Well, we come at last the final installment of the G.M.S.T.T.A.M.P.T.S.O.T.S.T.I.O.R.D.R.S. This is where we tie up the loose ends and bid a fond fare thee well to the movie and tv t-shirt craze that afflicted me in the mid to late 70s...
To start off with we have above a snippet from an ad that ran in the October 1978 issue of "Science Fantasy Film Classics" magazine, a favourite of mine at the time. Not only did the mag extensively cover all the essentials - Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, CE3K and the rest - with often not-seen-elsewhere colour pics, plus a full colour pull out poster every issue ( more than one of which still bares the thumbtack marks from years on my wall ) - but they usually had pages of drool-worthy full colour ads as well. This issue alone had 8 glossy colour ( and two glossy black & white ) pages for "Code Name: Galactica" ( one of BSG's pre-release names ) toys and models, Star Wars jewelry, watches, clothes, buttons, posters, knapsacks, bags and masks!
So from one of these great ads we see some of the shirts available at the time to the hordes of rabid Star Wars fans jonesin' for a iron-on fix..
As I recounted in the last post I had designs "D" and "J" ( my best friend had "B", my sister "F" ) and below, from a photo circa late '79, we see design "A".
Not too vivid a memory of this shirt( unfortunately though I do remember that haircut! ) , but a fun design nonetheless. It seems Factor Etc. felt that if the design featured any character that appeared in Star Wars, no matter that they weren't one of the stars, it would sell. Apparently they were right - although I don't remember seeing any Grand Moff Tarkin or Aunt Beru shirts at the time!
Here's a much nicer version...
Up next is an odd one ( the t-shirt I mean... not me - I know what you were thinking! ). If it weren't for this single photo I'd have no clue I ever owned this Chewbacca ( or as a rival Star Wars freak, who I had an ongoing argument with on the elementary school playground, insisted he was named - "Chew-a-bacca" ) shirt. Once again the obligatory iron-on glitter ( again - feel free to use any combination of the last four words in that sentence as a band name! )
Unfortunately no close-up available of this one. Probably for the best anyway.
And here we have this black version of my first SW shirt which was, if my aging noggin' serves me correctly, second hand. I'm not sure if it was passed on to me from someone or picked up at a neighbourhood garage sale, but I do recall the design being a little faded when I got it. It actually was a little different than first shirt as it had the revised lettering ( see last post ).
1980: The Canadian Caper & the largely boycotted Summer Olympics. Alfred Hitchcock, Marshall McLuhan and Peter Sellers died. Jessica Simpson, Macauley Culkin and Christina Aguilera were born. Hmmm, I don't think those last two groups quite balanced out....
But... 1980 also heralded, with much ballyhoo and fooferaw ( not to mention a little hubbub, and a touch of hurly-burly ) the release of motion picture entitled The Empire Strikes Back.
I was just as excited as any self-respecting Star Wars nut would be, and although it marked the point at which my interest in the whole Star Wars thing started to wane, I still held enough nuttiness to purchase a couple of Empire t-shirts before I grew out of it all.
Case in point...
...the lovely little number you see above and below. Nothing says 800 year old midget-elf-frog-guy like sparkly glitter! I think I recall realizing soon after picking out this shirt that it wasn't my favourite. It was okay - just not my favourite.
This next one however ( I'm the one on the left! And yes, that stylish orange shirt on the right that you recognize from the last post was originally mine before it was passed on to my sister ) was certainly well loved. Snowtroopers and Stormtroopers in vibrant Imperial colours on a black t-shirt! Not bad for 1980.
For the full story on this curious snapshot be sure to check out these three posts on my Flickr site from last year.
So... in summary what have we learned?
- I wore shirts.
- I lived in the 1970s.
- Sometimes the shirts that I wore in the 1970s had pictures of characters from television and movies on them.
- A few photographs survive of me wearing said shirts.
- I spent way too much time scanning these photographs, writing up hopefully goofy comments and posting them to this blog.
I'll leave you to your own conclusions.
So thanks for stopping by! As a parting gift I'll include below a few groovy retro iron-on links - some have vintage shirts / iron-ons for sale, others are just galleries. But take a look and see if you can find your long lost Starsky & Hutch or Donny & Marie t-shirt that you wore until the design was so faded that you couldn't read it any longer.
Iron On Station
Retro Duck
Crushi
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