50s TV stars like Superman and Davy Crockett. The company’s first costumes were made with a stiff gauze, then shifted to plastic masks and vinyl smocks. By the 1970s, it was the largest maker of Halloween costumes, with about 80 percent of the market. As late as 1990, right before it folded, Ben Cooper still sold nearly four million costumes a year. The art, however, the distinctive look of Ben Cooper costumes, was because of Romano, who started with the company in 1962. Romano was more inventive with his portraits of cultural figures than accurate. His pinball-machine colors and swirling kaleidoscopic designs were of a piece with ‘60s pop artists like the Chicago Imagists and Hairy Who. To this day, the art reminds collectors like Ecker of sideshow murals and the silk-screened T-shirts sold in shopping malls in the 1980s. Compared with the strict adherence to a cultural property that’s expected of licensed merchandise now, a Ben Cooper costume was like a bootleg. Or with its loose, out-of-proportion features, folk art. Michelle Gordon, from left, Jimmy Dallarosa and Wendy Meyer pose with Halloween costumes that will be for sale at the Secrest Elementary School in Colorado in 1969. The school was holding a carnival. (Denver Post) For much of the Cold War era, to walk around an American middle-class neighborhood on Halloween night was like witnessing a Ben Cooper fashion show. The masks offered microscopic slits in the mouths and noses to (sort of) breathe. The smocks resembled garbage bags. Since these costumes never had sleeves, it was not unusual to see a Creature from the Black Lagoon with flannel arms. Indiana Jones looked like a hobo and the Beatles looked like American Psychos. Ben Cooper himself would drive around on Halloween night, admiring the show he created. But by the late 1980s, his health declined, the company had a factory in Georgia burn down, and it declared bankruptcy twice — the second time on Oct. 30, 1991. Caprilozzi thinks part of the problem was that Ben Cooper Inc. didn’t change enough with the times. After the Tylenol scare tanked Halloween 1982, the company and its competitors got together to make “13 Great Ways to Celebrate Halloween,” a free pamphlet that was circulated widely in department stores and supermarkets, intending to revive the holiday. “One suggestion was host a costume contest,” Caprilozzi said. “Funny thing is, if you wanted to win, you’d never wear a Ben Cooper costume.” Today, the company doesn’t exist. Halloween has never been bigger, but costumes have built-in muscles now and masks cover your entire head. Kid costumes are often too expensive (and sophisticated) to be disposable. Fast and cheap is not on trend. That said, it’s rare for a costly latex mask these days to replicate the eerie dead-eye stare of even an old Ben Cooper princess. Ben Cooper masks remain the stuff of nightmares — which may be why several companies (such as Rubies of Long Island, which acquired the Ben Cooper brand name in 1992) now produce plastic Ben Cooper-style masks. Albeit, for nostalgic adults. As for my Stormtrooper costume? Here’s the ugly truth. It was mostly white (except for an inexplicable blue Stormtrooper illustration on the smock) and uncomfortable. I put it on, grabbed a pillow case for candy and ran out of the house and across a neighbor’s front lawn. In those first five minutes of Halloween, I tripped over a garden hose and I landed in a big fresh mound of dog poop. I went home, crying. My mother put me in the car and drove me to CVS and we took home a new Ben Cooper costume. That was the lesson of Ben Cooper: You should have options on Halloween night. I picked Frankenstein, and rejoined my group of friends, losing a mere 30 minutes. Frankenstein didn’t fit much better than the Stormtrooper, but after Nov. 1, I never saw it again. [email protected]