5 Killer Terminator Tees

Thunderfrogs is brought to you today by the letters FIC, and the number 11.

With Watchmen having come and gone (to, it should be noted, much less fanfare than was deserved), excitable fan boys everywhere are turning their thoughts to the upcoming releases of the Star Trek reboot (May 8th), the Transformers sequel (July 3rd) and the first installment of what promises to be an epic Terminator trilogy set in a post-nuclear, post-Ahnold (?) apocalypse. Even though Terminator: Salvation won't hit screens for about 6 weeks (May 21), I thought now might be the ideal time to survey the marketplace for relevant shirts.

Some simple Google-sleuthing has yielded a wealth of options, but I've whittled my suggestions down to 5 intriguing designs, all widely available from an assortment of online vendors.

1. 80's Tees is selling this fantastic shirt which directly invokes a classic scene in the very first film when Arnold's T-800 model coldly robs and kills an unsuspecting arms dealer. Effing hilarious, I say.





2. This top from Snorg Tees has made the rounds on various tee blogs in the past, but I really, really, really like the clever, if simple and childish, wordplay riffing on what is arguably Schwarzenegger's signature one-liner.



3. As most Terminator devo-tees (pun intented, yo) are aware, the character of John Connor — the leader of the future resistance movement — will be portrayed in the newest film by the Dark Knight himself, Christian Bale. The actor made headlines recently with an embarrasing on-set rant in which he chewed out the lighting director. A tape of the exchange was subsequently leaked online, thereby becoming fodder for culture jammers, remixers and satirists of all sorts. Naturally enough, it didn't take long for an entrepreneurial t-shirt company to cash in on the moment. To wit, peep out this shirt from Despair.com.



4. I'm fairly conflicted about the fourth entry on this list, which I discovered on eBay. I can't imagine I would ever wear this, and yet, I'm awestruck at its creepy and faux-metallic construction of the Terminator chassis, which conveniently puts a reverse spin on a campy and quite memorable line from the second film: "I'm a cybernetic organism — living tissue over a metal endoskeleton."



5. The last tee on our index comes, like the first, from 80's Tees. And, similar to number two, it puns on the same snippet of distinguished and much-copied dialogue. Terminator-fatigue, anyone?

If you haven't seen it, watch the trailer for the new film below.

I'd like to thank Andy for giving me the chance to guest blog here on his site. With any luck, I'll make recurring appearances in this space every so often...

Andy: This is a guest post by Travis Greenwood, of the t-shirt blog It Goes To 11. Thanks Travis! You're welcome back any time.