Several months ago my friend Barbara asked me to design a T-shirt for her husband (my former propmaster) Dwight and his prop crew, busy on the set of the remake of that Bacon-infused 80s dance hit “Footloose”. I confessed to Barbara that, while I knew it involved dancing and people wearing Chuck Taylors, I’ve never actually seen the movie. I looked at stills and screen captures from the original movie and I dropped by set of the remake a few times. Despite having “done my homework”, inspiration didn’t strike until the film was very nearly wrapped and let’s face it, the design you see here is pretty simple: just the word “Footloose” spelled out by one particularly long shoe string attached to a classic Chuck Taylor sneaker. As long as the movie has been around I can’t help but think some artist has done this same thing at some point in the past, but it was new to me! Since I’d had recently used discharge ink for another shirt design with great results that’s what we decided to do with the Footloose Prop Department shirts. I understand folks on the crew liked the design. What do you think?
Update: there were only 20 of these shirts made, so they’re super rare!