Three Wolf Moon

Three Wolf Moon is a T-shirt featuring three wolves howling at the Moon. The numerous satirical reviews for this on Amazon.com have become an Internet phenomenon. The T-shirt was designed by artist Antonia Neshev.[1]

The original Three Wolf Moon T-shirt

Origin
Brian Govern, review author
Antonia Neshev, creator of the Three Wolf Moon design

The Three Wolf Moon T-shirt, created by The Mountain Corporation, gained popularity after attracting sarcastic reviews on Amazon.com attributing great power to it, such as making the wearer irresistible to women, striking fear into other males, and having magical healing abilities. Brian Govern, a law student at Rutgers University,[1] who was searching for a school book on Amazon and was led to the Three Wolf Moon T-shirt by an Amazon recommendation which had been targeted at students purchasing college semester books.[2] He decided to write a review of the shirt on a whim as he did not actually own the shirt. His faux-serious review as "Bee-Dot-Govern" in November 2008 concluded:[3]

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the 'guns'), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.

Since this original review was posted, more than 2,300 similar reviews have been posted.[4] Some reviewers have uploaded images showing famous people wearing the shirt.[5]

The shirt attracted further interest when it became popular on networking sites such as Digg and Facebook and was then lauded in conventional media as an Internet phenomenon.[2] German scholar Melvin Haack considers it to be a notable example of a redneck joke.[6] The reviews have been included in studies of such online sarcasm. Such sarcasm tends to confound analysis of customer reviews and so the texts have been analysed to determine which elements might identify sarcasm. One common example found in n-gram analysis was "alpha male".[7]

Sales

The T-shirt is manufactured by The Mountain Corporation,[8] a wholesale clothing company in Keene, New Hampshire, United States.[9] Their art director, Michael McGloin, said that they were making many more shirts in response to the great demand which had made it the top-selling item in Amazon's clothing store.[10] Due to the success of the shirt, the New Hampshire Division of Economic Development made it their "official New Hampshire T-shirt of economic development" and awarded it as a prize for innovation.[11]

Parodies and attributions

A similar shirt featuring Keyboard Cats instead of wolves has been produced at the T-shirt design site Threadless. In July 2009, this was the most highly rated design there.[12]

Capcom prepared a limited run through iam8bit of a "Three Wolf God Sun" shirt for the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con International, featuring images of the wolf gods Shiranui, Amaterasu and Chibiterasu from their video games Ōkami and Ōkamiden.[13][14]

Minecraft parodied the design in its merchandise, replacing the wolves with creepers, an enemy featured in the game.[15]

Georgetown University created a parody of the "Three Wolf Moon" shirt using images of their mascot Jack the Bulldog as a promotion for students attending a 2015 basketball game.[16]

References
  1. Peter Applebome (May 24, 2009). "Think a T-Shirt Can't Change Your Life? A Skeptic Thinks Again". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 15, 2017. Retrieved February 25, 2017.
  2. Rajiv Sabherwal, Irma Becerra Fernandez (2009), Business Intelligence, John Wiley and Sons, ISBN 978-0-470-46170-9
  3. "B. Govern "Bee-Dot-Govern"'s review of The Mountain Youth Three Wolf Moon Short S". Amazon.com. Archived from the original on 2012-11-09. Retrieved 2013-02-04.
  4. "Customer Reviews: The Mountain Three Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee". Amazon.com. Archived from the original on 2015-04-03. Retrieved 2013-02-04.
  5. Joseph Jaffe (2010), Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones, John Wiley and Sons, ISBN 978-0-470-48785-3
  6. Melvin Haack (2009-08-20), Redneck Jokes as a Subcultural Phenomenon (PDF), Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig, archived (PDF) from the original on 2011-07-19, retrieved 2010-09-09
  7. Antonio Reyes, Paolo Rosso (2011), Mining Subjective Knowledge from Customer Reviews: A Specific Case of Irony Detection (PDF), archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-07-11, retrieved 2011-12-05
  8. "The Mountain Artwear Tie-Dyed Animal T-Shirts & Apparel". www.themountain.com. Archived from the original on 2017-05-22. Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  9. Steve Johnson (May 20, 2009), Comedians of the Amazon, Chicago Tribune, archived from the original on 2022-07-13, retrieved 2022-07-13
  10. Daniel Emery (21 May 2009), Joke review boosts T-shirt sales, BBC, archived from the original on 6 May 2022, retrieved 29 May 2009
  11. "State Hopes To Harness Power Of 'Three Wolf' Shirts". WMUR. 27 Jan 2010. Archived from the original on 13 July 2022. Retrieved 13 July 2022.
  12. Tom Phillips (23 July 2009), Three Keyboard Cat Moon: and the internet did rejoice, Metro, archived from the original on 2018-06-12
  13. Warmouth, Brian (2010-07-15). "Awesome Three Wolf Moon Shirt Gets 'Okami'-fied". MTV. Archived from the original on 2016-01-12. Retrieved 2010-07-15.
  14. "SDCC Update: Triple Function Design". Capcom. 2010-07-14. Archived from the original on 2010-07-17. Retrieved 2010-07-14.
  15. Lowe, Scott (2 February 2012). "T-Shirt of the Day: Three Creeper Moon". IGN. Archived from the original on 2 November 2021. Retrieved 1 November 2021.
  16. Steinberg, Dan (2015-01-09). "Georgetown fans howl (happily) over iconic Jack the Bulldog T-shirt". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Archived from the original on 2018-06-12. Retrieved 2018-06-07.
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