The Mountain’s 2013 T-Shirt Series

“There are new shirts from The Mountain?  Oh my God, I’m so excited right now.  So so excited.”

~AFFotD  Editor-In-Chief Johnny Roosevelt after a Mountain Dew and Purple Drank binge

There are a few landmark cultural events that are forever burned into our memories.  They were momentous occasions that defined a nation and shaped every single one of us in the best ways possible.  The appeal of prohibition.  Neil Armstrong’s moon walk.  The first bottle of American Honey hitting store shelves.  All of these pale in comparison to The Mountain designing and pressing the Three Wolves T-Shirt.  Finally, a shirt that could only be enhanced by the addition of potato chip grease stains, a shirt that ranged in size from “no you’re going to want something larger than large” all the way to “XXX-Large.”  It combined all the raw American predatory energy of wolves with howling and the moon to create a piece of tailored fabric that apparently causes American super powers.

But Americans are never content to do one thing great, and the creative minds at The Mountain were no different.  When they introduced their Big Face Animal series, we were right there sifting through the Funyuns and weed smoke to show you biking pigs and space gorillas.  And then, earlier this year, we got up from our La-Z-Boys, put some ointment on our bed sores, and shared with you our thoughts of the second batch of shirts designed by these cowboy hat wearing geniuses.

Recently, as we were going through their site looking for Christmas presents for our friends, families, and the one guy on our mailing list that won’t stop messaging us with cryptic demands that we write about the Solar System more, we could hardly contain our excitement when we saw that the 2013 Big Face Animal collection was out and available for purchase.  Because apparently if you’re going to be releasing T-shirts of giant kitten faces, you have to release them a year in advance.  You know, like a Kia.

But look at us, babbling on when we could be showing you pictures of giant bee faces.  Behold, the 2013 Mountain T-Shirt collection!

No we absolutely were not kidding when we mentioned T-shirts of bee faces.  That is a bee’s face, thousands of times larger than it would appear in nature, bursting from your torso like a Eli Roth directed reboot of Bee Movie.  This shirt is both mesmerizing and terrifying, and we’ll tell you why:  whenever you take something tiny, and we’re talking the size of a pencil eraser or smaller here, is magnified to giant proportions, you are guaranteed to end up with something from your nightmares.  Sea monkeys do not look like friendly sea people under a microscope, they look like a torture device meant to be inserted into your urethra.  While Honey, I Shrunk The Kids alluded to this, we can’t stress enough that if an ant were people sized, it’d look like a clown rapist.  So yeah, we’re going to go out on a limb here and say that if you’re looking wear a shirt that consists of a bee’s face stretched out over your entire torso and beer gut, you might want to familiarize yourself with the sound of small children fleeing as soon as they see you, because you’re going to get that a lot.

We have a hard time imagining who the target demographic would be for this shirt.  Because we tried to think of a list of people who would be excited to get this shirt, and so far we’ve come up with “mildly mentally disabled adults in their early 30’s that want to run around going ‘BZZZZ’ when they going grocery shopping with their mom,” “former beekeepers who got fired after testing positive for hallucinogenics on a drug test,” and “giant sentient bees who are trying to fit in and spy on human society but don’t have a good sense of our fashion sense yet.”

Oh hey, speaking of hallucinogenic drugs—it’s the double unicorn double rainbow double enchanted castle shirt!  Because even PCP fever dreams can pretty and fantastical, right?  This is the shirt that’s perfect for both women shopping at Wal-Mart in their finest Zubaz and for Bronies who are looking to expand their wardrobes.  All kidding aside, the design for this shirt is brilliant, but it’s brilliant in the way that Nikola Tesla a genius who happened to suffer from severe OCD.  Because anyone with a marketing degree could look at the Double Rainbow video, see a three wolves howling at the moon shirt, and realize that these were converging points of interest.  But The Mountain decided, fuck that, if we’re doing a double rainbow, let’s put unicorns on there, because reasons, and let’s also put castles on there, because holy shit this is some dank weed.

Our biggest fear is that the castles on this picture are pretty clearly supposed to be the Disney Enchanted Castle, and we’ve learned from personal experience that Disney is not a company you want to fuck with as far as copyright matters go (as seen by our failed attempt to make “Donald Drunk” AFFotD’s official cartoon mascot).  We just really hope Disney doesn’t come after The Mountain, because we love The Mountain, but Disney has the rights to Darth Vader and they’re the only ones who know where our families are.

In First Blood, John Rambo kills exactly one person in the whole movie, and his shirt is on while he does it.  Now, in each subsequent Rambo sequel, that number went up, from 58, to 78, to 83.  Why is that?  Is it because we have an insatiable blood lust when it comes to our movies?  Well, sure, but mainly it’s because anytime we’re going to do a sequel to something, we’re going to do it bigger and better.  The Mountain is no exception, as evidence by this shirt called “Find 10 Wolves.”   There are ten wolves in there you guys!  That’s like, more than twice as many wolves as in the three wolves howling at the moon shirt!  We’ve only found about six of them so far, but that’s only because it’s way too early in the day for us to break out the peyote.

Our favorite thing about this shirt is that it’s so scientifically accurate.  Not a lot of people know that the Northern Lights is made out of wolf ghosts, but it totally is—Aurora Borealis is actually an Algonquin term that means, “Holy shit you guys, there’s fuckin’ WOLVES IN THE SKY, oh man I’m tripping major balls right now, I need someone to spot me, man.  Goddamn this is some strong shit.”

This is a honey badger.  He’s pissed.  We don’t know what you did to piss him off, but if we’re to believe everything we ever hear from effeminate gay men (which we do), honey badgers are both crazy and nastyass.  This shirt actually can actually be a pretty good public service for our nation, since if every tall, skinny convicted felon had an XX-Large sized honey badger draped over his frame like a carnivorous muumuu everyone would know that they’re unstable, angry at the system, and it’s best to leave them alone and let them continue gnawing on the chunk of beeswax they inexplicably are holding.

Oh yeah, we forgot to mention, they’re doing zombie shirts now, because everyone loves zombies, because we’re in a fucking recession.  The Walking Dead is one of the most viewed TV Shows in the history of cable television, and they’ve spent almost half of the show’s existence working very hard to not farm on a farm.  So are we surprised that The Mountain is trying to cash in on the zombie craze?  Absolutely not.  Are we frustrated about their efforts?  No, we fully hope they sell millions of these shirts to parents who aren’t sure what to get their introverted children who are way into comic books and George Romero movies.

The only issue we have with this shirt is that we have no idea what it’s trying to convey.  Is this supposed to be the last thing you see before being devoured in a zombie apocalypse?  The title of the shirt (“Last Breath”) seems to imply that, but if you’re buying a shirt from The Mountain, why are you married and wearing a suit?  Or, since it’s going to be from the vantage point of whoever is looking at it, does this imply that you’re part of the hoard if you’re wearing this shirt?  Hunting down lone groomsmen in your constant search for flesh to devour?

Actually, we’ll take three of these shirts, please.  Two XX-Larges and one Medium please (every once and a while we like to squeeze into a shirt that really shows our jelly roll situation in the most graphically uncomfortable way possible).

Ahem.  Excuse us for a moment.

*calmly takes out newspaper and lays it on the ground*

AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!  AGH!  AGHHHHHHHHHHHH!  AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKIDY FUCK!?  AGHHHHHHH! AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

*collectively curls up into fetal position, begins sobbing uncontrollably*

Haaaa, oh The Mountain, we can never stay mad at you.  The moment you create a clown-monster-zombie from the worst nightmare we ever had to spend thousands of dollars on therapy to suppress, you come right back with a scrawny ostrich shirt which you absolutely know is going to be worn by a six foot four, 120 pound dude with a Kid Rock haircut/facial hair combo who is a little too quick to chime in on a conversation about how food stamps come on a debit card now.  This is definitely one of those shirts that will be purchased by people who look like their pets.  So long as their pets are, say, a long necked bird.

Either way, we here at AFFotD once again salute The Mountain for continuing to fight the good fight, and for reminding us that the good fight involves a lot of over-sized faces being put on over-sized shirts.  God bless.