A Tale Of Two Tees
The economy is looking rough, a Hollywood personality becomes president & almost gets assassinated... We should clarify, we're talking about the 1980s today.
The coincidences line up quite a bit — we couldn't resist.
A new weapon bursts onto the scene and a new era of warfare has begun falling into place post-Vietnam, one that's colorized, sensationalized, and meshing together with pop culture as it's broadcast on TVs around the globe.
Our 80s-90s tee-remake game has needed some TLC — we looked at a few 'retired' designs of ours and decided it was high time that they made their return, looking better than they ever have.
In other words, the UZI Carbine & Pistol tee and the hilarious bootleg-origin "Bort" Gulf War shirt returned to our store.
But if you're not in the know about the origins of these designs today there's a surprising amount of history to talk about for both articles....
UZI DOES IT.
The year was 1948, Israel was brand-spankin' new and was surrounded by countries who wanted to wipe them off the map.
Their makeshift armed forces were equipped with WWII hand-me-down bolt action rifles of time's past, but there was one thing for sure. The future was self-loading & fully automatic.
So, major Uziel Gal spearheaded an incredibly simple-to-operate, cheap to manufacture, and compact submachine gun. It was a revolutionary departure from the heavy, full sized sub-guns of the era. Made with stamped steel and completely tool-less to service in the field, it offered suppressive fire at a compact size.
It would be deployed in the Suez crisis in 1956, definitely not by the United States CIA by the thousands in Vietnam, and started slowly appearing more and more in the pages of Soldier Of Fortune alongside other compact sub-guns of the time like the Swedish K.
Immediately, the impressions it left were great: Soldiers of all kinds were impressed by its versatility, unkillable reliability, and surprising accuracy.
It was only a matter of time before Gal's UZI would hit the largest arms market in the world. The USA.
Uziel Gal moved to good 'ol Philly in the 70s and found a job at US manufacturer "Action Arms". The president of the company had a good feeling about the UZI, even in a neutered semi-auto form.
After some back and forth with the ATF and Israeli Military Industries (IMI, now IWI), authentic UZIs were a "go". It was a much larger success than Action Arms ever anticipated, selling 7000 units at the first unveiling in 1980. And then 30,000 more in the first three years.
Then they dropped probably the hardest advert of all time to sell even more of them 1984, the design which now lives on our tees.
It was an absolute hit on the civilian market, a common sight at the gun range, and made its way onto the big screen as the de-facto "tough guy" SMG to spray-n-pray at the hip.
Then it got global news coverage, seen on Reagan's secret service detail as they quickly sprang into action during an Assassination attempt. It was win after win for the Uzi, but it couldn't go on forever...
In four short decades, the UZI went from global superstar to a specifically banned evil black rifle. With the Assault Weapons ban in '94, the government rained on the SMG's parade — IMI imports were completely cut off, and in an apparent act of greed, the head honcho of Action Arms didn't want to pay the 5% royalties to Uziel Gal.
After a lengthy court battle, the guy ended up having to pay DOUBLE what Gal first asked for. Oops.
Its legacy is without a doubt still relevant today — auction-gouging of the surviving UZIs continue on, and shoddy clone builds flow steadily into a nostalgia-fueled market...
We hope to carry on its prestige with a tee shirt showcasing its best times instead.
EAT MY SHIRTS!
Let's start off with the first question: Why the heck is this uncanny version of Bart Simpson on a shirt about the gulf war?
For those of you born a little further into the 2000s, The Simpsons was not only a good show at one point in time, but it was the advent of adult-audience cartoons that paved the way for countless popular shows like Family Guy and even Rick & Morty.
To make a long literary essay short, this yellow family was nothing short of a worldwide cultural sensation throughout the 90s.
The equivalent bootlegged character nowadays would probably be SpongeBob SquarePants or the Minions from the "Dispicable Me" series. Why are they all yellow? Is there some conspiracy to explain this?
As is usually the case for recognizable characters, the bootlegs flowed like water at tourist-trap boardwalks and tee shops and typically had something to say about the politics of the time.
With Bart acting as a symbol of the prevailing counterculture of the 80s and 90s youths. It wasn't odd to see him on protest/parody paraphernalia or offensively doodled by people for fun.
He appeared in particular on a lot of merchandise about the gulf war since it coincided with some of the most popular seasons of the show's airings — examples go from designs like ours to ones that split our sides and have absolutely zero chill.
We chose this design to remake a while back but went the extra mile — we fixed the hilariously inaccurate camo he was wearing, re-illustrated everything by hand, but couldn't bring it to ourselves to fix the hilarious lazy eye pupil.
We take pride in our bootlegged bootleg — and this time in particular we have the quality & print really dialed in so you can enjoy "Bort" in all of his yellow glory...