Part 5: Countdown to Corner Bar

The logo of Zombie Apocalypse NOW!, the Transformers-like jack-o'-lantern, was not chosen at random.  While I guess you’d assume our logo would be something zombie-themed I actually wanted to avoid that. I really wanted an image that was unique and be something that would eventually be synonymous with the band but without being completely obvious.  That said I still would like to have a “Z-Buster” image as a secondary logo but that day hasn’t happened yet.

Anyway the seeds were originally planted while I was on the Saturday Morning Cartoon Show and we happened to be playing It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.  I joked with my co-host DJ Muppet that it’d be funny if the Great Pumpkin was real and went on a violent rampage across the world (This was prior to Robot Chicken doing that very skit, I should mention).  I ended naming it the “Doomsday Pumpkin” as a combination of “Doomsday Clock” and “Smashing Pumpkins” (The album Zeitgeist had recently come out and I kept hearing about the song everywhere).   It wasn’t until later that I even thought about using it as a band logo. That we can thank the Moped Army for.  Kind of.

So for those of you who don’t know the Moped Army are basically a nationwide group of moped enthusiasts which started out in Kalamazoo years ago but now has chapters all over the US.  The Kalamazoo chapter call themselves “the Decepticons”.  Now I’m the kind of guy that gets pretty frustrated when I get caught behind mopeds while driving and I was always pretty disappointed when (As a big time Transformers fan) I saw stickers all over town of the Decepticon logo and got really excited until someone told me that was actually for the Moped Army and not the toyline.  A buddy once joked that we should become “Autobots”, put the appropriate logo on our cars, and become a rival gang.  That kind of stuck in my head; not the part about being a rival gang but about having a Transformers logo.    I soon got the idea that Zombie Apocalypse NOW! could have such a image to promote ourselves and that whenever I saw a Decepticon sticker somewhere in Kalamazoo I would put my own sticker right next to it as a counterpoint. I’m not sure why I eventually decided to use the Doomsday Pumpkin character to do this but I do know is that I really, really wanted a Transformers grinning pumpkin to represent the band.  Probably because I’m a nerd.

My buddy Mr. Kaze, who also made a lot of out T-shirts, offered to design the logo based on my specifications.  Here’s the original proof of concept.

Th earliest Doomsday Pumpkin logo

I thought it was pretty good, but Travis didn’t really like it and suggested the image needed to be wider to invoke a scarier picture. Mr. Kaze went back to the drawing board and came up with what we decided would be the final product.

Pumpkins in Disguise!

We loved it and almost immediately began making shirts of it.   These days most of our fans know that logo pretty well. Per Mr. Kaze’s suggestion I (Eventually) wrote an accompanying song to make a stronger link between that picture and the band, appropriately titled “Doomsday Pumpkin”; a story of the Great Pumpkin declaring humanity to be too corrupt and thus bringing about the end of the world as punishment.

The disaster at the Corner Bar after the jump.