This Guy Chronicled Every Single T-Shirt to Appear in Heavy Metal Parking Lot

The web was a bizarre place in the mid ’90s. Way before the dawn of social networks, anyone with access to a home computer and an Internet connection set up a “home page” — on GeoCities, AngelFire, Tripod, or the like — that was basically just a collection of random shit they liked, often highlighting something of an obsessive or far-flung nature. I still remember the address of my own personal GeoCities page… and no, I’m not sharing!

Some of those home pages are still around, preserved in glorious, hand-written HTML source code like a childhood time capsule unearthed from the backyard. Like Craig Giffen’s Ho-Hum Web Page, sent in by MetalSucks reader Chris B., in basically the same state it was in 1996 — cheesy graphics, tables, FONT tags and all — hosting a collection of stuff near and dear to Craig, such as a “Human Clock” comprised of people from all over the world holding up hand-written signs with the exact time on them, an aquarium he made out of an old Macintosh SE, and various personal photo and video journals from vacations taken over the years.

And then there’s this: a collection of still frames of EVERY SINGLE T-SHIRT in Heavy Metal Parking Lot, painstakingly captured by going through the film one frame at a time and hard-coded onto this web page, sorted by band, for your personal enjoyment. Though the project is much newer than much of the rest of Giffen’s site — he started in 2011 and finished it up in time for the coming 30th anniversary of the film’s release (May 31st, 2016) — the page maintains a glorious made-in-1995 feel, right down to the rainbow horizontal divider and “Heavy Metal” animated .gif, mined from an old 3.5″ floppy disk he’d saved all these years. Take your cassette tapes and shove them up your ass, hipsters… this is the real deal!

I won’t ruin the fun of browsing the page for you — go and visit yourself — but below is just a sample of what’s in store. There’s also an entire section of unknown t-shirts… maybe you can help identify a few!