Review: 'Retro Fan' Issue #2

Michael Eury’s new magazine Retro Fan has a very singular purpose: to hit the nostalgia sweet spot. With the arguable exception of Christmas, no holiday hits that spot like Halloween, so you can bet that Retro Fan’s autumnal issue will give you that deep bath in ghouls you crave at this time every year. Articles cover such gruesome yet wistful topics as horror hosts (including a brief interview with this issue’s cover-girl, Elvira), 1960s monster TV (specifically Bewitched, The Munsters, and The Addams Family), The Groovie Goolies, and those delightfully garish Ben Cooper costumes.

While these topics have all been discussed many times before, the Retro Fan writing staff always hits just the right note. The writers’ references to their own, very relatable, childhood experiences maximize the nostalgia value without upstaging the topics. The tone is friendly, but the articles are almost absurdly in depth. Did I previously know that Bob Clampett was preparing an animated feature with basically the same premise as The Munsters way back in the 1940s? Nope. Do I now ache for the existence of such a film? You bet your abbie-normal brain I do. Did I know that there were also plans for a sort of Muppet Babies-esque spin off of The Groovie Goolies in the 1980s? Hell, most ex-employees of Filmation didn’t even know that!

For those who do not have a predilection for monsters and the macabre, there are also articles about such non-Halloweeny topics as Sindy: the British Barbie (good to see a female writer being invited to the show this issue…hopefully there will be more in issue #3), a now defunct dinosaur theme park in San Diego, a fab collection of lunch boxes, and super hero View-Master reels. If I have any beef with this issue, it’s that I wish the lunch box photos were bigger and it would have been nice if the View-Master article were more seasonal, focusing on those wonderful adaptations of creepy classics such as Dracula and Frankenstein featuring creepy dolls. I loved those.

But the biggest disappointment is not Retro Fan’s fault at all. As soon as I glanced at an article about a pop culture museum in Baltimore, I was poised to buy a bus ticket to Charm City—then I read the sidebar explaining that the museum closed for business between the article’s writing and the magazine’s publication! It’s just another reminder of how quickly things change, how constantly the past replaces the present. At least we have Retro Fan to memorialize such lost things with humanity and love.

Psychobabble’s 10 Tips for the Perfect Retro-Halloween

In a confusing, modern world in which everyone wanders around aimlessly in their virtual reality helmets while playing Pokemon pogs on their telephones and listening to auto-tuned teenagers sing about their vaginas, Psychobabble offers Halloween as an oasis of retro sensibilities. Not politically retro. That would be gross. I just mean Halloweenally retro. Take off the helmet. Put down the phone. Turn off that singer who is still a teenager and consider listening to one who was a teenager fifty years ago (may I suggest The Crystals’ and their “Frankenstein Twist”?). It’s time to buckle down and allow the waves of nostalgia in.

There are few things more old-fashioned than the notion that the vale between the natural world and the spirit world will lift up and a host of ghosts will sneak under it and start partying on our turf every October 31^st.. That’s some silly shit. So it would be highly inappropriate to celebrate such an old-fashioned holiday in a new-fashioned way. Here are Psychobabble’s ten tips for recreating the perfect retro Halloween experience.

1. Hang Beistly decorations.

Halloween is not an icy pool. You don’t just leap into it on October 31^st and leap right back out again. It is a warm bath. You sink into it slowly and lounge, preferably for an entire month. Part of that involves decorating your home. Many people spend all of their energy hanging ghouls and skeletons all over the outside of their homes, which is all fine and good for showing your neighbors how festive you are, but you should never neglect the inside either, since you probably spend more time indoors than out on the lawn. Whether you’re decorating inside or out, you cannot have a truly retro Halloween without some Beistle decorations. You know them. They’re those grinning cats and jack-o-lanterns, wrinkly witches, and dancing skeletons rendered in shades of orange, black, yellow, and green on die-cut cardboard. These designs have been in use since the Beistle Company began in 1900 and were particularly ubiquitous in the seventies and early eighties. Few visuals will instantly conjure those old-timey Halloween feelings than Beistle decorations, though you are also welcome to hang up some of those toxic melted plastic popcorn decorations depicting ghosts, witches, and cats. They’re retro too. Expensive animatronic serial killers and giant inflatable Adam Sandler vampires from Hotel Transylvania are not.

2. Send mail using actual paper and actual mail boxes.

...And for No Other Reason Than It's Awesome, Here's a Vintage Ben Cooper Costume Ad...