The Mausoleum of Madness, Part II!
Welcome to Dinosaur Dracula’s MAUSOLEUM OF MADNESS, PART II! This is a multipage feature. Page links are are at the bottom, or you can visit the starting page over here. Enjoy your stay at the Mausoleum, and pay no attention to the harmless bats.
#15: Zayre Halloween Ad! (1988)
Zayre was a chain of department stores that were all but gone by the end of the ‘80s. Like most of their competitors, they had bangin’ seasonal sections, evidenced by this page from one of their Sunday circulars.
I don’t know if this spread will hit the same if you’re not within spitting distance of my precise age, but wow, this is wildly nostalgic for me. All that’s missing is a vinyl cape and maybe a couple of Lite-Stiks.
We’ve got Spooky Goop, which blended vibes from traditional makeup kits with something out of Mattel’s Mad Scientist toy line.
Then there’s the same cardboard Dracula head that got taped up in every elementary school for years and years, as if by some undisclosed mandate. “You must teach the times tables, and you MUST tape the face of Dracula over a dusty window that kind of opens but not really.”
And good God, the videos! During the Halloween seasons of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, it was common for horror-flavored VHS displays to turn up in even the most unlikely of stores. Zayre was definitely not the sort of place where one would expect to find copies of Deadly Friend, but that was the magic of October.
So here’s your challenge. Picture it… Zayre, 1988. You’ve just won a Halloween gift certificate worth $25. You can only spend it on items from this page. What are you taking home?
#14: DTV Monster Hits Ad! (1987)
This is an old TV Guide ad for DTV Monster Hits, a prime time Halloween special that aired exactly one time on October 30th, 1987. (We did a whole podcast episode about it a few years ago.)
The hourlong special put modern pop songs over creepy clips from various Disney shorts and movies, and if you’re wondering why it’s not officially streaming nor had any physical release, consider the complications in licensing songs from Michael Jackson, The Eurythmics, Stevie Wonder and Pat Benatar for a one-and-done TV special that only six people remember anyway.
In any event, there are copies floating around online, in varying degrees of decay.
I’ve become a sucker for DTV Monster Hits, which could’ve only come out when it did. This thing just SCREAMED “1987,” which was right around the time when my excitement over seeing cartoons on evening TV was at its peak. I swear, the world never seemed more alive than it did when Charlie Brown, Garfield and Donald Duck were on prime time television!
#13: Rice Krispies “Talking” Skull! (1988)
From an era when cereal premiums still had personality and pizzazz, Rice Krispies went for the kill shot with – quote – a “glow-in-the-dark talking skull.” As you can guess, that was a bit of an overstatement.
What you actually got was one of three plastic monster skulls that did indeed glow in the dark, but only “talked” in the sense that you could puppet their jaws up and down. (As demonstrated in this old TV commercial. “Wake up, Jenny!”)
So no, they didn’t really “talk,” but they were still very cool toys. Certainly cool enough for me to take a break from my usual marshmallow messes for a box of plain old Rice Krispies.
(As a kid, during that brief period before I decided milk was gross and never went near it again, my thing with Rice Krispies was to fill a bowl and then top it with a heaping spoonful of sugar. Honestly, after you did that, shit was better than Lucky Charms.)
#12: Elm Street Trade Ad! (1988)
This trade ad from Great Southern Company aimed to spike interest in their assorted Nightmare on Elm Street merch. Namely posters and t-shirts, which you might remember seeing in stores and catalogs back then, even if you had no clue that this one company was creating so much of it.
While it was Dream Warriors that pushed Freddy firmly into the zeitgeist, the film’s success kinda caught his orbiters by surprise, so it didn’t have much merch. For the next installment, The Dream Master, everyone was prepared. Looking back, it’s interesting to note that the VAST majority of vintage ANOES memorabilia – toys, clothing, whatever – came out between 1988 and 1989.
Trade ads like this are hard to come by, because they lived exclusively in trade magazines, which weren’t available to the general public. These sorts of ads were meant for people who might’ve ordered dozens of Freddy Krueger tees – not just the one you or I would’ve settled on.
#11: Sun Valley Halloween Cookies! (1991)
GOD this box is gorgeous. I might as well be looking at a cozy fireplace, or golden leaves rustling on an October tree. It’s just so pure, innocent, and sincere. If the Great Pumpkin sought out cookie boxes instead of pumpkin patches, he’d pick this one.
Sun Valley’s “Buttery Flavored Cookie Snacks” came shaped like witches, ghosts, cats and jack-o’-lanterns, and while I never tried them, I’m confident that they tasted like Grandma’s house.
While there’s a vintageness to the design that makes the box look even older than it is, that holographic doorway betrays its early ‘90s roots. From cereal boxes to comic book covers, that was one of the era’s biggest gimmicks. I just never expected to see it employed on a package of cat cookies!
