For those of you new to this, I'll get you up to speed. All of the MFP officers in the first Mad Max movie wear blue t-shirts. They are raglan cut shirts (meaning the sleeve seams go in diagonally toward the neck) made by the Bonds company of Australia. Bonds is still a major underwear company in Australia, but they no longer make these t-shirts in this color. Hopefully they will make them again some day, but until then, we fans have to try and find the best version we can.
As an aside, it's worth nothing that Bonds shirts run small for some reason. Their large is like another brand's medium, or even a small. It's also worth noting that the MFP officers in the movie wore their shirts pretty tight, so whatever shirt you get you may want to buy a size smaller than you normally would - or if you manage to find a real Bonds shirt, buy it in your size and it will fit too tight - like in the movie).
Here in the states you cannot find t-shirts that are raglan cut. I've only seen long sleeve shirts and what are called baseball shirts (with 3/4 sleeves) with those types of seams. But what about the color? Fans have been in search of a color that closely matches that of the original Australia Bonds shirt.
I purchased shirts from some major retailers to see what we could get. The key to this exercise is that Karol is lucky enough to own an original vintage Bonds blue t-shirt, so we had something to compare the others to. I had hoped we would find something very close. I'm sad to say that none of the shirts I found were correct. But read on to see the results.
The shirts featured here are from U.S. chain retailers, with one extra shirt from Australia made by a company called Biz (and donated by our friend Alan - Cruzn2themax).
Left to right, top row - Biz, Bonds, Michaels
Left to right, bottom row - Kohl's, Target, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters
(the photos are large so if you can't see the whole thing on your screen, try clicking on it or download it)
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In the photo above you'll see that none of the shirts are correct. The Michael's shirt (from a craft store chain here in the U.S.) is way too dark blue and probably the least accurate of the bunch. The Urban Outfitters shirt is pretty far off as well. The rest all look pretty similar to one another, but they're all too light, none have the slightly deeper blue that the Bonds has. And remember that your monitor may not be displaying these colors accurately, but at least you can see how they compare to each other.
We eventually decided that the Target shirt was probably the closest of the bunch, but it was pretty arbitrary since other than the two shirts that were way off, all of these t-shirts were sort of equally wrong.
Here's a picture of the Bonds shirt and the Target (Merona) shirt side by side.
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Hey Karol, maybe someday we should take your Bonds shirt down to the garment district and see if we can find a color match.
