Smurfs Attack - Old School Toon Tee Shirt

This is Smurfs Attack available at SplitReason.com

Split Reason has been around since 2003, however they seem to have steered more and more towards the tried and tested popularity vote system you can find at Threadless and many other similar t-shirt designer sites. (I have a problem as a designer with this format - it seems rely on a more throwaway attitude towards new designers - popularity is viral, not dependent on the votes of competitors and anonymous surfers - oh well - my five cents.)

You’re sure to find gems everywhere you look, although it can be frustrating when you see a t-shirt you like sitting for weeks on end in the submission pool. Luckily Smurfs Attack is available to buy now. The design caught my eye, basically due to my own childhood memories in the 1970’s, popping down the local BP petrol garage and buying a Smurf every Sunday like it was some kind of small blue religion.

I soon grew out of the phase and passed the whole collection, to a kid down the road with a single mother and permanent food stains on his t-shirts. He was broke, I was cynical, he did collect almost all of my toys at the time, including all my Action Man gear, thinking back, if that kid didn’t smear it all with chocolate and leave it at the end of the garden, he should have a pretty health stash of collectibles for auction by now! I can’t imagine what I saw in the Smurfs at the time, they sure are squeaky, their voices are almost as infuriating as that glib, nonchalant, indeterminate so-called laugh that Mickey Mouse would occasionally bark at Donald, usually at the duck’s expense.

It’s nice to see another side to these sickeningly wholesome things, I’m not even sure what they are, I presumed they were elves at the time, although that could be due to where I bought them. The main message from these mutant woodland creatures was co-operation, à la Sesame Street stylee. It’s actually a pretty hilarious t-shirt if you were there at the time, of course there’s the Eighties TV cartoon series that created a resurgence of interest, but if you’re truly old school, you had the awful figurines and for a few brief weeks thought they rocked, and then decided you couldn’t stand all this love and peace and hapinness and forced the poor things to fight to the death until you were bored. In your mind it probably looked a little like this t-shirt!

N.B: Hmm… seems like I’ll need to build a little more traffic for the blog before I can expect my first official submission to submissions@buy-tees.net, I’ll continue in the meantime with a series of quick low-downs on some of my favourite independent t-shirt designs recently surfed, and a little information on the designers behind the ideas (when I can find it!).