Tom Purcell: Halloween’s 30

Halloween has lost its punch.

That’s according to pop culture expert Robert Thompson, trustee professor and founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

“The post-World War II years were the golden age of Halloween for kids,” Thompson told me when we first spoke in 2009, “a trend that continued into the 1980s. But in the early 1990s, Halloween was reclaimed by adults.”

Why the shift?

“Halloween became one of the last bastions of free expression for adults — the one day in which almost anything went,” said Thompson. “Adults could be a wise guy or do something outrageous they’d never do the other 364 days of the year.”

Thompson said adult costumes had generally satirized popular culture or current events.

In the 1990s, costumes mocke