Welcome to the creepy, spooky, ghoul-y section of Branded in the 80s, the home of my yearly Halloween Countdown blog-a-thons.  I’ve had a lifelong obsession with the All Hallows Eve holiday and all of the various permutations thereof, be it monsters or horror films, candy or old Halloween records.  For the past decade I’ve set aside my typical Branded postings (stickers, cartoon commentary, editorials, etc.) and tried to concentrate on the holiday for the entire month of October (and sometimes September and a bit of November as well).  Below are the various countdowns I’ve done to date (just click on the banner to be whisked away to a spookier array of content.)  Enjoy!

 

Peel_Here_Scream

2015 marks the 10th anniversary of Branded in the 80s’ Countdown to Halloween, month-long article bonanza.  So I thought it was appropriate and fun to get back to my roots a bit and spend the whole month of October taking a look at a bunch of vintage Halloween stickers in a variation of my first ongoing column, Peel Here.

 

 

Month of Monster Squad Banner 580

For 2014 I decided it was finally time to take a good hard look at one of my favorite films of all time, the 1987 Fred Dekker adventure/horror classic, The Monster Squad.  This was probably my favorite countdown yet as I had a chance to share a lot of really rare pieces of Monster Squad ephemera as well as creating my own digital set of Topps-style trading cards for the film.  It was such a success that I ended up getting the chance to connect with a number of folks who worked on the film which completely left my head spinning…

 

 

31 Days of GPK Banner small

For 2013 I cull through my vast collection of vintage Garbage Pail Kids so that I could share my favorite gross, spooky, and monstrous sticker cards all month long…

 

 

For 2012 I was able to track down 31 new monster, creature, and ghost animation cels, though this time I decided to share pieces from both the Real Ghostbusters and the Filmation Ghostbusters cartoons.

 

 

In 2011, having run out of Real Ghostbuster’s animation cels to share, I instead broke out my collection of vintage monster mask ads ripped from the pages of Fangoria, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fantastic, and Starlog magazines.  All in all it’s a pretty decent mix of masks from the 50s through to the 90s, and features companies such as Topstone, Distortions Unlimited, Death Studios, Don Post, Universal Studios, Tony Gardner Studios, and a couple of others as well…

 

 


2010 welcomes back the countdown of Ghostbusters spooks in the Return of the 31 Days of Monsters.  All month long I’ll be sharing favorites from my collection of vintage animation cels from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon.

 

2009

2009 happens to be the 25th anniversary for the seminal 80s flick Ghostbusters, the 20th anniversary of it’s sequel Ghostbusters II, and over the course of this last year Time Life released the complete Real Ghostbusters cartoon on DVD for the first time.  In honor of all this ghost busting, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to share 31 of my favorite monster animation cels from my collection, one for each day of the month.

 

 

2008

2008 saw mostly weekday posting as I didn’t want to lose my mind mid-countdown.  I tried to keep to the 80s theme of the site, but like every year there is a bit of the present thrown in as well.  The biggest surprise this year was the explosion of blogs that took part in their own 31-day countdowns, a veritable cornucopia of treats.

 

 

2007

2007 was my first official countdown, and it’s all over the map in terms of content.  No real theme besides Halloween-y fun, but I had a blast keeping to the schedule that year.

 

 

2006

2006 was my first year with the site, and I didn’t realize I was doing a countdown until about halfway through when I realized that I wasn’t thinking or writing about much else.