Sore Loser

A few months ago someone made a post about a company that sells shirts and hats that feature fictitious logos from some popular sci-fi, cult or horror films.

The company also holds a monthly contest in which people can submit photos or illustrations that feature their t-shirts in some manner. My first thought was to do a zombie picture but after looking through the past winners, I saw a couple zombie (and one possession)entries had already been done.

Not wanting to follow the crowd I looked through the shirts again and came across a Weyland-Yutani shirt from the film Alien.

According to Wikipedia :

Weyland-Yutani is a fictional corporation in the motion picture Alien and its sequels, often referred to simply as "The Company". It is one of the corporations that runs the human colonies outside the solar system through the Extrasolar Colonization Administration, has a seat in the Interstellar Commerce Commission's Company Review Board, and also has a large presence on Earth.

Weyland-Yutani is consistently portrayed as exhibiting the worst aspects of corporate profiteering, willing to sacrifice decency and human life in the pursuit of profit. In various portrayals of the Aliens' universe, the corporation has its hands in all aspects of space colonization and research. The corporation has consistently ordered its employees and agents to attempt to obtain living xenomorphs so that they can be exploited as a biological weapon, without regard for their obtainers' lives.

Weyland-Yutani is a modern example of the longstanding trope of the evil megacorporation in science fiction.

Brilliant! I LOVE Alien! Without a second thought I was off.

I knew I wanted my image to tell a story of some sort. I envisioned that Parker (played by Yaphet Kotto) had a son who years later would be doing the same job as his father. As Parker Sr. had never returned from his mission, Junior was on a quest not only to complete what his father never did but do it as an honour to his father's memory.

I'm a pretty modest guy 99.9% of the time, (hey, I'm a Canadian) but I "knew" that I had the winning entry that month.

So it was with a bit..er okay, a major fucking shock when the winner(s) turned out to be, you guessed it, zombies. Not only was it another zombie image but it also featured a t-shirt that a previous winner had used.

I was pissed. And I sulked (yes Southerman I tend to be doing that a lot lately) I vowed I'd never look at that fucking site again.

Until this month.

I couldn't help myself. Part of me was sure that they made a mistake and that it would show up this month or that there would a least be an image that would blow me out of the water in terms of creativity and execution.

It was neither, the winner was a dude sitting on a log in front a building that The Shining was shot in or around, wearing the Overlook Hotel shirt.

I thought that these were uberfans of films, the nerdlords of all the film nerds. [Sigh] Sometimes I fucking hate people ( You were warned!).

Anyway enough of this blabbering here's my entry . Oh by the way I will probably order something from them in the future, but not as soon as I originally intended.

Bitches!

That's a great entry man.

Sadly, I really suspect many just didn't friggin' get it. (I've seen Alien on the order of 20 times over the years, but my nerditry doesn't extend to movies, so I couldn't remember the name of Yaphet Kotto's character for the life of me. The fact that it's a film-nerd sort of site AND you provided a great big friggin' clue by naming the guy "'Kotto' Parker Jr." should have been a tip-off....)

That's worth a good sulk as far as I'm concerned.

I like it - but probably far to clever for them.

Are the other images there yours or just a random selection from the site, I was wondering what game(s) these were from fatadventurepr6.jpg , samplecounterexplaineduk4.jpg , licinius.jpg , 01overviewgd9.jpg ?

I remember a thread here talking about the first one... was the game called Tales of Adventure?

EDIT: Duh, search function?
Part 1
Part 2

Dogmatix wrote:

That's a great entry man.

Thanks Dogmatix!

The fact that it's a film-nerd sort of site AND you provided a great big friggin' clue by naming the guy "'Kotto' Parker Jr." should have been a tip-off....)

That was my thinking, oh well I had fun doing it.

Southernman wrote:

I like it - but probably far to clever for them.

Thanks Tom.

Are the other images there yours or just a random selection from the site

It looks like images from other users, but it's funny 'cuz there seems to be a few images I've seen here at "The Fort".

Great entry. I'd have picked it over another fucking zombie pic. Unless the zombie was chasing a hot girl wearing no shirt. Then you'd be out of luck. But short of that your picture should have been the winner. I am outraged on your behalf.

Not to sound like a dick, cause I think it's a great concept, but from a straight shirt design perspective it's not all that good. It wouldn't look great on a shirt as a set of graphic elements and it would lose a lot of the detail in the photos when being printed. For example, keeping enough detail to be able to read the company name on his shirt would be next to impossible, and even then it would only be readable if you were really really close and thus not well suited for a shirt.

Generally speaking, for shirts you want really bold and/or simple stuff. Shirts are a totally different medium than anything else and have their own set of design constraints/needs. I used to design and print shirts for bands (and whoever else really, but mostly bands) and I've seen a lot of great ideas on paper that just won't work well as shirts. It mostly comes from printing up a bunch of terrible shirts and realizing what does and doesn't work haha.

I didn't think the contest was about making a shirt...but using one of their already made shirt designs..

lj1983 wrote:

I didn't think the contest was about making a shirt...but using one of their already made shirt designs..

Exactly.

This link shows past winners.

lj1983 wrote:

I didn't think the contest was about making a shirt...but using one of their already made shirt designs..

I fail.

You should have won.

but yeah, that's an awesome entry...and probably to in depth for most internet people

The employee of the month idea is awesome! You totally got scammed.

lj1983 wrote:

but yeah, that's an awesome entry...and probably to in depth for most internet people

That's true but these shirts aren't geared toward most people on the web, they are for, I assume, fans of these films.

If I saw some guy walking down the street wearing an WGON TV shirt, I would stop and say "Where the fuck did you get that from? That's from Dawn of the Dead right? Or the Winchester Tavern t-shirt. These shirts are for the film nerd who would get or recognize these logos.

That was the reason I went for the concept I did.

Hatchling wrote:

The employee of the month idea is awesome! You totally got scammed.

Exactly. Even if they didn't get the Kotto/Parker reference, the Employee of the Month thing with all the pipes in the background reminiscent of the movie setting should have been enough.