For Halloween this year, the California Crows became the Mystery, Inc. gang, or Scooby-Doo and friends. As you'll tell from the pics, we had me (Trent) as Fred, Eve as Daphne, Haylee as Velma, Cameron as Shaggy, and Landon as Scooby-Doo. This was an especially fun costume theme for us, as the Scooby-Doo character and his friends have spanned multiple generations, starting with the original cartoon in 1969, and including several cartoons series, live action movies, and animated movies up until the most recent version that starting airing spring of this year. So almost everyone is familiar with the characters in one form or another.
It was also fun because we had to piece together the costume for each character to make it feel as authentic as possible. While I came up with the idea and am typically the most picky and specific when it comes to how close we match the source material, Eve did most of the leg work in finding the various parts of our costumes and also made the Scooby costume for Landon. And besides that full body costume, the most fun part of our costumes was getting our hair to look right. For Haylee, we put a copper colored mousse in her hair to darken it and redden it a little bit, and got it cut to the right length and gave her bangs. Cameron's hair is a wig that we happened to already have that Eve and I had gotten almost 10 years ago for a murder mystery dinner party (I would have preferred to grow out Cameron's hair into an actual shaggy hair style, but Eve had just cut his hair really short a couple of months ago when we decided on this idea and there wasn't enough time for his hair to grow out enough).
Eve's and my hair were the trickiest, as Eve doesn't like wigs and my hair, come Halloween, was the perfect length and volume for Fred's hair, albeit not the right color. So, we dyed our hair! Now, Eve hadn't dyed her hair since her youth, and I had never dyed my hair, so we had a friend come over and help us with the process. Eve put a semi-permanent lightener in her hair and a semi-permanent salmon coloring to get hair to the range of red/orange needed for Daphne. And she had to cut her hair for bangs, which she doesn't normally like, but was willing to do for the costume (I prefer her in bangs, at least…):
I tried to lighten my hair with a neutral brightener, but I didn't feel it got light enough, so I decided to be fully committed and bleach my hair:
That obviously lightened my hair a lot, and the result looked like a very light blonde that could have passed for Fred's hair, but I wanted more of that cartoony saturated yellow, so I added a temp yellow spray that did the job nicely:
And we had a lot of fun with our Halloween transformations. On the Saturday before Halloween we were in our costumes all day since we had two Halloween parties, one being a Carni-ween at the kids' school (Cameron and Landon won a prize) and the other was our church ward Trunk-o-Treat party (we took home the top family theme prize). Then on the Friday of actual Halloween, I wore my costume to work all day (had a beanie on the whole week until then so as not to give away what I did to my hair). Eve, I mean Daphne, met me at work for lunch, which was fun and romantic (in a cartoony type of way :) ) and gave my costume more meaning. Then I left work early to get home in time to go as a family to the mall for trick-o-treating. This was the first time we had tried the mall for trick-o-treating, and will probably be the last, as it was packed, lines were long, and the kids got very little candy for the time we were there. But we more than made up for that in how much attention we got from many people that recognized our theme and made positive comments on it or wanted pictures of us. And after leaving the mall we went to a friend's neighborhood for trick-o-treating, and again it was especially fun because of how many people recognized our characters and loved the idea of it as a family theme.
While we hadn't planned on it ahead of time, I decided Friday night after having so much fun that day and the weekend before with our costumes that I wanted us to go to a portrait studio on Saturday and get some nice pictures in our costumes. So we went to a JCPenny's portrait studio, and we'll have some nicer pictures to post to a flickr album once we get those back. I figure the most fun part of all of this is looking back at pics of our family and remembering the fun we had.
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