Yesterday…Medusa. Today…a DALEK! Yep. That’s right. We built a Dalek to guard our checkout counter. SHOPLIFTERS BEWARE! Fuck around and get exterminated.

To kind of break up the black in the room, we decided to base the Dalek off of Davros’ ride. Black and silver always look good.

We also got in our storage lockers and our new shelving units for shirts and what not. Gonna keep this one short as we had a sale today, but it’s looking good! Should be reopened in no time! Here are some more pics from today’s build:

-Justin

You all probably thought that since we’re shopless right now that we wouldn’t be doing any releases this week. Well, you’re way wrong! We’ve got some amazing stuff today. Here we go!

About a month ago, we saw that The Walking Dead’s Charlie Adlard did a movie poster for George Romero’s new addition to his dead series, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD. We frantically got ahold of Magnet and asked if we could produce it. They said yes and now you can have this framed and hanging in your very own home. Oh, did I mention that it glows in the dark?! We printed the red with glow ink so the zombies will forever be staring at you.

Poster by Charlie Adlard. 22″x34″ screen print with glow in the dark ink. Hand numbered. Printed by D&L Screen Printing. Edition of 150. Click HERE to buy.

We also did a shirt with the zombie moon. With no exaggeration, this is my new favorite shirt. We got them back from the printer and they turned out incredibly well. I’ve been playing with the types of shirts we were printing on and with this we used a SUPER SOFT black American Apparel Tri Blend Track shirt. If you are a Romero fan or a fan of Charlie’s work on WALKING DEAD, this is a must have. Click HERE to grab one!

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD gets released tomorrow nationwide and we highly recommend going to see this. We showed this last year at Fantastic Fest with Romero and the crowd loved it. Check your local listings to see if it’s playing around your area.

Today, we also have the final drop of THE WARRIORS posters. Ken Taylor turned in some unbelievable work with his Gang Leader set. Represented you have THE FURIES, THE ROGUES and THE ORPHANS! Yes! THE ORPHANS! We are huge fans of them here at Mondo and we hope you share the same enthusiasm.

Poster by Ken Taylor. Each print measures 12″x36″. Screen printed and hand numbered. Printed by D&L Screen Printing. Edition of 200. Click HERE to buy.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this set, you are getting THREE prints. They are all individual posters measuring 12″x36″.

We also have a new poster by Tomer Hanuka. This is the first time working with Tomer and we have many more projects lined up with him. Keep an eye out for those! Tomer brought a unique vision to the world of THE WARRIORS and I, for one, will be framing this up. It will definitely hold a place on the wall of the new Mondo store.

Poster by Tomer Hanuka. 24″x36″ screen print. Hand numbered. Printed by D&L Screen Printing. Edition of 180. Click HERE to buy.

-Justin

Today was a very satisfying day and as far as pictures go….these show the most change in the shop. No longer are the walls blue. They have been painted a deep black. All holes and sheetrock have been fixed and internet and power is run. Lighting is still being worked on, but should be good to go by the end of the week. Speaking of lighting, today saw the installation of our Medusa chandelier.

I can’t believe this actually happened. In planning the store, I said I had an idea for a light with an arm sticking out of the ceiling holding a severed Medusa head and everyone was like, “Ok. Cool.” Didn’t bat an eye. I’ve got the best job in the world.

We worked with Hawgfly again here in Austin. Meredith Johns and crew did an INSANE job on this. We based this design off of three things; the Ray Harryhausen Medusa design in CLASH OF THE TITANS:

the Medusa design Skinner did for us last year:

And the Gorgon Video Label:

There are so many details with this thing. We have a secret plug in the neck gore that pulls out so we can change the lightbulb inside and oh yeah…when the lights are on, it’s eyes light up just like in CLASH OF THE TITANS! I wanted to get a pic of this for this post, but when I went in, the power wasn’t ran to it yet. The hand gripping the snakes belongs to Cheech Marin. Meredith did all of the practical effects work in Robert Rodriguez’s MACHETE and they had to mold Cheech’s hand and arm, so instead of blowing dough on molding mine, we just used his. Thanks Cheech! One reason I know this chandelier was a good idea was when a group of little kids looked into the store, they yelled “Mommy…SCARY!” and ran away. Mission accomplished. Super happy with this and the surprises will continue to come in following posts. When the store remodel settles down, I’ll do a progress blog post on how this was made. I had Meredith take pictures of every step and it’s really amazing stuff. Take a look at more detailed shots of the space and of the chandelier up close:

-Justin

Yesterday’s post was pretty light. We pretty much just took all product out of the store and got it ready for the demolition team. They worked most of yesterday and got it all stripped out for the sheetrock dudes and the electricians. All fixtures have been ripped out and when I was in there this morning, the electrical guys were getting ready to start moving the inner ceiling can lighting around. They were also dropping in new outlets to power the LED lights that will be lighting our shelves and new display case/ checkout stand. They also had me pull out our new chandelier for the space to see how heavy it was. We worked with Hawgfly FX on this and it came out great. I’m not going to post any pictures of it yet (scheduled to be installed tomorrow), but as a teaser, I’ll just say that Cheech Marin’s hand was involved with making it.

Here are today’s pictures with the last one being my first time using the iSweep Panorama setting on my Sony TX7 camera. Looks pretty cool. If you’ve never been to the store, you can kinda get a better idea of the layout.

Yesterday was the last day of the Mondo store at the Alamo S. Lamar as you know it. After we closed for the evening, three of us began slowing gutting the store of all merchandise in preparation for the construction crews coming in today. We have been wanting to do a remodel on the store for some time now and figured that now was as good a time as any to tackle it.

If you’ve ever been to the store, you might have noticed that it is pretty small, so it took a lot of thinking in the design to make it more comfortable for people that want to come in and browse. I’m not going to spill any beans as to what plans we have for it now, but over the next week, keep an eye on this blog to see photos of the development of the store. Today’s photos are pretty simple. BEHOLD…an empty Mondo!

*NOTE: All EVIL DEAD orders have been shipped. We will be getting our shipping back up and running soon, but do expect to add two or three days time onto your order’s arrival. We will be having a few releases later on this week, but the store remodel shouldn’t effect things too much. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email us at Store@MondoTees.com.

Today, we released 2 posters and a shirt on the website. The time was announced (which is something we don’t like to make a habit) and we sold out of both posters in around 35 minutes. After the dust had settled on today’s release I checked Twitter and my email and found over 75 messages with people essentially saying, “Fuck you guys” or “You just lost a customer.” It’s not unheard of that people are upset when they don’t get something they really want and in our business it’s even worse because all of our pieces are limited edition, but these emails made me want to write an open letter and kind of let people look behind the curtain to see what we are doing with our release days. Several people think we are unprepared and go about these things not realizing the demand our posters have, but that is not the case. Could anyone have imagined that THE EVIL DEAD release would have more people (well over 1,000 on the site this morning) going after posters than the IRON MAN 2 release did? I love being open with our fanbase and this blog post will hopefully shed some light on the inner workings of Mondo and illustrate how we are working very hard to make release days as easy as possible for you…the fans.

QUANTITY AND THE AFTERMARKET

We have gained lots of new fans in the last several months and one thing we always get asked is if we will reprint. The answer is no. We are big supporters of limited editions staying limited. We will do variants and things like that, but the edition size will always be stated up front. We are also aware that some people out there don’t buy our posters to hang on their wall. Some of our posters are very popular on the aftermarket. It’s no secret, I assure you. I can understand the frustration it may cause fans that tried to get one as a gift or to hang in their office only to miss out on one and then they turn around and see someone else that got one immediately selling it. The truth is, we cannot control that. We do limit our sales and try to make sure everyone gets one, but that’s all we can do. Rest assured that we ARE NOT the ones putting the posters up for sale on eBay, so getting angry at us about it will do nothing. We sell the posters in our store in Austin, online and at the shows the posters were made for. Once the posters sell out, they are gone forever.

OUR SITE

Probably the most common email I get is the one where people tell us to up our bandwidth or get more cookies or whatever. Admittedly, the performance of the website has been and still is the most frustrating part of the job to us at Mondo. I am on the phone at least 3 days a week talking to technicians trying to tweak this and that all in an attempt to make sure the website doesn’t crash. The fact is, it’s almost impossible to get everything right. When there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of people all trying to buy one poster at the same time, there will be problems. Even sites like OBEY crash and they are 10 times the size of us. We have a dedicated server and are constantly tweaking the shopping cart and individual item pages to make the performance of the site better.

I’m not trying to make excuses here. Not one bit. I’m simply trying to say that we are trying. We don’t have the money to throw at having multiple servers like Amazon or other mega sites. I’ve been trying to work with Digital River that runs the Matty Collector sales and even Sideshow Toys because of their nice sale day sites. So, bottom line, if the site goes down, it sucks, but the reason it’s going down isn’t because of poor planning or lack of prep….it’s because of too much enthusiasm and excitement from fans. It is impossible to gauge excitement for a certain release. It’s all part of the thrill we get from our jobs.

SHOPPING CART

This has been an ever increasing question from fans and since we’re trying to clarify things today, I thought I’d share an actual email we got about this subject:

I don’t know how this normally works, but I was in the middle of completing my order – the last screen was loading up. My roommate asked me for assistance with something, so I went to help him and when I came back to press check-out, it said there was nothing in my cart and when I tried again, the poster was sold out. I thought having something in the cart automatically reserved the item for me, at least for a few minutes?

So, the questions is, if you put a poster in your cart, does that mean it’s yours? No. Having something in your cart doesn’t mean it’s reserved for you. The only way that item comes out of inventory and into your home is if you pay for it. This is the same way on tons of other sites and is the absolute, best way to handle inventory.

YOU’VE LOST A CUSTOMER…FOREVER

This is probably the worst thing we hear from fans upset about not getting the poster they were shooting for. If we take this morning’s release as an example, you’ll see our predicament. We had 1,000 people on the site trying to get a little over 300 posters. Because Olly Moss’ run says 250, that doesn’t mean we have 250 for sale. The studio has their comps, we sold some at the show last week, Olly gets copies, etc. So, we had around 150 or so of Olly’s to sell and 1000 people on the site. Theoretically, we could have 850 people furious at us because they didn’t get a poster. Just know that this is what happens with limited edition releases. If you don’t get one, we are VERY SORRY. We want everyone to get what they want, but it is impossible. Stick with us, though. If you missed THE EVIL DEAD posters, we have something awesome coming up next week, and the week after that and the one after that. We have a ton of really amazing projects coming up that will last the rest of the year, so please…hang in there.

HOW WE ANNOUNCE SALES

We announce the on sale of our posters and shirts by many ways. We send out a bulk email, announce it on this blog, announce it on Facebook, Twitter and we also get covered by many major news sites. Many people ask us to announce times for our releases which we really don’t like doing. It’s a situation that can be described by the old cliche, “Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.” By releasing our posters at random times, it greatly eases traffic on the site. When we announce times, like we did today, the site bogs down and everything slows. The site didn’t officially crash today, but it got way too slow for my liking.

I’ll leave it at that. To sum up, we try to produce the best products for the best movies and want you to be able to have them in your home. We have grown by leaps and bounds the last year or so and are still trying to get everything perfect, so stick with us. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments. I’m looking forward to answering them.

-Justin

When we found out the Alamo Drafthouse was showing THE EVIL DEAD, we knew that we had to go all out for it. That means, two posters and a shirt! This also marks the first time we’ve worked with the ever prolific Olly Moss. Not giving anything away, but this won’t be the last time you hear from Olly.

Poster by Olly Moss. 16″x 24″ screen print. Signed and Numbered by the artist. Edition of 250. Click HERE to buy.

Olly was even on hand to sign and number these prints. Here’s a pic of the goings on:

Not only did Olly knock the print out of the park, but he did a great job on the Evil Dead shirt featuring the skull of BRUCE CAMPBELL! Click HERE to buy.

We also made a long distance call to Germany and got Florian Bertmer to put pen to paper.

Poster by Florian Bertmer. 24″x36″ screen print. Hand numbered. Printed by D&L Screen Printing. Edition of 150. Click HERE to buy.

-Justin

Today we are happy to announce that our THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE poster is ON SALE! We could not resist doing one after seeing the film. THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE is more warped and deranged than anything we have seen in recent years and is opening nationwide today. We here at Mondo give it our highest recommendation. There are some films that you can watch by yourself and then there are those films that get enhanced by watching with a ton of like minded folks…this would be the latter. Check your local listings to see if it’s playing in your area and if not, watch it on VOD. You can buy our poster for the film HERE.

Poster by The Silent Giants. 24″x36″ screen print. Signed and Numbered by the artist. Edition of 160.

-Justin

This is probably the most excited I’ve ever been to write a blog post. Seriously. We’ve got three MAJOR things going on, but first and foremost, the IRON MAN 2 online release.

Working in an official capacity with Paramount and MARVEL, we are thrilled to announce these limited edition screen printed posters for IRON MAN 2 by Tyler Stout and Mike Saputo. Buy them HERE.

Poster by Tyler Stout. 24″x36″ screen print with metallic inks. Hand numbered. Printed by D&L Screen Printing. Edition of 515.

Poster by Tyler Stout. 24″x36″ screen print with metallic and glow in the dark inks. Hand numbered. Printed by D&L Screen Printing. Edition of 130.

Poster by Mike Saputo. 24.5″x36.5″ screen print with metallic inks. Hand numbered. Printed by D&L Screen Printing. Edition of 265.

Again, all posters can be purchased by clicking HERE. 

The second item on the docket this morning is equally as satisfying as the IRON MAN project. Last year at Fantastic Fest, THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE screened and blew everyone away. Then, in one of the greatest moves ever made in cinematic history, IFC purchased and set a wide release date for the film! THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE needs to be experienced with audiences and you can now do that in several theaters across the country including the Alamo Drafthouse starting Friday. To celebrate this incredible feat of filmmaking and exhibition, we are releasing our own HUMAN CENTIPEDE poster.

It’s not up yet, but you can purchase THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE poster HERE on Friday, May 7th.

Lastly, we are releasing one of the two THE EVIL DEAD posters at the FINAL screening of this film tonight at the Alamo Ritz. If you follow Olly Moss on Twitter, you would have seen this mysterious Tweet:

“Just took delivery of maybe my favourite print I’ve done. For Alamo Drafthouse. I think I can show on Wednesday…”

Well, this is the print he was talking about and it is gorgeous:

We have been wanting to work with Olly for a while and were thrilled that the first project we put him on was THE EVIL DEAD. Not only did Olly do the poster, he also produced a shirt for the film…

Come on! I can’t show you everything! We will have the new Olly Moss shirt for sale at the show tonight, but will be releasing Olly’s poster and shirts in the very near future online AS WELL AS the other poster in the EVIL DEAD project by one of our favorite artists. Keep an eye on our Twitter and the blog for more info.

-Justin