#My friend pedro merchandise movie

The shirt almost left her life for good during her 'KonMari phase,' as she put it. Simmons wore the shirt into her 20s, when she worked as a bartender, and said it was a big hit even then, far past the height of the movie's popularity.

(It might have helped that her dad was from Idaho.) It became such a staple in her household that her parents let the whole family do a Napoleon Dynamite-themed Christmas card.

#My friend pedro merchandise movie

Like Hey, here's a shirt that tells us that joke and we're both in on the joke now.' He recalled being a middle schooler, sitting in class and being one of three kids wearing the Vote for Pedro shirt, an occurrence he said they didn't think too much of back then.įor Simmons, the shirt became 'the epicenter of so many good times.' She was 14, and thinks she must have watched the movie every weekend of her freshman year of high school. 'I just found them to be like a joke that could be told multiple times.

'I had other shirts, like the I Do All My Own Stunts shirt and the I Think You're Pretty Gangster shirt,' said Josh Kessenich, a 27-year-old engineer and former owner of a Vote for Pedro tee. Some people I spoke to remembered the shirt as just another jokey collectible in the era where the ironic t-shirt reigned supreme (I personally wore the shit out of the Urban Outfitters Idaho? No, Udaho! tee during this time). Kevin Beaty, a 31-year-old photojournalist for Colorado Public Radio, thinks his shirt 'ended up in a trashcan.' In addition to proudly informing the world that we had seen the movie and loved it, wearing a Vote for Pedro tee felt like an opportunity to celebrate our inner dweeb in a world that didn't always understand us.Įven so, many of the people I spoke to couldn't recall what happened to their once-coveted shirt. Bush and Dick Cheney, the infamous Malice at the Palace Pacers-Pistons-fan brawl in Detroit, and the launch of a small social network called The Facebook, the shirt felt like a symbol of levity and underdog spirit in a bleak and confusing, post-911 world. In a year defined by an election that gave us four more years of George W. Napoleon Dynamite was a run-away success, grossing $46.1 million, turning Heder into a star, and launching the sale of an inestimable number of Vote for Pedro shirts. At the film's dramatic (and endearingly goofy) climax, Napoleon clinches Pedro's presidency after he performs a now iconic dance to Jamiroquai's 'Canned Heat' in front of the whole school, while wearing the seminal tee. Together they do bike jumps, participate in unpasteurized milk tastings, and, ultimately, lead Pedro's campaign for student body president against popular girl Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff). Eventually, he befriends Pedro (played by another then-unknown, Efren Ramírez), an equally lonely teen who is new to the school and the lone brown kid in a sea of Midwestern whites.

The film, which sprung from a bizarre short made by director Jared Hess in film school, starred an unknown actor named Jon Heder as Napoleon, a gangly, awkward high schooler who is tragically unhip and often bullied by the cool kids. With an extremely high-stakes election of our own just days away, I wanted to know what the shirt meant to them, and whether they shared my inkling that this film from 16 years ago has something to teach us about the present. To paraphrase early aughts singer-songwriter Paula Cole: Where had all the Vote for Pedro shirts gone? Recently, after the film came up in conversation with a friend, I started wondering if anyone out there still owned their tee, and maybe even wore it from time to time. Though the shirt had become a staple of our regular lives, it seemed to fade into obscurity without a second thought, vanishing without a trace into Goodwill bins, dumpsters, and Buffalo Exchange resale piles across the U.S. With its white cotton fabric, navy trim, and bright red, equally ubiquitous Cooper Black lettering, the Vote for Pedro shirt was everywhere in the mid-aughts-and then, after a period that felt like a few years but is hard to exactly pinpoint, seemingly nowhere.