The Projector #84: The Walking Easter Egg (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

A couple of weeks ago I bought a pair of shoes I’d been eyeing for over a year: a pair of yellow Mexico 66 Onitsuka Tiger sneakers. They’re super-comfortable and stylish-looking, but I bought them because I’d written a piece about Bruce Lee’s Game of Death and wondered if I could find out what kind of shoes he wore. Not only was this possible, they were still for sale. Or, more accurately, for sale again after laying dormant for years; that Uma Thurman wore the same shoes as an homage to Lee in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 helped bring the brand back into fashion.

I posted a picture to Twitter and some people who saw the tweet got it (or at least made the Kill Bill connection). But that’s a self-selecting sample of people who probably care about some of the same movies I do. Walking around in the real world, I’m guessing they just look like yellow shoes.

And that’s fine. I get a little weirded out when people do get references on the (probably too many) movie-themed pieces of clothing I wear. The Star Wars T-shirts are obvious to all, but the Hausu shirt is in a language spoken only by cult movie nerds, and I’m guessing my “Children of the New Dawn” shirt just looks like a shirt for an ’80s metal band to anyone who didn’t just watch the movie Mandy and remembered its intricately designed chapter titles. I’d love to say that when someone at my dog’s boarding facility spotted this shirt by the great Erica Henderson as a reference to The Thing it created a permanent bond between the two of us, but it didn’t, just as correctly identifying a Soft Boys T-shirt from a restaurant worker when I picked up some food on Mother's Day just led to a moment of awkwardness because he’d forgotten what shirt he was wearing. (I did get a free drink by correctly identifying a bartender’s tattoo as the logo for the band Love as seen on the cover of the classic album Forever Changes.)

Do we wear such things for others or ourselves? I’m not sure. In some ways, it reminds me of Ready Player One, a Steven Spielberg movie I didn’t care for at the time (and still isn’t a favorite), but one that’s stuck with me anyway. In theory, putting on the identity of some favorite pop culture item ought to create a tribal bond with those who recognize it, but is it also a kind of armor? When Wade, the protagonist, dresses up as Buckaroo Banzai, does the semi-obscure reference invite in those who get the reference or put up a wall that keeps out those who don’t? Maybe this is more of a prompt than anything else. Why do we wear what we love and who do we wear it for?

Speaking of Lee, we came this close to pairing Mortal Kombat with Enter the Dragon, a movie I’m sure we’ll get around to doing one of these days. I’m glad we didn’t, though. Big Trouble in Little China was super fun to revisit and one of our main points of connection was the idea of a martial arts tournament. And if you’ve seen Mortal Kombat, you know they talk and talk and talk about the big tournament yet — and spoiler if you haven’t seen it — the movie never gets around to depicting it. It’s the film’s fireworks factory, promised here but reserved for a sequel. (One I’m guessing we won’t cover, but who knows?)

We’ll talk more about Mortal Kombat in an episode dropping later this week. Meanwhile, you might enjoy these reading these pieces.

• At Oscilloscope’s Musings, edited by our own Scott Tobias, Bill Ryan takes a deep look at the career of William Friedkin.

• What documentaries have had the biggest impact on moviemaking? At The New Yorker, Richard Brody offers 62 picks.

• As for the moments that shaped an other discipline, the internet video, Vulture looks at 25 edits that defined online videos as we know them.

• Also for Vulture, Dan Reilly gets into the after-the-fact recasting that brought Tig Notaro into Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead.

• And, in another Vulture piece (good week for our friends there), Josef Adalian plunges into the mysteries of Netflix’s sometimes baffling top 10 list.

• Ever wondered about the secret origin of the pug star of The Mitchells vs. the Machines? Wonder no more, thanks to this Carlos Aguilar piece for Polygon.

• Also for Polygon, Keith Phipps considers the values of dystopias that never happened via a look at the semi-forgotten 1972 film ZPG: Zero Population Growth.