Photo by James BunoanThe swap meet is the communal graveyard of Southern California, where our consumer culture banishes its former fads to the bazaars of smelly tarps and gaping vans. But for one brief, inauthentic moment during the early 1990s, swap meets from Cypress to Orange were the Rodeo Drives for the season's fashion statement—the imitation SimpsonsT-shirt.
At the time, The Simpsons was still considered a passing phenomenon—rather than the American cultural landmark it eventually became—so Fox swamped stores with Simpsons action figures, T-shirts and records. Kids and adults alike especially bought reams of Simpsons T-shirts at stores, visually announcing to the world their hipster ratings.
An adroit clothier—his or her identity is lost to history, but he or she probably ran a Malaysian sweatshop—must've taken notice because imitation SimpsonsT-shirts soon popped up in swap meets. The telling factor was in the signature: Fox-sanctioned T-shirts bore the autograph of Simpsonscreator Matt Groening; knockoff producers didn't bother with that final detail. No matter—the much-cheaper imitations became as popular as the real McClure.
Then things got strange. Swap meet sellers began hawking SimpsonsT-shirts that imagined the clan as Rastafarians; lizards; and even Mexicans wearing ponchos, smoking pot and playing guitars. Most of the piratería(“pirated goods” in Mexican Spanish) T-shirts, though, focused on Bart Simpson, who was then the show's focal point. One genre of pirateríaT-shirt depicted Bart assuming the identity of the era's popular sports stars: Michael Jordan, Joe Montana and baseball/football machine Bo Jackson. Other T-shirts—Bart stuck between the ass cheeks of an obese sumo wrestler, with the legend “Crack Kills”; Bart karate-chopping his cartoon competition, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, into bloody bits—defy categorization.
Still, the most infamous Simpsons T-shirt mutation remains the “Can't Touch This” series. You'll never see Bart like this again: black, with red fingernails, flipping off the world via the chest of the shirt's wearer, the legends “Can't Touch This” and “Fucking Bart” buttressing Bart's head. Bowdlerizing teachers at my elementary school forced kids wearing this T-shirt to turn their shirts inside-out. Shows what little principals know: the bird continued to brightly offend through the T-shirt's flimsy material.
Piratería SimpsonsJust like in real life.Cue Mr. Burns: ex-cellent. T-shirts largely disappeared once the show transformed into an American institution and manufacturers focused their factories on Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and Pokémon. But the legacy remains: in the classic episode “Behind the Laughter,” the faux-narrator notes that the Simpsons became so popular their faces showed up on crappy merchandise. The corresponding animation shows a store rack hanging with T-shirts that feature a smiling Bart uttering such non-Bart maxims as “You Bet Your Sweet Bippy, Man” and “Life Begins at Conception, Man,” trademark licenses be damned.
