Minions Have Taken Over the Wildwood Boardwalk

Every kind of minion imaginable is on the Wildwood boardwalk. Even naked minions.

When you’re the guy who writes an annual column about t-shirts on the Wildwood boardwalk, your friends send you a lot of texts about the latest t-shirt trends when they go down the shore. (I get a lot of weird texts from my friends.)

The past month, I’ve been getting the same texts from friends: Minions. There are minions all over the boardwalk.

I recently went down to Wildwood to investigate, and my friends’ texts were right: Every type of minion imaginable is on the Wildwood boardwalk. Regular minions. Minions with pithy inspirational sayings next to them. Ninja Turtle minions. Batman minions. Heath Ledger Joker minions. Superman minions. Spider-man minions. Even Green Lantern minions. Who likes Green Lantern? And, yes, there are naked minions.

Earlier this summer, I wrote about how minions are making Comcast millions. (The company owns Universal.) The spin-off movie in the Despicable Me franchise, Minions, has made more than $962 million worldwide since its release on July 10th. That’s almost a billion dollars in a little over a month! No wonder minions are all over the boardwalk. Too bad for t-shirt vendors another Universal/Comcast hit, Jurassic Park, isn’t so easily meme-able.

Let’s check out a few more late bloomers on the boardwalk this summer.

Deez Nuts

Deez Nuts is a joke beloved by 15-year-old boys and people on Twitter, which is a site where everyone acts like 15-year-old boys. It goes like this: You ask an unsuspecting oldhead something about BOFA. Their expected response when asked how to get to “BOFA Street” or if they’ve heard the latest single by BOFA is, “What’s BOFA?” You reply, “Bofa deez nuts!” (The Philadelphia version — as immortalized in Yah Mos Def’s “New Direction” — is “From East Falls to these balls.”)

Then I guess you say “HA, GOT EEM” afterward? As an oldhead myself, I don’t entirely know.

Michael Jordan!

I spotted a few of these Michael Jordan shirts on the boardwalk, with two images of the iconic dunk contest photo and two of the six rings photo. What, no crying Jordan? Give it time.

Straight Outta…

If you’ve been on social media recently, you’ve probably seen one, two or 500 people making images with a “STRAIGHT OUTTA [x]” overlay. On the Wildwood boardwalk, they sell “STRAIGHT OUTTA PHILLY” and “STRAIGHT OUTTA NEW JERSEY” shirts. Free promotion for the Straight Outta Compton film, though I bet Dr. Dre and Ice Cube would be pissed they aren’t getting a cut.

I forgot to take a photo of these — hence the improvisation above, made on the Straight Outta Somewhere site. But, trust me, if you want a STRAIGHT OUTTA… shirt, the boardwalk has them.

And, Finally

Presenting the most surprising shirt of late 2015: A shirt saying that the wearer is not gay, but will have sex with a person of the same sex for $20. Hey, everyone’s gotta make a living.

Earlier This Summer: 2015 Wildwood Boardwalk T-Shirt Roundup | Confederate Flag Shirts on the Wildwood Boardwalk