Dan And Dave Hit The Wildwood Boardwalk: A 2024 T-Shirt Report

There was no way we were going to win this seagull. It was the second time I’d put a buck into the claw machine, attempting to win a little stuffed seagull with a french fry in its mouth. My dad had an idea. “Go for this one,” he said, pointing to one in front.

With Drew McQuade’s 73-year-old vision and Dan McQuade’s 41-year-old hand-eye coordination, and with claw machines being what they are, the odds were against us. I moved to the spot he picked, and it quickly became clear that his vision outpaced my coordination. I missed it by a lot and started laughing, and then he did.

And then one of the claws got stuck on the plastic hang tag of the seagull, and held on. We got this Wildwood, New Jersey-branded seagull with a french fry in its mouth after all. The attendant was laughing, too, as he asked if I wanted to exchange that pink-tinted seagull for a grey one. I didn’t care, but I did want one with a slice of pizza in its mouth instead. Now my son has a new stuffed toy. There was even a second little seagull in its pouch! That is not how seagulls actually work, but it is cute.

I write about Wildwood boardwalk T-shirts yearly, and most of those shirts are bootlegs of some kind of other. But the real bootleg this year is the seagull. In 2022, Morey’s Piers launched a plush toy of a little seagull with a french fry in its mouth. It was cute, and presumably sold well enough that, in 2023, the bootlegs arrived. By 2024, basically every store on the boardwalk was selling some sort of stuffed toy seagull with a french fry in its mouth—not just the T-shirt shops, but any place that thought it could sell one. This was the boardwalk at its finest, and in this case the idea of a seagull holding a french fry in its mouth—I’ve also seen pizza and bikini tops—was not a trademark-infringing idea. Anyone could do it, and everyone did.

As it happens, my claw machine triumph happened on the week Donald Trump was shot. The boardwalk's T-shirt makers went into overdrive; by that night there were shirts for sale about Trump surviving the shooting—You Missed, or What Doesn't Kill You Makes You President, and the like. I knew that this year I couldn’t do the T-shirt column alone. I needed help. David Roth and I had been to the American Dream mall at the Meadowlands and the Stroud Mall in the Poconos. The Wildwood boardwalk is basically a mall. So I recruited him to judge some shirts from this summer.

Dan: David.

David: Dan.

Dan: It took four years of Defector for me to finally get you to visit the Wildwood boardwalk. Frankly, it coulda been harder. 

David: Most of what it took was that my family spends a week at The Philly Shore now, and our place was like 25 minutes away, but I won’t act like your revelation in a text that there’s a 1/10 scale model of the Vietnam War Memorial surrounded by plaques advertising local contractors and motorcycle clubs didn’t have some impact. And that really delivered.

Dan: I have so many questions. Why don’t you just tell me what you thought of it, and I will let you know if you’re wrong.

David: So my main previous boardwalk experience was decently long ago, at Seaside, which is nearly 100 miles up the coast. I had that to go on. But the strangest bit about the experience, for me, was the sense of familiarity I had at Wildwood, despite the fact that I’d never actually been on that particular boardwalk. I have read so many of your posts and Slack messages and such about it, for so many years, that it felt less foreign than it should have. It’s bigger than I thought it would be, and more diverse. As Trumpy/trashy as the T-shirt shops are, I was pretty well prepared for that. But I was not expecting to see/smell so much Caribbean food, for instance. I expected there to be a lot of pizza, although the pizza we had was much better than I'd figured it would be. That the guy behind the counter was talking darkly, more or less to himself, about how AI Was Programmed By Sissies was, I guess, my expectations meeting in the middle—the actual janky/fun thing I knew from your posts, which really was pretty fun, being brought down to earth in real time by people with some of the worst vibes you can find anywhere on earth. On balance, though, it was nice.

Dan: I think the AI Was Programmed By Sissies guy missed the mark, but he was onto something there. I mean, at least he hated it.

David: The guy he was notionally talking to was like "you know a lot of it's fake, it's just a person typing all that stuff in" and I think he was kind of right, too. That said, I had zero urge to join that conversation.

Dan: You know, my brain is always searching for one iota that best describes Wildwood. This year featured several new ones. Trump held a rally in Wildwood proper in May, for one. 

David: I remember this. I also remember Roger Stone posting a photo of Copacabana beach in Rio and claiming it was that rally, and I know from previous visits to Wildwood that there aren’t any dramatic mountain formations along that particular stretch of Jersey barrier island coastline. I was delighted to see that there were still leftover Trump plush souvenirs from that event for sale.

Dan: Wildwood also closed the boardwalk over Memorial Day weekend, with the mayor blaming “volatile and aggressive” groups of teens. The city, one of five municipalities on the island, passed several new ordinances—including one banning backpacks after 8 p.m. North Wildwood had already passed a 10 p.m. teen curfew.

In August a kid and a cop were using a “drunk driving simulator” golf cart when it careened off the course and sent four people to the hospital. Later that month, a cop driving a police Ford F-150 ran a woman over on the beach. “The officer was down there in performance of his duties, on a call for service,” Police Chief Joseph Murphy said. “Horrifically, he ran over a victim who was laying on the beach.” Murphy said the cop was responding to a report of an ordinance violation.

David: Decent-sized iota there. I am going to leave the phrase "drunk driving simulator" to the side out of respect for what an amazing combination of words that is, but this is more or less how I think about Wildwood as a town. It's a place with a huge and beautiful beach, and where the news is basically "cops do their little cop pranks and have terrible cop accidents, and then a bunch of public officials thank them for whatever they fucked up."

Dan: I still think the best description of Wildwood remains that half-size replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. Maya Lin’s design uses the landscape as part of the monument—in my mind the most powerful, touching war memorial the U.S. has ever produced—and this one places it in front of a big field at a park that flew Trump flags during his rallies here. I am not kidding when I say it is beautiful in its own way. The design still kind of works at this scale. What works less are the ads at the bottom from the payroll service companies that sponsored the monument’s construction. Hey, it’s Wildwood. It fits.

David: We hadn’t gotten to the actual boardwalk by the time we saw this, but it was a good baseline for the taste-level issues that kind of define the boardwalk experience. It’s not that it’s all good or bad, or all one thing or another—for all the Trumpy stuff for sale, we didn’t see anyone actually wearing any of that shit, and a good deal of it was on marked-down racks. The thing that’s for sale everywhere on the boardwalk is the idea of Having A Good Time, and every possible wearable signifier of that. So there were all these different visions of that available, with the most meaningful commonality there being how obviously for sale they were. Being reverent about casualties of war is one of those things—some people like wearing shirts about what type/size of butts they’re into, others prefer ones saluting the troops—but even that sentiment can’t exist outside of the broader context. Maybe on the other side of the causeway, but not here. I am probably overthinking this.

Dan: It has literally been my job to overthink this for more than a decade now. I’m glad I could pull you into the spiral.

Trump Shirts

Dan: Trump shirts do dominate the front of most boardwalk T-shirt shops. Though as they’ve been for the last five years or so, they’re next to shirts that say “I’m not gay, but $20 is $20.” This is a cheeky shirt you’d see in gay bars a decade ago, but on the boards it’s still front and center. Next to Trump.

Most of the new Trump shirts this year featured references to the assassination attempt, including one saying “LEGENDS NEVER DIE’S.” There was also some meme-type content about it: Trump as 50 Cent, Trump as Neo from The Matrix, one with Hillary shouting “What do you mean they missed?” These were all at least trying. “In this house we identify as non-Biden-ary” is a legitimate joke. But what Trump fan wants to be reminded of the time he got shot? This is what my uncle, a diehard, told me when I asked him if he wanted one of them. “Why would I want to remember the time he was shot?” he asked me. I thought it was a good question. Like Dave said, we didn’t see anyone wearing any of these.

Dave: This is one of the disadvantages of having "a thing that just happened, which people generally know about or at least have heard of, on a T-shirt you can wear" as the cornerstone of your business model. Or so I imagine.

Dan: Lots of shirts featured his mugshot, though I was disappointed in the paucity of “GUILTY/NOT GUILTY” shirt options like back during the OJ trial. I had pogs with this motif! Surely the T-shirt makers could’ve done Trump similarly.

Dave: Or just put some of the shirtless and swole Ben Garrison cartoon Trumps on a T-shirt. This is no time to suddenly start respecting copyrights. Give the people what they want. For like $35.

Hawk Tuah

Dan: Because I was on leave for six months and trying to stay offline as much as possible, I have not seen the “Hawk Tuah” video. I do not plan on doing so. It even took me a while to figure out what the sexual act the meme was referencing. I do have one big question, however: How long did it take to land on this spelling? Everyone uses the same one, but I kind of think … well, I’d have to watch the video to see how she says it, I guess, but I’m surprised everyone landed on the same spelling. Can you shed some light on this topic?

David: No.

Dan: Interesting.

David: I don't know how everyone decided on the spelling, which seems to get both of the sounds pretty wrong. It looks better Hock P'too, I guess? Like when you put it on a T-shirt that endorses either the beloved and famous Woman Who Spits On That Thang or the act of Spitting On That Thang, for president.

Dan: You know what? I do think this woman should be president. Not in 2024, but one day.

I ❤️ [Whatever] [Literally, Whatever]

Dan: I wrote about the I ❤️ whatever phenomenon back in a 2021 edition, and they have gotten more prevalent since then. They’ve sometimes strayed from the classic “Milton Glaser reference in a Cooper Black font” style, but in general they are the same as they’ve always been. I do ❤️ NY, and I do ❤️ my hot wife as well. It’s a great sentiment no matter who you’re looking to love.

David: This was where the boardwalk T-shirt experience really popped for me, because there were so many different options available. Something like the full spectrum of preferences was out there; it was something like the old promise of the internet in that sense, except in this case instead of finding other people who were into whatever you were into it was a shirt that you could wear advertising your love of, like, Left-Handed DILFs or Thick Portuguese Aunts.

Dan: In 2021, I credited YouTuber Danny Duncan (7.67M subscribers) with sparking this ❤️ resurgence, and the trend has grown. He’s still at it. His recent videos include Destroying My Tesla For Fun! (1.7M views), Buying Illegal Stuff on Facebook Marketplace (2.5M views) and Crazy Old Man Goes Bridge Jumping (2.2M views). You know what?

David: What?

Danny: This dude’s only nine years younger than me. He’s not young anymore, really. Like me! I can do this. With those YouTube view count numbers, I think I should start going by Danny. Maybe that’s the secret sauce. Time for this crazy old man to go bridge jumping.

David: I ❤️ My Rebranded Coworker, Danny.

Business In The Front … Party In The Back

Danny: We were very confused by this one.

David: This is maybe a reflection of our own cultural blind spots because we saw this one everywhere and were like "why is the concept of being in the military and then getting your mugshot taken years later such a popular shirt?"

Danny: Eventually, using my skills of deduction (Google Lens) I was able to figure it out. The front is a shot of country musician Zach Bryan, who actually became famous while still in the Navy before being honorably discharged in 2021. The back is, I suppose, his current look. He does not seem to have a mullet, making the “Business in the front, party in the back” text make little sense, but that is a real trademark of WIldwood shirts.

David: I mentally filed this one under Unknown/Incomprehensible, along with what wound up being many other shirts. A lot of those were basically just online memes cut-and-pasted onto shirts. The Trump ones even retained that kind of deep-fried pixelation effect that's unique to that sort of thing, the kind of smudgy visual dustiness I still associate with Facebook, although I guess that's now more of a place to find AI-generated images of improbably busty soldiers. There was something kind of disappointing to me about seeing musty boomer memes in this context, and on these shirts. It's not just that the memes are bad, although they are all bad. It's that there was previously some element of mystery to me about where Boardwalk stuff came from, some sense of an abstract cosmic force commanding people to print T-shirts with like Bart Simpson smoking a blunt in front of a Serbian flag on them, and then sell those shirts. And this was just sort of the same shit you see everywhere else. Although I should say I probably would've felt differently if the meme in question was, like, the one where Bugs Bunny is holding an old-timey pistol and looking mournful. If you're going to trawl the internet for shirt ideas, at least throw back the stuff that's too obviously toxic to eat.

One bit I want to celebrate, though, was that there were a few Skibidi Toilet T-shirts, and that the shirts themselves seemed as confused about what that was as everyone else. Like whoever was printing it was clearly just like "I guess this is a video game about a bathroom guy, for kids." And I respect that. You don't need to know some things, and at some point the move is just to put the famous toilet man on a shirt and keep it moving.

Danny’s Purchases

Danny: I got my uncle a “Trump car” T-shirt commemorating his May rally. One might wonder why I bought a shirt of a man I hate, but my uncle would be way more likely to accidentally convince someone to vote for Harris than he would convince an undecided voter to push a button for Trump. He’s not going to create any new Trump fans at Greenman’s Deli.

I do think the shirt is pretty good, if a bit obvious. The tram car is a Wildwood staple, a little tram that can take weary travelers down the length of the seemingly endless boardwalk. So why shouldn’t Trump be riding the waves on one? I should’ve made us take a ride on it, David. The tram car, I mean.

David: I was sufficiently honored to have stepped out of the way of the tram four or five times during our walk up and back. I will say that to the extent any of the Trump stuff was charming to me, I liked the ones that tried to fit him into the broader Wildwood experience. I'd rather a cartoon of him driving a tram than a picture of his mugshot with This Is Cool To Me Somehow around it in Impact font.

Danny: T-shirt sellers used to be restricted by what shirt decals they could purchase. There are still quite a few heat-press transfer decals that stores use, but now basically anything and everything is taken from the internet. This is how I got my Eagles “Fueled By Haters” onesie.

David: The dude printing the shirt had to do much more work than I expected. They did not just have an Eagles Fueled By Haters onesie ready to go.

Danny: He had this shirt logo already, but I was apparently the first to want to tell people that a baby was fueled by haters. So he copied it from the internet, painstakingly followed my persnickety instructions to fix certain parts of the image as he sized it down and wiped out the background, then made sure he left in the errors from the original: The tank is both full and not full, the Eagles logo is a little janky. In fact, he made the logo jankier. I like it. My son’s Eagles fandom—his lifetime record is currently 2-7—is now fueled by all those haters.

David: It is beautiful, to me, that your son is already wearing and indeed shitting in a garment that is both very hard to parse and quite obviously fucked up in a bunch of ways that are specific to this place.

Danny: I paid $80 for these two things.