Keep It Real

So what’s so good about Atari, you say? Well, one of their fine products gave us Beast Busters, for one.

This zombie-shooting rail game is a vision into another world, a trip through the double vortex of the late eighties and Japan. There’s nothing in today’s video games quite like it. What game can you play today that features owls carrying undead football players, naked Smurf zombies, and cars made of human flesh that come to life and fight you? Where in popular culture today do you find bosses that transform into zombie werewolves halfway through a battle, and heroes known as ‘Johnny Justice’?

The answer is: none. It’s clear that Atari’s slow demise accompanied a decline in human creativity. The better graphics and improved gameplay just don’t make up for the fact that very few modern video games feature blue-skinned naked zombie bikers, Japlish, and the sense that sanity is slowly being stripped from your brain like flesh from a zombie’s head.

Somewhere along the line, humanity lost the simple joys of shooting up towns inhabited by about 500,000 identical gun-wielding undead, or of bouncing a ball from one side of the screen to another.

This t-shirt celebrates those old days of simplicity and baffling, baffling zombies. Wear this Atari t-shirt, and celebrate Atari and old-school video games in all their glory. For all their flaws and incoherence, they had heart.

Wax On, Wax Off

This article claims that the Karate Kid movie led to the downfall of Western civilization, by teaching its viewers that goals can be achieved with ridiculous ease and a few training montages. He may have something of a point. To this day, we still have movies about people learning a new skill in a matter of months and using it to defeat those who have been training in the same technique their whole lives. The message is that if you’re strong-willed enough, persistent enough and American enough, you can succeed at most anything far quicker than those suckers who’ve been practicing their whole lives.

But on the other hand, movies like Karate Kid show us a dream. A dream that learning karate isn’t thousands of hours of repetition after school, every day, for years and years, turning down social activities and other hobbies. Instead it’s a way to beat bullies, win the girl and establish a lasting surrogate-father relationship, all with a mere couple of months of chores.

And isn’t that what movies are for? Not to show us life exactly as it is, but to give us all inspiration for when times are tough? To give us hope that one day, we too can find a kindly Japanese man that will teach us awesome martial arts and life skills, all in a mere two months?

Wear this t-shirt, and carry on the brave hope.

Don't Get Pinched

St Patrick’s Day: not only the only ethnic celebration to be observed on a wide scale internationally, it’s the only celebration to be centered almost entirely around drinking. We suspect that one of these things might be related to the other. The honor given to St Patrick is partially based on the legend that in the fifth century he drove all the snakes out of Ireland. Presumably, he then pulled out a keg of Guiness to those around him and said “Okay, let’s do this.”

And why not celebrate? If you have any Irish blood in you, be thankful, because it’s one of the few ethnic backgrounds that is fashionable these days. Think about it: do people go around celebrating being English? Do English people get cool movies made about them being divine assassins and fighting Daniel Day-Lewis? No; they just get to be the bad guys in sci-fi movies.

If you don’t have Irish blood in you, now is the chance to get some. And by ‘blood’ we mean ‘beer’. And by ‘beer’ we mean ‘a lot of it’.

And you can do it while wearing one of these T-shirts:

Or if that doesn’t suit, one of our other fine St Patrick’s Day T-shirts, like this one. Keep in mind that unlike Fosters beer and Australia, people in the country that Guinness is associated with actually do drink it, so don’t worry at all about being inauthentic.

We have a large enough selection of St Patrick's day t-shirts to cover all of your drinking needs. Enjoy!

VICTORY!!!

Viking Quest might be a fictional show, but if it weren’t, we would definitely watch it. Why? Because it’s about Vikings, greatly underappreciated in this ‘all ninjas and pirates, all the time’ culture of ours. Where are the epic movies about lone Vikings rebelling against the masters that raised them and setting out on their own quests? Or sailing the oceans, going on magical quests and fighting Kraken? Nowhere, that’s where. This is despite the fact that Vikings could easily do these things as well as ninjas and pirates, if not better. Do ninjas drink funeral ale and cremate themselves in goddam burning boats? Did pirates have their own afterlife featuring buxom women and beer? No, they did not.

These days, the closest we have to Viking-centered entertainment is this Viking vs Samurai fight.

Many things could be behind this dearth of real TV shows and movies about Vikings. Maybe all the rape and plunder of other sovereign nations is a sensitive issue in today’s PC-sensitive world. Maybe everyone is caught up over the fact that Vikings didn’t really wear those helmets with the horns stuck to them, and the technical quibbles are holding up production. Maybe they are holding out until the pirate craze finally dies down, and Vikings are destined to be the next Big Thing. Or maybe it’s a sensitivity related to football teams. But let’s face it: the most likely explanation is that the movie and television industries are run by a secret cabal of samurai, reacting against their natural enemy.

In the meantime, encourage Viking pride by celebrating Entourage’s portrayal of Vikings with this fine T-shirt.