31 Days of Halloween - Day 21

In one of my boxes of Halloween stuff I came across a bunch of useless crap interesting paper ephemera. This included a stack of old flyer ads for places like Party America, Party City and Halloween USA. There are also a couple from Jo-Ann and K-Mart. The oldest one was from 1999, with the bulk of them being from 2005-2008. While it would have been much cooler to have found a stack of similar store flyers from the 1960s-1980s, and while these might not be time capsule worthy material (not yet anyway) they provide a snapshot at what was being offered in Halloween costumes for those years.

As expected, the bulk of the kids costumes were based on the popular pop culture offerings of the time with Star Wars and superheroes for the boys and Disney princesses and themed prostitutes for the girls, while the adult costumes seemed to be divided mostly into asinine frat party wear for the guys and themed prostitute wear for the ladies.

For the next few days I'll be posting scans of these flyers beginning here with 1999:

Skipping ahead to 2005:

Check back tomorrow as we move on to 2006 and 2007.