Title: Jaws 3-D
Publisher: Topps
Year: 1983
Details: 6 Cards || 1 Viewed || 1 Stick Bubble Gum

A Topps 44-Card Series - In 3D: The cast of "Jaws 3-D", a terrifying entry in the popular series that boasts dimensional photography and unique special effects.

Ok. A diverse group of water enthusiasts. Other than the dude with a beret, a pretty normal-looking sea-side-living bunch.

Bloody Remains! Kathryn Morgan offers a snack to her friend, the killer whale Shamu.

Hmm. Ok. Didn’t expect to see Shamu. Does part of this movie take place at Sea World?

The New Peril! Kathryn Morgan is shocked to learn that the shark has been transferred to a different tank and may not survive.

Well… there’s another shot that seems to be set in Sea World. That’s strange. Surely the entire movie isn’t water-theme-park based.

Also, I’m pretty sure I can see that dude in the blue gym short’s right ball.

Seeking Human Prey! The horribly mangled body of Shelby Overman is discovered and a startling discovery is made: there's another, even larger shark in the vicinity!

Poor Shelby Overman! Was his (her?) body discovered under that sheet? Pretty convenient for the survivors, though I don’t see how that could possibly be blamed on a shark. There are sharks in this movie, right?

Oh, wait… there’s a shark reference. Apparently there’s an “even larger shark in the vicinity.” Which I presume means the vicinity of  Sea World. Not sure how that’s even possible.

Madness and Mayhem! Innocent water skiers are oblivious to the presence of the monster shark..!

Really? REALLY? This movie has a Shark vs. Synchronized Lady Water Skiers scene? Was it a parody? What kind of person would let a shark into Sea World in the first place?

Diverting the Monster! Calvin Bouchard has accidentally allowed the killer shark to enter Sea World!

Oh. A Calvin Bouchard type of person. That jerk.

So after seeing six still images from Jaws 3-D I am thoroughly confused. Partially about the film’s plot, and mostly about how I could have made it 25+ years without knowing that Jaws 3-D was set IN A SEA WORLD! That’s a major cinematic knowledge gap. Thanks for filling it, Topps!

PS: The promised 3-D Viewer? Completely missing from my pack. Who do I call for a refund?

Title: Fright Flicks
Publisher: Topps
Year: 1985
Details: 9 Cards || 1 Sticker || 1 Stick Bubble Gum

The pack I bought contained cards with images from Aliens, Day of the Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street I, II, & III, Poltergeist, The Fly (1986), Ghostbusters, and Predator:

Of the nine images, my favorite – based on the badass-image/non-sequitur-tagline combo -  is the “Okay, Who Took A Bite Out Of My Bran Muffin?”/The Fly card (Card #9).  I’ve always been partial to the toungue-in-phone gag from A Nightmare on Elm Street, so Card #8 is a great find for me as well.

The pack also had a striking Fright Night sticker that I’m currently in the process of finding a home for. (One problem with my day job is that I have relatively few occasions to carry a sticker-covered Trapper Keeper):

That's Slimer's chin on the reverse-side puzzle piece

Finally, this pack contained a piece of the ubiquitous Topps chewing gum:

Card-collecting readers of a certain age should get an immediate and powerful sense memory from viewing this image

Although I haven’t had a piece of Topps gum for close to two decades, seeing the stick immediately made my mouth water. Even when fresh, Topps gum wasn’t objectively good. But I remember loving it as a kid because… hey… free gum! Also, it was such an integral part of the card-collecting process (open pack, chew gum, see if you got anything good) that I never even questioned whether it was a good as a stick of Big Red or a chunk of Bazooka Joe (note: it wasn’t).

In the interest of journalistic integrity, I decided to chew the 25-plus-year-old stick while writing this post, and include my thoughts on how it tasted. Like a connoisseur of fine beer, I sniffed the gum before chewing it. I was surprised to discover that it was completely devoid of any discernible odor. I suppose it was made of iocane powder.

Undeterred, I put the gum in my mouth. I expected it to be tough and difficult to chew, but the opposite was true. Within seconds, the gum had completely liquefied, leaving behind a glaze of slightly-thicker-and-sweeter-than-normal saliva in my mouth. I don’t know what the substance was that made Topps gum chewy, but it apparently self destructs in less than two-and-a-half decades.

If I die in my sleep, please bury me under this tombstone:

Best. Epitaph. Ever.

If you remember buying Fright Flicks, let me know your favorite cards or memories of collecting them in the comments.

Micah :: Reel Distraction

Screw You, Exploding 1-Up Lady!

This is the Swedish VHS boxart for PINBALL SUMMER, aka PICK-UP SUMMER, aka FLIPPER GIRLS. Or, as the Swedes like to call it, GÄNGETS HÅRDA SOMMAR, which as near as I can tell means “Hard Gang Summer.”

As you might gather from the artwork, PINBALL SUMMER is an ultra-specific pinball-based teen sex comedy. When I reviewed the film three years ago, I had this to say:

What makes Pinball Summer different than other teen sex comedies is that even the clichéd teen sex comedy scenes all have at least a tangential connection to the world of pinball. You’d think it’d be hard to come up with 100 minutes of pinball-related activities, but director Mihalka somehow manages to do it. It’s pretty amazing actually. There’s pinball challenges to determine who pays for dinner, make-out sessions in a pinball factory, strip-pinball parties, alpha-male demonstrations of pinball prowess… there’s even pinball-related double entendres like “I wanna tilt you on the machine!”

Yeah, it’s a pretty enjoyable film.

We’re all about the learning here at Mondo, so here’s your Swedish lesson for the day. According to Google Translate, the phrase “FULL RULLE! BRUDAR * BILAR * BÅGAR * FLIPPER” means “FULL REEL! BABES * CARS * ROLL * PINBALL” in English.

Click here for a shot of the back of the box, which contains bonus excellent-sounding Swedish words like knutte-gänget (biker-gang), sammandrabbningar (clashes), flipperturner (pinball tournament), and flipperdrottningen (pinball queen).

Micah :: Reel Distraction

I’ve been inspired all week by the courageous Terror Tuesday screening of the misunderstood 80′s horror oddity Halloween III. If you aren’t familiar with the film, it’s the redheaded stepchild of the Halloween franchise that has nothing to do with the other movies- beyond the fact that it’s packed full of generic John Carpenter synthesizer music. This movie is so random that it could only have been inspired by inhalant abuse (ok, so they claim it’s actually inspired by Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but how you get from modest aliens to evil Irish warlocks with armies of robot yuppies that are plotting to appease the old Gods’ hunger for sacrifice by using stonehenge dust-powered lasers to turn children’s heads into bugs... I have no idea). Anyway, the plot uses whole-head halloween masks to hide the child-obliterating druid laser technology I mentioned, and I thought this year I would get all crafty and make myself a whole-head mask. This way, when I am busy abusing inhalants on Halloween, no one will be able to tell I am drooling, or identify me to the police when they find me sleeping in their closet, covered in bean-dip and candy wrappers.
Here’s how I did it:
I picked Crayola Model Magic as my main medium because it’s easy to mold, and dries into a sort of lightweight styrofoam that is easy to paint (get the giant tub of white, not the little kiddie packs that come in colors). When you are making something as big and heavy as a mask, however, you need some sort of reinforcing structure. You can use a balloon, or wadded up newspaper wrapped in tape, or something with a surface smooth enough for the model magic not to stick to, but I had a feeling that something this large would come apart when I tried to peel it off whatever form I built it on, so instead I made an armature out of this stuff called Shapelock, and then built the mask on top of it, embedding the reinforcement in the mask. Shapelock comes in a bag of white beads that you pour into hot water. The beads melt together into this pliable clear mass that you can sculpt with your hands. When the Shapelock cools, it turns into hard, dense plastic.
A word to the wise, if you drape a bunch of rope-like blobs of shapelock around your head, get it off while it is still flexible. The stuff contracts slightly as it cools, and it would be loads of fun to pour scalding water over your head to try and melt it again when you can’t get it off. Likewise, once you remove it, the contracting action will probably make your framework too tight to get back over your head. I used a hair drier to re-soften and loosen a few pieces, or alternately you can saw or drimmel pieces to make room or to make joints.

Next I applied the Model Magic in big sheets and blobs. You can keep the Model Magic soft by getting it wet, and also smooth out the lines where you join separate hunks together by rubbing it with water.

Remember to leave yourself air holes! Also, if you have a microchip full of stonehenge dust that you want to slip in, do it now while the Model Magic is soft, and make your air holes big enough to let out the rattlesnakes and centipedes that will be boiling out of all your facial orifices. It’s inhumane to keep them trapped inside!
After that, you just need a good coat of paint. I’m almost finished with mine- this paired with an upsetting black unitard and a lot of blue paint is going to be a Draag costume from the 1973 animated film Fantastic Planet. I’m hoping the red saucer-eyes will discourage anyone from thinking I am a “Blue Man”, but luckily one of the benefits of a whole-head mask is that if you punch someone in the junk as hard as you can and then run away, no one will know who did it.

-Wiley

Under the pretense of instructing viewers on how to make delicious meals, Shasta and Arcie shoot the shit about David Icke style conspiracy theories, how long Dick Cheney’s lizard heart will last, and whether or not there are lots of pagans at SXSW. Normally, public access shows that are purposefully trying to be funny are unbearable, but the Cola Sisters have the amazing ability to remain dead pan just enough so that the accidental channel surfer who stumbles across their show will be completely convinced and weirded the fuck out. Here are the Cola Sisters interviewing another straight faced nutjob, The Room’s Tommy Wiseau:

Tuesday night at the Austin Art Authority the Cola Sisters debuted their masterstroke, Toning For The Tribulations. What Strange Brew is to SCTV, Toning For The Tribulations is to Cooking Good. Now available on DVD, Toning is an hour long work out designed to get you in shape for the end times. Watching the premier last night while the Cola Sisters worked out live in person, I realized that I need to start actually doing these exercises. It will be way more fun than Jazzercise. Let’s let the Cola Sisters explain what Toning For The Tribulations is all about:

Though the entire video is hysterically funny, this final segment on how to exercise during everyday life, followed by a meditation sequence, had me laughing so hard it was almost embarrassing. It’s hard to pick a favorite exercise tip but mine has got to be:

“Dig yourself out of the mass grave (if your lucky enuf to have succesfully played dead and avoided all the machine gun bulets and bayonet stabs – you will work off a lot of calories heaving them other bodies of a you)”

Oh, and by the way, I’m Devon, one of the new Mondo Tees bloggers. Here is a picture of me with Arcie and Shasta so we can make the internet just a little less anonymous.

-Devon

A footnote to my post on Monday – “Yayoi Kusama: I Love Me“, a documentary about The Polka-Dot Queen just became available on DVD, Twitch has a review here.
-Wiley

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

-Justin

PIE SLICE BAKERY!!!!!

Dammit, I’m not a thin man and learning about PIE SLICE BAKERY pretty much sealed the deal for me staying that way. To make things worse, it’s like two blocks away from Mondo….and it’s on the way to work! Not only do they have insane baked goods like cupcakes, cheese cake and, well, pies…they also have breakfast tacos and pizza! Seriously, I’ll probably be hitting this place up at least 2 times a week as it has become my new favorite restaurant in town!

Check out their website HERE and go get some pie!

SCARECROW VIDEO!!!!!

Scarecrow Video itself isn’t new to me, but their blog is! I’ve been there several times and have lots of friends that work there, but had no idea they were kings of the blogosphere! One post in particular really blew me away. It broke down every movie that even remotely influenced Tarantino’s INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. You can read it HERE. I don’t know about you, but when KILL BILL came out, I loved watching the  movies that he took inspiration from. Now, thanks to Scarecrow, I can do the same thing with BASTERDS. So, before you go see it again, you can have a mini marathon to get you pumped to blow some Nazi’s away!

ALEX PARDEE AND THE SCARED FRIENDS!!!!!

Look it up on Wikipedia…it’s a fact. ALEX PARDEE IS COOL AS FUCK. Just when I thought this guy couldn’t get any cooler, I get this pic in my email from Mitch Putnam.

Click on the picture to read the full story from Pardee, but to summarize, some crazy dude at his Upper Playground Seattle show came with a razor and started gashing himself across the stomach and wrists spraying blood all over the place. After swearing a lot and saying “no way” out loud over and over again, I went to ZeroFriends and grabbed his SCARED FRIENDS shirt in blue.

In case you don’t remember, Pardee is the mega-horror fan/ super-artist who destroyed the RE-ANIMATOR poster we released in July.

You can also see it hanging in the background of the picture with him posing behind the blood!

A digital high five goes out to this guy for being the worlds biggest BASKET CASE fan and for cheating death! We at Mondo salute you!

-Justin

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS by Tyler Stout

24″x36″ 4 color screenprint, hand numbered with an edition size of 450. We only have super limited numbers of these for sale as we gave Cinemapocalypse attendees first crack. LIMIT 2 PER PERSON.

Also available is this gorgeous variant edition.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (VARIANT) by Tyler Stout

The edition on this particular poster is only 80.  LIMIT 1 PER PERSON. Both were printed at D and L Screenprinting.

Print Mafia also got to take a shot at Hitler and as you can see…mission accomplished!

Hitler Target (INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS) by Print Mafia

4 color screenprint. 17.5″x23″. Hand Numbered.

Last but not least, the movie that started the “men on a mission” genre…THE DIRTY DOZEN!

THE DIRTY DOZEN by The Silent Giants

Edition of 90. 18″x24″ Signed, numbered and hand screened by the artist.

-Justin