Until a few nights ago, I had no idea that this show existed let alone that it had 5 seasons! This could be one of my favorite shows of all time and I’m just now hearing about it more than ten years after its last show aired. This first episode is pretty basic. It shows how head casts are made with alginate and how they sculpt things out and mold them in foam latex, etc., but the later episodes get nuts. Miniature pyrotechnics, optical effects, demons, tornadoes, etc. Click HERE for a full episode list. I’m going to post as many of these as I possibly can on the blog so get ready for some learnin’!
Last week was the opening of “The Lost Art of Inglourious Basterds“ at the Upper Playground Art Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. It’s a funky little gallery / store where artists create unique pieces of clothing that are hipster meets geek. Hoodies with killer bees on them, t-shirts full of sales slogans from the 1950s and so on. Cool, but pricy stuff. There was a sweet jacket there by Superfishal that I wanted to snag, but it was $120. A bit much to pay for a jacket when you live in a town where you rarely need to wear a jacket.
The show consisted of art from David Choe, Sam Flores, Estevan Oriol, Grotesk, Jeremy Fish, Patrick Martinez, Alex Pardee, Dora Drimalas, Munk One, N8 Van Dyke, Rene Alamanza, Morning Breath and Skinner Davis, and they each created their own poster art based off their interpretation of Inglorious Basterds. Only six prints of each piece was created, and those were practically sold out by the time the show opened, to the tune of $300 a pop. Eli Roth (The Bear Jew), Samm Levine (Pfc. Gerold Hirschberg), and Omar Doom (Pfc. Omar Ulmer / Dominick Decocco) all attended the opening, as did producer Lawrence Bender, but Tarantino himself was nowhere to be found … even though his signature was on all the prints.
I spoke to Samm Levine, who was picking up this sweet Munk piece, and asked him if a secret cut of the film existed where his character had more lines. “I don’t know if it exists yet, but I can tell you that footage is out there somewhere. We shot a lot of stuff, who knows what might happen with it!” Check out pictures from the event in the gallery below, which contains all of the pieces that were for sale..
The first shirt in our new release comes from David D’ Andrea who you may remember from our ANTICHRIST poster we did last year. He was the perfect guy to illustrate this shirt dedicated to the most evil band to ever hit the screen, SACRIFYX! It’s available in white and black and like with all of our products, is in limited supply.
This is one of my personal favorites as it features the Zoltar fortune telling machine from BIG. This shirt was produced by our good pal Mike Saputo. Mike always turns in killer designs and you can definitely expect to see more from him soon.
Cinefile is also back with it as they just released two shirts in their super popular Directors Shirt series. This time Pedro Almodovar and Alejandro Jodorowsky get the title treatments.
Last but not least we have our newest shirt for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. All of these shirts are available online HERE and in the Mondo store at 1120 S. Lamar Blvd. Keep an eye on the blog as we have some big things lined up for 2010!
I thought it was fitting to do a QT Fest edition of We’ve Been Framed considering the news that he saved the New Beverly Cinema. We’re big fans of the New Bev and QT and are very happy to see that the theater will be around showing great movies for years to come.
These two posters were sent in by Micah and are for QT 6 and Best of QT Fest (which was my first trip to the Alamo).
Thanks Micah!
-Justin
P.S. If you are into studying films at all, specifically exploitation films, take a closer look at the books on Micah’s shelf. NIGHTMARE USA and SLEAZOID EXPRESS are amazing books that can’t be recommended enough.
A fan on our Twitter account remembered how obsessed I am with the classic HBO intro from the 80’s-90’s and sent me a link to the behind the scenes look of how much attention to detail and dedication went into the making of it. At certain points of this video I was fist pumping in the air…I think it was when they mentioned that each car had individual headlights and the shot of the guy using tweezers to insert a tiny little bush into a tiny little pot. Every aspect of this is fascinating….from how they shot it, to how they created the swirling colors on the “O,” to how they molded the town. Watch and really, truly marvel at genius at work.
-Justin
P.S. If anyone knows any of the people involved with this, please let me know. I would love to email them and thank them for creating one of the most memorable things from my childhood.
Even the undead need a little love, right? Gallery Nucleus is holding a “Zombies in Love” exhibit through February 22nd in Alhambra, California, and it features a load of forlorn grey matter-eaters just looking for a little love. Screw the traditional restaurant scene and ditch the tired chocolate hearts, this is a perfect stop for you and your honey on Valentine’s Day. My favorite piece is this little undead bird, which makes me imagine a Zombie Twitterfeed … which would probably only ever say “BRRRRAAAAIIIINNNNNS” or possibly “Shambling.” Stop in for the gore, peruse their little shop (they have some sweet zombie books and a nifty undead doll you can take home), then head across the street to the Yazmin Malaysian Restaurant for some food. I don’t know if they serve brains or not, but you could always ask.
[I recently bought several packs of film- and tv-related trading cards: everything from Growing Pains to Maverick. I plan to open one pack a week and document every card, sticker, and stick of gum I find. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll discover a hologram or two.]
Title: Bill & Ted’s Most Atypical Move Cards Publisher: Pro Set Year: 1991 Details: 10 Triumphant Cards || 1 Contest Scratch-Off Card
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was one of my favorite movies as a kid. I credit the “69, dudes!” sequence (a joke I didn’t even realize was a joke for many years) for sparking my interest in time-travel fiction where the narrative folds over on itself. In fact, I could draw a straight line from my young love for Excellent Adventure and the Back To The Future trilogy to my adult love for movies like Primer and Timecrimes.
So when I had the chance to pick up an unopened pack of “Bill & Ted’s Most Atypical Move Cards,” I didn’t hesitate. Released in 1991, the set features key scenes from both Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (a film that ranks among my earliest remembered theatrical experiences). I got several excellent cards (including two featuring George Carlin), so let’s get to it:
All We Are Is Dust In The Wind, Dude
There’s really not a bad card in the batch (actually, the Lincoln card is a bit boring). And you can tell that whoever wrote the card-back text was a fan of the films (or at least knew how to talk the talk). Just look at Card #44: Rufus drops by to see his excellent friends and brings them a surprise – the babes in savory clothes! I love that someone got paid to sit around and write these things.
My favorite of the ten cards is #94, which includes a “Bill&TedSpeak to English” dictionary. Despite the fact that I haven’t seen these two movies in at least 15 years (I’m well past due to revisit them), reading the “Bill&TedSpeak” list brings back some vivid memories from my youth. If you can read this list without hearing Bill’s & Ted’s voices in your head, you’re a better man than I:
Loogied – Spit
Station – Greetings, salutations, yes, of course, where do I sign?, way to go, hallelujah, right on, and (of course) excellent!
Most Atypical – Incredible, amazing
Metal Heads – Rockin’ musicians
The Floppy-Eared, Egg-Dropping, Hippity-Hopping Behemoth – The Easter Bunny
Reaped – Killed
The Ugly Red Source of All Evil – The Devil
Your Royal Deathness – The Grim Reaper
The Fugue Dude – J.S. Bach
Beelzebub – The Dude Downstairs
Miscreant – Loser
God’s Finest Planet – Uranus
The Repository of All Earthly Building Materials – Builder’s Emporium
Phantasmagorical – Spooky
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to work at least one of these phrases into a conversation over the next 24 hours. Report back in the comments on how it goes.
The pack also contained an Instant Win card. The grand prize – a bodacious trip to San Dimas, California – was featured on the front of the pack. Incredibly, the first prize was an entire GTE Telephone Booth. I’d love to find out the story of the kid who won that prize. I know that if I’d had an entire phone booth delivered to my parent’s house, I’d have had a lot of explaining to do.
There also was a sweepstakes you could enter to win props from the movie with “an approximate retail value of $25 (but unknown intrinsic value).” If anyone out there happened to be a sweepstakes winner, please let me know what you won!
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately given that it’d be too late to collect), I didn’t end up with a winner:
This is a first for me as I’ve never seen a framed ANTICHRIST poster before. David D’ Andrea was the artist on this particular piece and if you liked this, you’re going to love the new shirt we’ve got coming that he illustrated (Should be for sale in the next week or so.) If you look in the background you can also see the Stout INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS poster we put out and his THE BIG LEBOWSKI poster.
Thanks to Gabriel for the photo.
If you’d like to have your posters featured on the blog, please send me your pictures (at least 700px wide) at Justin (at) MondoTees.com.
The site is on its own dedicated server now and will be staying that way from now on. The traffic we’ve been having on poster releases warrants it now and the support from fans has been staggering. Thank you so much for your patience and I’m sorry if you missed out on something in they craziness. To our new fans that were making their first purchase from us, thanks so much. It’s great to have no supporters and it’s a great time for you to find us. We have made a strong effort to get the best properties on the planet and to bring them to you at Mondo. To our current fans, you guys are the best. Thanks for sticking by us with all of the site problems. I know its sucked, but after today, we hope it to be the last time this happens. You have to remember that this is the first big release on the new version of the site, so bugs were inevitable. Now that we’ve worked that out, things should be infinitely smoother on the next release.
We’ll be having a lot of great stuff coming out soon and several announcements on our intentions for the next few years. Thanks again for hanging in there with us today and we hope to see you back on the next release!
-Justin
UPDATE #3
The site has been switched over to a dedicated server. If you still can’t see the site, follow these directions. It should work for you after:
If you can’t access the site it’s probably due to cached DNS records. In Windows go to cmd.exe and iconfig /flushdns, in OS X just google ‘OS X (version) flush dns’ where version is your OS X release; Tiger, Leopard, SL.
Thanks to Martin in the comments.
UPDATE #2:
FULL DISCLOSURE:
SITE STATUS
This is what’s happening RIGHT NOW. Our backend provider is switching the site over to a dedicated server which is the absolute highest option that they offer. They’re doing this on the fly so it may take a while. If you know anything about IT stuff, I’m sure you know that what I’m saying is a nightmare. I’ve talked to at least 4 different people and they are on it.
Because the site is being switched over, I cannot check inventory status on the backend. When it goes back up, I’ll let everyone know what is still available and what is sold out. My guess is that the WOLF MAN variant is, but I will confirm that when the site gets back on its feet.
Again. I’m sorry. That’s all I can say right now. You can look at it one of two ways. We either have a shitty site or we got a ton of traffic because Martin Ansin and Daniel Danger KILLED these posters. To take away from their skills and these posters just because the site went down isn’t fair to them at all. As you can see, we JUST SWITCHED sites so this wouldn’t happen, but with the high profile release, it brought WAY more traffic than we anticipated and the site went down. Does this blow? Yeah. I buy the new Masters of the Universe figures from Matty Collector all of the time and I get frustrated every time their site crashes and I have to wait. Real people run Mondo and we’re a tiny staff and sometimes things like this happen. Again, I’m sorry and we’re working on it. I’ll try to keep you updated as much as I can.
UPDATE:
We’re currently switching the site to a new server that can handle all of the traffic we’re receiving. I’ll let you know when the posters are back up for sale.
Hey everyone-
As you all know, the WOLFMAN posters went on sale at around 11am. Upon putting them on sale, the site was decimated with traffic. In all fairness, more traffic than we’ve ever dreamed of receiving, so to say this has been overwhelming is an understatement. I’ve been seeing the comments on Twitter and poster forums around the internet and I want to issue an apology for the time you’ve spent refreshing the site and waiting for your transaction to go through. I feel terrible about this and am working to do everything I can to fix the problem. We’re switching servers right now and I’ll let you all know when the posters are available again. None have sold out yet, so everyone will still have a chance at getting them.
