I, and I’m willing to bet most of you reading this, can fondly recall some of our favorite childhood memories walking around a dimly lit neighborhood on Halloween night collecting an assortment of sugar-crack in our mom’s pillowcases. And if you were a little hellion, (hey, we were all kids once) you took full advantage of the spirit of Samhain and pulled the ever so important Halloween pranks on friends, family, and annoyed neighbors. Of course, some of these mischievous shenanigans required some stealth and if you were donning a Ben Cooper mask complete with a plastic garbage-bag-like costume, ninja-ing that prank became one HELL of a challenge. Walking around in those costumes were about as a loud as Freddy‘s razors on a chalkboard.
In any regard, Ben Cooper masks were and remain a nostalgic staple inside our fuzzy memory banks. So I couldn’t be more excited to see that horror merch extraordinaire FRIGHT-RAGS announced a new line of mini-masks that replicate those glorious days of when Cooper was King of the haunted holiday! The first up in the series is a 1979 mini replica of the Ben Cooper Alien mask to be released on, of course, Alien Day, April 26, 2018!
Per Ben Scrivens-FRIGHT-RAGS:
“As part of our Alien Day (4.26) line up this year, I am proud to announce a brand new addition to our mask line up – MINI MASKS! For the past several years we’ve been reproducing vintage-style Ben Cooper and Collegeville vacuform masks, selling them with t-shirts as a box set. These were full size masks in full size boxes, meant to replicate the costumes from our childhood.However, with the more masks we released it became apparent that…these take up some serious space! I have stacks of them on my office shelf and as much as I love looking at them, they take up a lot of collectible real estate. We wanted to be able to enjoy the warm nostalgic fuzzies these sets gave us, but without cluttering up people’s display cases. So we went back to the drawing board and tried to think of a different way to showcase our love for these vintage collectibles, but also stay true to them as well. Enter the MINI-MASK. We captured all the details (the eye/mouth holes, rubber band, etc) from the originals, but in a package roughly half the size of an original mask/costume set so it can be displayed much easier. In fact, the box is about the same height/width of a Blu-Ray case. Our first MINI-MASK release will be a replica of the 1979 ALIEN mask produced by Ben Cooper. We recreated the mask and box, but on a smaller scale. The mask itself measures approximately 4.25” x 6” and boxed it is approximately 5.5” x 6.75”. You can see its scale when compared to a VHS tape in this image (sorry, didn’t have the original ALIEN VHS tape handy, lol). This mask is limited to 426, and will be released on Thursday, April 26 at 10am EST. It will be sold on its own (no shirt), and retail for $17. We are stoked about this release, and have several other MINI-MASKS in the works, for new and old characters. Stay tuned!”
In addition, an all-new shirt and enamel pin will be released in honor of the day Sigourney Weaver became the baddest bitch in Sci-Fy-Horror history! Make sure to set your alarms and head on over to FRIGHT-RAGS for this nostalgic little diddy next week!