Learning Day: Illegally Easy Halloween Costumes for Kids

Children are great because they have no dignity. Want to put your lump of human dough in a silly costume and parade them around? That is fine and, in fact, encouraged, which is why Halloween is the best time of year. In fact there's a whole book dedicated to making your child look as ridiculous as possible. It's for people who have the ability to sew and can, therefore, steal copyrighted character costumes from Disney or Nickelodeon as the Lord intended, but instead, they don't just take the easy costume route; they take the illegally easy costume route. We're obviously talking about Illegally Easy™ Halloween Costumes for Kids (100 Costumes) by Leila Pletosaari.

There are off-brand Halloween costumes, and then there are costumes where the brand is so off I can't even parse what copyright we're attempting to steal. For instance, who the hell is Galaxy Guy supposed to be? He looks like the lovechild of Buzz Lightyear and Emperor Zerg with a dash of the robot from Lost In Space? Why is he holding a battery with a lever attached, and why is it so menacing?

The description of Galaxy Guy says, "Wondering about a possible life beyond our familiar planet, we earthlings fantasize about UFOs and Aliens." The word alien isn't copyrighted. This could be a generic alien, but they somehow overshot it and made a full David S. Pumpkins into Galaxy Guy. I feel like I should know who Galaxy Guy is? Maybe he's a character from that Louie Anderson children's cartoon I never saw? Space Genie Louie, probably?

I'll let you guess who this next off-brand character is because it's pretty obvious. Don't guess gay Hamburglar because The Hamburglar is already canonically gay, so the regular Hamburglar is the gay Hamburglar. Understand your Hamburglar lore!

She's a spy, of course. Spy's are famous for seamlessly blending in with the crowd in their floor-length purple capes. The big question mark on her bag is to convey that it's full of government secrets and ketamine. I think she might be a knockoff of the Mad Magazine Spy vs. Spy guys, characters children famously love timelessly.

Some children don't want to copy beloved characters, though. Some children want to be feared, and what is scarier than having a bunch of random crap hot-glued to your body. Nothing screams illegally easy™ like hot gluing garbage to your child and calling it Halloween.

If you want a costume that isn't a fun mystery, this book also offers you the option to be an everyday item that nobody likes; how about a slice of toast. What child doesn't dream of being bread? It's recognizable, bulky, hard to run in, and hard to feel any joy in. The perfect Halloween costume!

The joylessness of some of the costumes really shows up in the faces of the child models. It's wild to me that they could not bribe these children enough to smile. The snowman kid looks like they accidentally recruited the ghost of a Victorian orphan boy who wandered onto set, and he's definitely in one of the least embarrassing costumes in the book. His face says he knows exactly how big that hat is. He will never grow up to be a pick-up artist after this traumatizing experience. No one has ever looked so sad in a tophat.

I get the dead-eyed stare of a baby with too much shit on them. I know that feeling, but surely they could have taken more than one picture? When they say "illegal™" do they mean asbestos? How itchy and uncomfortable must these silly costumes be to elicit not one ounce of recordable joy from a friggin baby. This child would rather return to the void before memory than be a Ladybug.

I just wish some of these costumes would encourage children to dream a little bit bigger. There's a costume in here called Apprentice Clown that I find baffling. Why can't they be a full clown? I know they haven't been to clown school, but I bet the kid dressed as a doctor skimped on his MD. If the child wants to be a clown, let them be a full clown! I'm a full clown and people keep begging me to stop.

There is a step below Apprentice Clown, and that is Baby Clown. This child wasn't even clown enough to get an apprenticeship. Baby Clown isn't as baffling as Apprentice Clown because there are baby versions of all of the costumes, and most of them are ponchos for some reason? Do babies love panchos? Or is it because if they get it messy, it's easy to take off the pancho, add some face paint, and convert their costume to something like "giant bow freak?"

Imagine having the ability to be anything for Halloween and choosing to be injured. The book's final few pages are for "last-minute panic costumes," and all these loose ideas are shown via illustration to spare the children. This costume is called "accident victim."

At least this book has the humanity not to use real children from the worst costumes because some of the panic costumes are truly sad. Here's a fun game we can play. I'll show you the costume, and you guess what it is. Yell the answer right into your computer speakers. We'll start with an easy one. Who is this?

No, it's not Space Genie Louie. Um, it's Snips? Obviously!? Wow, super weird you didn't know that. Who is Snips? He's Galaxy Guy's loyal sidekick who wears a hat made from a disposable aluminum pie plate. Snips loves doing taxes, and his catchphrase is "Let's get snippy, bitch." Snips was deemed too controversial for the Galaxy Guy cartoon because Gas Station TV is full of cowards. Kind of a deep cut, I guess.

Ok, let's try again. For this next one, I think it's important to share for the first time that this book, which seems very 1970s, was actually published in 2001. That's a big hint, so you'll probably get it. Who is this child supposed to be?

She's the concept of Email! All of it. Those are printed out emails rolled up in her @ headband. She's even got a little prop email printed out to show you that's the thing she is! It's from your Aunt, and it says you'll die if you don't forward it to twelve other people. I'll assume you got that one.

This last one is probably the most difficult. It's more of a concept than a costume. It can be executed in a lot of different ways. The underwear on the model's head is definitely a choice. You can see we are once again utilizing the spy's question mark bag. A lot is going on here, but if you really think about it, I bet you know who this is!

I feel bad for saying that the swamp monster was just hot gluing random shit to a child because that's genuinely what this costume is. She's a Misfit, of course! Which is nothing. This is designed to make someone giving out candy sweat when they say, "Oh what a cute ballerina! And a sad little snowman, and um, oh, hey look at you. Is that silverware on your pants/shorts? Are you a drummer's trunk? A house fire aftermath? Are you the inside of a clown? What is going on over on the Disney Channel these days? Dear God."

It was illegally easy™ for me to rag on all of the children in these costumes. Can you imagine having to go to school, the bullying nexus, dressed in any of these costumes? The sad child in the top hat has the correct facial expression. On behalf of 1900hotdog.com, I would like to officially endorse ripping off copyrighted characters this Halloween. Our official company stance that I am approved to give is that no child should have to be toast.

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