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player ready...Move over, Batman: Bart Simpson has arrived. In the fashion and fad sleeper of the season, T-shirts and other clothing items featuring characters from the fractured cartoon family ”The Simpsons” have been selling as soon as they hit local stores.
”Last year at this time we`d sold 1,700 Batman T-shirts,” says Gary Colabuono, owner of the five Chicago-area Moondog`s Comicland stores. ”This year we`ve sold well over 3,000 Simpsons.”
Colabuono sold 120 Simpsons T-shirts (at $14.95 for adults, $12 for youth sizes) in one day before Christmas at his five stores. Sales have been escalating ever since.
The giant JC Penney Co. tested T-shirts with Simpsons characters at the company`s Woodfield Mall store in Schaumburg at about the same time the 30-minute animated TV show first appeared on Sunday nights at 7:30 p.m. on WFLD-Ch. 32.
”We sold 144 T-shirts in one week,” says a spokesman. ”We would have sold more, but we didn`t have any more. We`ve never had anything take off like this before.” Never slow to hop on a trend, officials in Penneys` corporate offices in Dallas quickly ordered an array of Simpsons merchandise (from pajamas to bike bags, posters, key chains and T-shirts) for the children`s department. They`re stocking up on sleep shirts, boxer shorts, cycling caps, beach towels, and T-shirts and tank tops for the young men`s department, too. Most of the merchandise should appear in the company`s area stores by mid-April.
Moondog`s Colabuono isn`t surprised at the strong positive reaction. Bart Simpson, the wise-guy son, is the hottest character right now, he says, and the Simpsons have become ”really kind of cultish on college campuses.”
He even thinks he knows why Bart is so appealing: ”Because he`s like that goofy little kid in all of us,” says Colabuono. ”The college kids realize that maybe they can be that way for a year or two before going out into the real world.”