This shirt is a puzzlement for me.  I thought for sure people would love it, but I have brought it to two different shows and it hasn't sold at all.  I will bring it to the horror/sci fi show in Sacramento this weekend and if doesn't sell there, it's not going to sell.  At that point it will be relegated to the web only until it ramps up.

That being said, I still like it a lot.  Who doesn't love Blade Runner?  Rutger Hauer at his best, although I am also a fan of the Hitcher.  I guess he is best as a villain.  However, he is actually a great actor.  If you don't believe me watch the amazing "I’ve seen things" scene.

I was about to bitch about he fact that the movie is set in 2019, only 9 years into the future, and we still don't have flying cars but then I remembered seeing an article on this Terrafugia flying car.  It requires an actual take-off like a plane, but in spite of that it's pretty freaking cool.  Of course the cars in Blade Runner is cooler, but then the communicators in Star Trek were in their own way cooler than cell phones, if only because they could contact a ship in orbit.

As a fan of sci fi props, I naturally have to give a nod to one of the greatest prop guns ever made, the Blade Runner Blaster, also called the 2019 Detective Special.  When I was in art school I did a huge art project on guns and as part of it I looked at and wrote a paper on sci fi prop guns.  Basically sci fi guns fall into two schools of design; Star Wars, and Star Trek.

The Star Trek guns are all designed to look as unintimidating as possible.  They all look either like TV remote controls or hot glue guns.  Half the time you can't tell if it's actually a weapon or not,  or if you have it pointed in the right direction.

The Star Wars guns are all made to look as frightening and intimidating as possible.  When you look at  a Star Wars gun you know there is a right end and a wrong end to be on.  The fact that they were all existing firearms modified to look more sci fi is a huge contributing factor to this.

The fact is, I am a huge Star Trek fan, but I despise their weapons.  A gun should be as scary as possible.  The true value in a gun is not in it's use but rather in the threat of it's use.  Once a gun is fired the situation is resolved one way or another and the weapon no longer has any value.  Even the Klingon weapons suck compared to Star Wars guns.

Other movies or shows in the Star Trek school include Space 1999, Buck Rogers, and Logan's Runs.  In the Star Wars category we have Aliens (home of the greatest sci fi guns of all time, the M41-A Pulse Rifle), Men in Black, District 9, and Battlestar Galactica.  

Anyway, the whole point of this long diatribe is the handgun from Blade Runner is in the good gun category and is probably the best sci fi handgun in future history (IMO).  If I had to pick guns from across genres I would probably choose it as my sidearm (with the M41-A as my main weapon).  I don't even care how effective it is.  It wins in the coolness category.  

Dave
September 22nd, 2010