Champion all the rage after movie T-shirt cameo
Brad Pitt wears it in ‘Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.’
Champion Spark Plug was among a handful of Toledo’s lifeblood businesses for decades, until the automotive parts company shuttered its main Toledo plant in 1991 and later excised itself completely from the city in 2010.
As noted by Esquire and others, now the Champion Spark Plug brand is all the rage, on T-shirts no less, thanks to Hollywood — as in “Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood” and its costar Brad Pitt.
In filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s well-received revisionist period piece set in 1969 Tinseltown, Pitt plays a handsome and rugged stunt double named Cliff Booth, who spends much of his screen time sporting a yellow Hawaiian-style shirt, unbuttoned and opened wide, with a thin cotton T-shirt underneath emblazoned with a slightly faded Champion logo.
As with most Tarantino films, the attire not only makes the man but also serves as a quick reference point about the character to audiences. In this case, Cliff Booth is meant to be seen as a champion. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what I mean.
Throughout the film, Cliff serves as the epitome of cool, a Marlboro man of another brand, who has seen it all, done it all, and takes nothing from no one. This includes a one-on-one test of strength with Bruce Lee, re-imagined as a tough-talking martial arts charlatan. With Cliff oozing so much bravado and chutzpah, it’s no surprise that the character has great appeal to movie-goers in that men want to be him and women want to be with him.
What’s surprising is that movie-goers would latch on to the character enough to foster a booming market for his Champion T-shirt. In reality, that T-shirt logo did enjoy a sizable run in cultural popularity; if nothing else, the Champion Spark Plug brand was recognizable enough to merit a Wacky Packages spoof in the early ’70s as “Chimpanzee Spark Plug” along with the slogan, “Your Car Will Go Bananas.” And now that original shirt can be yours, for the first time or again through Champion’s online catalog of gear and merchandise, buyfmgear. com. The T-shirt is $12.99 and comes in sizes small through XXL, but minus the cool and sex appeal of Brad Pitt.
But you will have to wait for your turn to climb aboard the already-crowded Champion bandwagon, at least if you want the original and not a knock-off. As the company’s website notes in all-caps: “DUE TO HIGH DEMAND, THIS ITEM IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR EXPEDITED SHIPPING. ALL ORDERS WILL SHIP IN 7-10 BUSINESS DAYS.”
The T-shirt also carries a significance beyond the film, at least to those locally. It’s a source of pride to ... well, not the company’s birthplace — that was in Boston in 1907 as founded by Robert A. Stranahan, Sr., and his brother Frank D. Stranahan — but to where it grew up and came of age after it relocated to Toledo in 1910. A few years later and Champion would be supplying spark plugs to Willys-Overland as well as Henry Ford’s assembly line of automobiles.
World War II arrived, and with it Champion provided a revolutionary new aviation spark plug with a ceramic insulator, which greatly aided the nation’s war effort.