Hello! Let me begin by saying that I’m honored to help add volume to the unstoppable day-glo tsunami of pop-and-sub-culture that is the World of Mondo. I’ll keep introductions brief and get right to today’s goodies. For more information about who I am, please visit http://wileywiggins.com. My assistant/bodyguard/biographer Niki and I spent this past weekend in San Francisco, thanks to the generosity of the San Francisco Film Society. After ingesting the requisite late-night mission-area burritos (delicious but dense boluses that we would continue to incubate inside our guts for the remainder of the weekend), we set our sights on Japantown. On a tip from Mondo Tees headquarters, we hit Super7 - an art toy mecca full of colorful objets d’art, books and shirts.
Saturday marked the first solo show of Lamour Supreme, but we were there too early to see the exhibit, and I had to be at the Clay theater that evening for the Film Society event we had come for. After a little gentle coaxing, the Super7 rep on duty let me photograph a few of the pieces that would be in Lamour’s show, as well as some shots of the store.
Lamour Supreme pieces at Super7
I bought a couple of Organ Donors toys on my way out, after ogling a gorgeous, mega-sized Frank Baum Wizard of Oz art book (if you’re not familiar with the actual Oz books beyond the movie, you may be surprised at how much tougher kids a few generations back were than our current crop of disinfected, peanut-terrorized CG-hypnotized lost-causes. At one point in the Oz books, the Tin Man finds his own head in a barrel of discarded body parts and they have a nice chat. The rest of his original bits get sewn together into a Frankenstein’s-monster-flesh-golem called “Chopfyt”.)
After Super7, we immediately hit Ichiban Kan. Ichiban Kan is like a Japanese 99 cent store- everything is Japanese, and everything is around $1.50. Every time I go to San Francisco I fill up a bag with random stuff from Ichiban Kan. Stationary, snacks (Pocky! dehydrated squids! Pink mystery fluids!) dishes, gadgets, bento boxes and bags and miscellaneous bits of plastic junk all emblazoned with amazing engrish nonsense to amuse and mystify. I barely even look at what I am buying when I go there, I just shovel that shit into a bag and I’m always surprised and delighted when I get home.
Finally we stopped in New People, a multi-level cultural center that boasted a genuine gothic-lolita clothes store. Niki and I were delighted to see a white otaku dude dressed in full on bondage-strawberry-shortcake pink gothic lolita garb, with a pink dress and frilly socks, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a pink parasol hidden somewhere as well. Can you imagine the beatings that guy must have taken to get to where he could proudly stride through the streets dressed as an anime girl? Or maybe he’s one of those home-schooled weirdos who never had to deal with the outside world and its cruel, socializing slurs and beatings, and has always existed in a pure state of self-actualized Sailor-Moon pervery. Either way, I salute him (and, no, I didn’t take a picture of him). However, it would have cost Niki 100 bucks just to buy a pair of socks in there, so we preceded to the gift store, where I immediately impulse-bought a Phaidon book of art by one of my new favorite artists, Yayoi Kusama- the polka dot queen.
Kusama hits a lot of sweet spots for me; a love of repeating patterns, a mystical horror that I associate with Op art and the way human perception systems work, and a fondness for women in spandex unitards. In the sixties, she filled rooms with millions of teeming psychedelic blobs, phalluses, and giraffe spots. She staged orgies of hippies covered in polka-dots to protest the fact that people were interested in artists only after they had been legitimized by death and commodified by their inability to produce new work. In short she’s kookoo awesome terrific, and she gets to live and have unlimited access to neon paint and sculpting foam after my cultural purges remove 95% of all currently existing media.
The top floor of the New People building was a gallery with an exhibit by Yoshitaka Amano, the artist behind Vampire Hunter D, Gatchaman, and a good chunk of character design in the Final Fantasy games. Now, I generally find playing Final Fantasy games about as exciting as doing my taxes, but I love Gatchaman. The sideburns, the white bell bottoms, thigh high boots, and bird-themed helmets. The art on display at New People were large panels of plastic that resembled painted animation cells, with lovely, bright glitter backgrounds. Every image was lickably candy-colorful and included Gatchaman characters drawn slightly more wobbly and sexualized and psychedelic than we’re used to seeing them… as if they were getting ready to boil down from characters into just a bundle of lines and fields of color with eyes.
Anyone that knows me is well aware that 1) I am on eBay way too much and 2) I love Harryhausen. Can you guess how excited I was when I found this up for auction? With a little over 3 days left as I write this, this original Ray Harryhausen model from GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD is going for a cool $20,000. I wonder what celebri-nerd is gonna pick this up? Someone call Seth Green to buy this and put it in Robot Chicken. Enough with the STAR WARS parodies…this is real claymation here. Here are some other pictures. Click on them to take you to the auction link.
If you don’t instantly recall this character from the film, check out the above trailer. She starts messin’ stuff up at about the 1:18 mark.
Also, in other INSANE Harryhausen news, I heard a rumor that Japan’s Bounty x Hunter was carrying this sweater. If you live in Japan, are going to Japan, know someone who is going to Japan or know someone that lives in Japan…get this in a size XL and I will have a son and give it to you.
Welcome to a new regular feature on the World of Mondo, the Weekend Triple Feature! I’m Tommy and each week I will be suggesting a thematically linked series of films for your viewing consideration. Thanks to Justin for inviting me onto the blog. I hope to recommend some interesting, undiscovered and entertaining stuff. Enjoy!
THIS WEEKS THEME: THE CHINATOWN UNDERGROUND
The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 stands as a political testament to the rampant and pervasive anti-Chinese racism of America’s past. But while a passionate and hallucinatory fear of the “Yellow Peril” gripped the nation and picaresque police reports of mysterious Tong Wars captured people’s imaginations, the overwhelming fear and fascination with Chinese culture found its most lasting expression in the sordid pages of the pulps. From Fu Manchu in his Limehouse lair, diabolically plotting world domination (not to mention his many literary clones like the Mysterious Wu Fang, the Yellow Spider or Wu Chung Fu) to the “slant-eyed immigrants” who practiced “nameless rites in honor of heathen gods” in the notoriously xenophobic stories of the otherwise brilliant H.P. Lovecraft, the Chinese were generally presented as a bunch of sinister fiends. Philip Francis Nowlan’s first Buck Rogers story, Armageddon 2419 A.D., is an example of pure Yellow Terror; and even well respected authors, like Jack London in Unparalleled Invasion, sometimes wondered at the awful fate which could befall America at the hands of the “heathen chinee.” But there was also a certain allure to the far East and its mysterious, possibly occult secrets which can be seen in characters like Milton Caniff’s seductive Dragon Lady or that great practitioner of Buddhist magic, the Green Lama. The detective Charlie Chan was created, with all his fractured-English wisdom, as a rebuke to the negative portrayals of Chinese in popular storytelling and he, of course, inspired his own thinly veiled rip-offs, among them Mr. Moto and Mr. Wong (the Mr. Moto movies with Peter Lorre are especially good, in my opinion). So it is out of this convoluted melange of attitudes and imaginings that a sort of mythic and fantastical notion of what secrets might be hidden beneath the crowded, foreign streets of Chinatown is dreamt up. Each of these three movies takes us further down into those perplexing passageways hidden beneath Chinatown in search of the many ancient and mystic secrets of the Orient.
The Secrets of Chinatown (1935, Dir. Fred C. Newmeyer)
Cultists hidden beneath black hoods, deadly knife-throwing assassins, men hypnotized to kill, coins of death, and a mystic cabal of evil opium smugglers are just some of the excitements to behold in this super entertaining but rickety, Z-grade programmer. A man dining in a Chinese restaurant discovers an ominous coin in his soup moments before being mysteriously murdered. The police investigate, but their top detective also turns up dead. The case is left in the hands of Donegal Dawn, an amateur sleuth with a strong imperialist inclination. He shows up at the Mayor’s office offering to take the case while, for some unimaginable reason, disguised as a Hindu (he’s even wearing blackface!). None of his many crime solving techniques are any less inscrutable than his ostentatious and misguided disguise but he somehow manages to get all the pieces in place. The movie is rich with atmosphere and somewhat surprisingly doesn’t try to explain away any of its supernatural elements. The opium smugglers actually are practitioners of black magic! It wasn’t just a Scooby-Doo style ruse. Another unique thing about this movie is that the Chinatown is question is actually in Vancouver, B.C. The film was shot in Canada with Hollywood money by a bunch of mavericks looking for loopholes on the limited import quotas for American movies in Britain. Since Canada is technically part of the British Commonwealth, Americans were able to covertly shoot movies there and pass them off as authentic “British” product, circumventing the cap on American imports. The somewhat disreputable films briefly made under these circumstances before the authorities caught on are, today, either totally forgotten or unfairly reviled. But this movie is true pulp of the most purely entertaining kind. Also it’s barely an hour long, a running-time more movies should aspire to.
Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962, Dir. Albert Zugsmith)
Vincent Price, in a treasured non-horror performance, is an international adventurer who arrives in San Francisco during a Tong war at the turn of the century and discovers an illegal trade of slave girls inside a maze of chambers and passageways beneath the streets of Chinatown. This eerie, somnolent film has nothing to do with the Thomas de Quincy book from which it gets its name and is actually pretty difficult to explain. It has the claustrophobic intensity of a fever dream. People are caged, beaten, drugged, and disappear through secret passageways, trapdoors and sewers. As Price descends into a miasmic, opium-induced stupor, he’s lead on a chase through a seemingly endless procession of twisting corridors and underground rivers. Spouting a steady stream of pulpy philosophical platitudes, his nightmare culminates in a whole hallucinatory five minute sequence shot entirely in slow motion. Directed by Albert Zugsmith, who’s responsible for producing a number of excellent films in the 50′s including several Douglas Sirk movies and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Opium Eater is one of the most strangely poetic and unnervingly fatalistic pieces of genre exploitation ever made.
Big Trouble in Little China (1986, Dir. John Carpenter)
No need to explain this gem. And no excuses if you haven’t ever watched it and are over 10 years old. Kurt Russell goes deep down underground and gets mixed up in some dangerous Chinese mysticism. One of the many things that’s entertaining about this movie is its knowing use of blatant stereotypes. Once again there’s some evil Oriental shenanigans afoot and a heroic white guy there to save the day. But where the film gets its satiric edge is by making this main character an arrogant, hubristic, smart-mouthed idiot. The crucial strength of this movie is in Kurt Russell’s swaggering, obliviously insensitive performance. The frantic, live-action cartoon pacing and non-stop gags and effects make it into an eternal 80′s classic and a bittersweet reminder of when John Carpenter was a totally infallible filmmaker. A perfect end to the triple feature.
As Mondo is starting more and more projects, I’m getting less and less time to write on the World of Mondo blog, so I’m putting forth a call to arms. If you have a love for comics, movies, Frank Frazetta, posters, music, parties, fun and all things good in the world, shoot me an email at Justin@MondoTees.com. I’m wanting a few good dudes and dudettes to write regularly on the blog. That reminds me, one important thing… YOU MUST KNOW HOW TO WRITE. If you don’t know the difference between their, there and they’re, there is no need to apply.
This is a non-paying job in the traditional sense, but expect lots of cool stuff in return for your services. Spread this around! I want to get this blog to be a well oiled machine!
Our good pal Lamour Supreme is having his first ever solo show this weekend at Super 7 in San Francisco. If you are out in SF, go to this. I promise you that it will be nuts. I can vouch for that. Lamour is a nice dude, but when it comes to vinyl toys (especially customs) he becomes a beast. Don’t believe me? Check out this custom I got from him a few months ago:
Here’s a few previews of things he’ll have at the show for sale.
He also did this killer shirt for Super 7 x Mishka that will be sold at the show:
Couple all of this crazy stuff with the fact that it’s almost Halloween. Rumor has it, that if you don’t come to the show dressed up, you won’t be able to buy anything. If you go this weekend, hit me up and tell me how it was!
Super7 Store
1628 Post Street
San Francisco, CA 94115
I found these two albums during recent garage sale/pawn shop expeditions, and thought they provided a nice Military point/counterpoint. So I’ve uploaded pictures and about a minute or so of audio from each to let you decide which is more convincing.
POINT
The U.S. Army Recruiting Service Presents – Feel Like A Man – Go Army (1964) – Four tuneful, timely commercials of interest to young Americans
This record was distributed to radio stations in early 1964, and features 8 60-second versions of the Army’s then-popular “Feel Like A Man” jingle. The back of the LP sleeve invited the stations to “help your Country by playing these commercials whenever possible,” and informed them that “the U.S. Army wishes to express its thanks for bringing its message to the attention of your audience.”
By way of contrast, here’s an “informational” hour-long conversation with several “experts” on the various ways that a fellow could get himself disqualified from the Draft. Not that they encouraged that sort of thing… they just wanted you to know your options. Or, as the moderator says in this introductory clip, “This album is intended to suggest some of the procedures available for pointing out a disqualification or a qualification. It is not intended to suggest methods of dodging, or draft avoidance.“:
The record set out in detail the various physical and mental “defects” that would make one unsuitable for the military, and gives the procedure for highlighting those “deficiencies” to the draft board. For further help, the inside of the record sleeve contained state-by-state listings of various “draft counselling centers”:
We’ve got a diverse range of products going up today. We’ve got our first ever toy, the first ever poster done for a movie directed by Dario Argento and the first time we’ve ever done an art print for Mondo!
The release of this collab marks the first time that Mondo has released a vinyl toy and who better to do it with than Velocitron!
This special edition Larvagon is a tribute to the amazing 1983 monster/goo opus THE DEADLY SPAWN and to celebrate, we decided to sweeten the deal by shipping this in a hand silkscreened box featuring the monster’s skin texture and also throwing in a DEADLY SPAWN shirt!
Limited to 15 pieces for sale in the US and only 25 in the world.
Considered by many to be among the best horror movies ever made, we knew that the artist we assigned to this had to be one of the best as well. Enter: Alan Forbes. Alan is a living legend in the poster game and he shows everyone why with this release.
Poster by Alan Forbes. 18″x24″ screen print. Signed and numbered by Alan. Printed by Monolith. Edition of 115.
From Wikipedia: A mondo film is a documentary film, sometimes resembling a pseudo-documentary, usually depicting sensational topics, scenes, and situations. The genre has been called “shockumentary.”
Mondo films are amazing. If you want to talk about the best of the best; MONDO CANE, FAREWELL UNCLE TOM and MONDO NEW YORK come to mind. Though, the only thing better than a mondo movie are the posters for the movie! With that in mind, we had Zach Hobbs make a poster for the store that captured the essence, the sleaziness and the beauty of the mondo posters of old.
Poster by Zach Hobbs. 18″x24″ screen print. Hand numbered, signed and printed by Zach Hobbs. Edition of 60.
We are also super psyched about our newest t-shirt for STUNT ROCK! Our good friend Skinner whipped this bad boy up and not only does it feature the Wizard from Sorcery on the front, we also dictated every line of dialogue in the trailer and put it on the back!
If you’re like me and don’t like wearing shirts for movies you haven’t seen, believe me, this is an exception. Just watch the trailer and you too can be in the super secret Stunt Rock fan club. This shirt is also available in SILVER.
Yeah, yeah…this picture is like nine months old or whatever, but it is still CAHRAZY! I’m on a huge Conan kick right now and when I saw this I almost died. If he still has this, can you imagine the other stuff that he has lying around?
Variety just published a story where they talk about the ongoing CHAOS REIGNS phenomenom that started at Fantastic Fest this year and even mentions Mondo in the article! Check out the article HERE and CHAOS REIGNS shirts are still available HERE.
Maybe I’m slow on the draw, but I was just told that PARANORMAL ACTIVITY will be getting a nationwide release because of its William Castle-esque DEMAND IT NOW promotion. I don’t know about you, but this is VERY exciting. The fact that PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is actually getting a major release is cool and all, but the possibility that studios will start listening to fans is even more exciting.
What can horror movie fans demand next? If we start a petition or poll or counter thingy like the DEMAND IT NOW promotional campaign did, can we stop shitty remakes from happening? Can we get TROLL 2 and BASKET CASE onto bluray? Who knows what the unified power of movie fans can do from here on out. What do you want to see next? What is your dream thing that you’ve always wanted to see come true?
