Sammy's Super T-Shirt

I used to love this movie, and would equally love to see it again. When I was in the 1st grade (1979-1980), my school's t-shirt had a lion's face on the front as our mascot. I used to constantly pretend that it WAS Sammy's super t-shirt. The only thing I couldn't do was run backwards, like the skid that stole it in the movie and put it on backwards. I don't remember too much of it since I haven't seen it in the last 25 years or so, but I just remember as a kid being totally into it. It was 70's kid television at it's best. Anyway, if anyone is interested in selling a copy, I'd be all about logging into PayPal to make it happen.

For about the past 10 years I have been trying to figure out whether this was a real movie or just something I imagined when I was very little. After hours spent on the internet, I found that dozens of other people remember the same things about this movie that I did. It's about some kid that gets powers from a shirt with a tiger on it and races. I really want to see this movie again, seeing as I remember basically nothing about it, but I gave it a 10 out of 10 just for actually existing. I really hope that it will eventually get a release on VHS or DVD! For those interested it does have its own website (the URL I don't remember) but the site is really great.

My son loved this movie so much, we had to make a Sammy's Super T-Shirt for him to wear, involving freeze-framing it on the VHS player, copying the picture, then reproducing it on a white t-shirt using wash-proof clothing dyes. He loved it. Why is the movie so good? It is a children's movie, made to capture the imagination of children and demonstrating that within each of us there is an ability to succeed if the effort is put in (which may not be true, but, hey, you'll never know if you don't try). Sammy is no different to Raiders of the Lost Ark, except for budget. You may say this is ridiculous, but I saw the looks on my son's and his friend's faces as they watched a movie made for them. Target market - a 100% hit.

Created by the Children's Film Foundation (remember the pigeons taking off in Trafalgar Square on the intro credits?), Sammy's Super T-Shirt was just one of the cheesy kids flicks aired by the Beeb on Friday afternoons in the Seventies and Eighties.

This film was all the more memorable to me as it was shot around my local area. The cinder athletics track where the grand finale takes place was where I too competed in district championships while at school (although I would have benefited from Sammy's Tiger power and the ability to speed up the film to make me run faster!).

And the creepy house where Sammy gets kidnapped was known as Murphy's Mansion. Run down and dilapidated after its appearance in the film, it was home to many figments of kids' lively imaginations - killer tramps living in tunnels, murdered children haunting rooms, zombies lurking in the woods. Naturally it was the mecca for any adventurous child, and could only be accessed by swinging precariously over a river from a boarded-up bridge or by climbing over fences and running through back gardens.

It's long been knocked down and replaced by bog-standard new houses - not quite the same really. And the same goes for the pigeons at Trafalgar Square - where are they now?

I'm so happy to learn the title of this movie. I remember it being shown to our elementary school in the 80s when we'd a have special movie day in the gymnasium where all grades got to watch. I thought I recalled it being a projected movie, but if it was a TV movie, then it must have just been something one of the teachers recorded and played back on the "giant silver top loading VCR." Same as a poster up above, I wasn't even sure I had really seen this or imagined it. The movies that stick in my mind from elementary school viewings are Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Disney's Ichabod Crane, the Pippi Longstocking movies (I had no idea as a child that she was poorly dubbed) and now that I know the name, Sammy's Super T-shirt.