Walter Hill‘s 1979 gang-warfare flick The Warriors is, hands (and knives, baseball bats, and bullets) down our favorite Big, Rotten Apple Movie. It captured a definitively unpretty moment in New York City’s gritty history and top-loaded it with with everything from Greek mythopoeics to cooly surreal action set-pieces and gutter panache.
If nothing else, watching The Warriors today makes you wish Rudy Giuliani had never slimed his way into the Mayor’s office and the charismatic but disastrously old-school Ed Koch still ruled the roost, gangs, burning Bronx buildings, and all. Replacing the Deuce with a Disneyfied dream-world fit only for foreign tourists and City-sanctioned hawkers of pre-approved family fun fare? Oh, the ignominy!
Thank the Ghost of Times Square past that our friends at Mondo Tees have commissioned artists Eric Tan and Tyler Stout to design these fresh takes on the old Warriors one-sheets. Perfect for stuffing your expat New Yawker’s grungy Xmas stockings, or for bedecking your own holiday halls with visions of violence and streetcorner chutzpah, the two designs (with variants available) are the some of Mondo’s best posterwork yet. We’re already sandblasting our own poster-slathered walls to make room for these bottle-banging babies, and we’re betting you’re likely to do the same. “Warriors…come out to plaaa-ay!” Amen to that, brothers and sisters.
This article appears in December 11 • 2009.