Marion Morrison

Born Marion Morrison, John Wayne grew to be iconic for acting macho, usually as a hero cowboy in Westerns from the 1940s through the 1970s. His is the face formed by negative space on the shirt. His additional nickname, The Duke, was inspired by a fireman who would tease Wayne for walking his childhood dog by correctly calling the dog Duke, but incorrectly calling the owner Little Duke. He earned a lot of money and received a number of accolades over his career including an airport being named after him ⇒.

Wayne/Fellows Productions

Batjac Productions is a film production company that now exists mostly to administer the rights of thirty some movies that have some sort of connection to Wayne. The company signed deals with two distributors, Warner Brothers and United Artists, to own they rights to the films after the cost of each movie had been recouped. As part of the agreements, Wayne was to star in the “A” titles while also making “B” titles to the distributors’ delights.

Batjac originated as Wayne/Fellows Productions as a partnership between Wayne and Hollywood producer Robert Fellows ⇒. Fellows was later bought out of the partnership. Wayne decided upon the name Batjak in reference to a fictitious company in an earlier Wayne film. The administrative assistant accidentally used a “c” instead of a “k” in filling out the paperwork; Wayne decided to keep the typo within the official name; I found this anecdote to be the most interesting detail of my research for this dossier.

Research was needed to ascertain the correct name of this shirt. Although “Batjac Productions” is printed in small letters on this design, other shirts such as The American Red Cross {All-American Blood Donor & Be A Hero} have printers or designers that take the opportunity to piggy-back their business name on top of their client’s designs. I am glad that I did look until that point I was struggling with determining whether this shirt was intended to promote Wayne or the movie that is also mentioned on the design.

Flight Of Fancy

The High And The Mighty ⇒ is a movie adaptation of a novel of the same name written by Ernest K. Gann whose niche was aviation-themed fiction. The 1954 movie release features Wayne was as both co-producer as part of Wayne/Fellows Productions, and also as protagonist Dan Roman, the co-pilot that likes to whistle while saving the lives of everyone on the plane.

The plot concerns a airplane flight from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi to San Francisco, California. The flight suffers mid-flight engine failure before making a successful landing. The characters are prone to extended introductions, extended monologues, and flashbacks. The setting is 1950s America when air travel was not so expensive, smoking was allowed in the cockpit, kids could carry around a fake gun on-board to pretend to shoot the pilot without consequence, and passengers could walk right up to the gate to board.

Avast!

Oddly enough, this is the only shirt throughout the archives of which I have seen the design that was probably pirated. A cadre of sellers will put up a woman’s tank top with the design on this shirt missing the Batjac copyright notice for around $18. I regret that the moving target nature prohibits me from posting a future-proof link. I wonder if any woman who buys this shirt considers Wayne’s history of being a cheater (or afternoon drunkard, or smoker before and after cancer, or WWII draft-dodger turned supporter of sending other boys to die in Korea and Vietnam) before purchase.

I suspect that this shirts that I have now are legit because of the quality of both the ringer shirt and of the print placed upon it. The probable pirate tank tops are only lightly printed as if a contemporary slightly grungy design would have had the time to fade so quickly. Nonetheless, being official does not make a shirt like this feel authentic because, just as the movie is a product of the 1950s, the shirt design is typical of the 2000s and 2010s packaged rebellion design.