Animated Ghetto

Photos by Patrick O’Dell. Only the shirts that Ray is holding up are by him. We bought the other ones all over Manhattan.
 

Sort of like abortion, thugging out your favorite cartoon character and putting the bootleg on a size XXXXL t-shirt used to be a tricky business. Due to the iron grasp with which Warner Brothers and the other pillars of kids’ TV held onto their licenses, the only people you could count on to carry out the operation were boardwalk airbrush artisans and back-alley silk screeners. Under these shady conditions, the results were mixed, and many an urban Taz enthusiast walked away dollars poorer with a t-shirt bearing the hazy image of a misshapen brown lump in a bandana.

Fortunately, over the past ten years the old guard has been waking up to the reality of the streets and coming to realize that drug-dealing and prostitution are just two of the more colorful aspects of the world around them. There are still some hurdles to surmount with regards to violence and getting higher than a motherfucker, but things definitely done changed.

Not only can you now have Elmo bedecked in pimpish finery beaming from your chest without fear of litigation, but the glut of higher-quality thugtoons flooding the vendors’ booths has pushed the bootleggers to soaring new heights of creativity in order to compete. What greater tribute to the progressive power of the free market can you come up with than a t-shirt with a drawing of the Michelin Man pounding the living shit out of Mr. Clean? You simply can’t top that. Don’t even try.

We spoke to Ray Sierra—the Bronx airbrush artist behind Big Pun’s official line of shirts and the creator of such gems as Pimp Elmo, Pimp Pink Panther, Pimp Tweety, and Tupac Patrick from Spongebob—about the relaxed climate in the cartoon-urbanization trade and the challenges that remain.

Vice: So all the cartoon and kids’ stuff you guys do is on the level, right?

Ray: We do most of the art for a brand called Changes. They license out all the rights to the characters, so ours are all authentic Pink Panther shirts. You can tell by the label. It says Pink Panther on it.



And the license-holders are OK with them being modified into pimps and drug-dealers?

They still don’t want to be defaming their own characters. They don’t want Bugs Bunny smoking a blunt or Spongebob with an AK. But that’s what the urban market wants, because our world is all about everything just being sensationalized, glorifying guns and thugs. The urban consumer wants the characters he wears to reflect that whole thing.

That sort of makes sense, but don’t things like Scarface and 50 Cent shirts cover those bases? Why thug out children’s characters?

It’s simple marketing when you think about it—people buy what they know. We all grew up on Bugs Bunny, we know him through watching Looney Tunes and Tiny Toons. Also you got like the Daffy Ducks and Pink Panthers, characters who just had a certain kind of personality. Take Spongebob for example. He is number one right now because he’s like that inner child in everyone, just wanting to be silly and goofy and laugh.

But if they’re into him because he’s so kid-like, why make him Thugbob, or Streetbob Straighthood?

Well you’ve got a lot of these guys who deep-down want to wear the cutesy stuff, but they’ve got to thug them out because you’re not going to come through with the ladies in a Winnie the Pooh shirt when you’re in junior high. But if he’s got two guns and a bazooka, that makes it cool. And they want to be tough, but still be attractive to the ladies, so they’ll get a gangsta Tweety because almost every girl loves Tweety.

When they give you the license, are there a bunch of ground rules about what you can and can’t do with them?

The license-holders give you a style guide for drawing them. Some people, like with the Pink Panther, they’re really picky about redrawing him. Everything’s got to be proportionate. They want it to look exactly how the original guy drew him. Then you’ve got other people like Popeye where you get a little more leeway.

Besides the technical aspect, do they just leave it up to you?

We’ll throw out different ideas, and then the owners have to approve it. We try to submit all these harder things, but nine times out of ten they aren’t going to print anything with guns or drugs. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what will or won’t get through. Like we had one we wanted to do for the Pink Panther where he’s doing push-ups and has on the bandana, like that whole jailhouse yard thing, and it was going to be like, “Get your weight up.”



So they don’t want him working out, but they’re fine with him being a pimp? Oh, wait. “Get your weight up” also means “deal more drugs.” Now I get it.

Yeah, and that other shirt says, “Pinkin’ ain’t easy.” I knew they wouldn’t go with “Pimping ain’t easy,” so when I came up with it I just went, “OK, let’s have a Pink Panther with all the elements of a pimp, but not actually say pimp.” When you’re dealing with these guys, you can’t be too upfront. You’ve got to go with a little dual-meaning subliminal type of stuff. That way it attracts the urban crowd you want, but it doesn’t offend the older generation who isn’t hip to the whole slang.

If the big guys are getting into the same market, why haven’t there been any big crackdowns on all the crazy bootleg designs?

Most of these hip-hop-type artists are just selling out of small stores. They only make 50 shirts for each design. It’s not enough to hurt Pink Panther or whoever. It’s more like it keeps their promotion up and makes the characters more popular.

Even when they’re holding a smoking gun over a mountain of coke?

The truth is the companies can’t do it themselves, because then they’ll lose their old fan base of people who grew up on Pink Panther. I mean you’ve got fans of Betty Boop who are like 90 years old. They don’t want to see her with implants and hooker boots and a gat.

But the kids do. Fuck, I do too!

Right. It’s just a whole cultural thing where the urban markets look at all these commercial companies out there and they’re waiting for somebody to make the urban side of all these characters. And when they don’t, it’s even more attractive an idea. And that’s where all the bootlegging comes in.

THOMAS MORTON