Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays the evil villain Negan in “The Walking Dead,” has branded the people who demanded removal of the t-shirt from stores as “stupid.” Morgan is shocked to find that anyone could find the T-shirt controversial to begin with. Basically, the offending shirt was on display at Primark stores and it featured Negan’s famous Lucille basebat bat, backed by the rhyme the villain used to select his victims, i.e.
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” Anyone who saw that episode totally gets it. The scene is burned into their retinas forever, as Glenn and Abraham were brutally murdered.
On continuing the rhyme in TWD, the next line was “catch a tiger by the toe.” Nothing controversial about that, right? However, some bright spark remembers the bad old days, when the word “tiger” was originally the N-word. Sort of, around 100 years ago, right? But thanks to a complaint that the shirt was “racist and offensive”, the U.K. department store chain Primark pulled the TWD shirt from its stocks and has apologized. In fact, the BBC quotes the complainer as saying the T-shirt was "fantastically offensive."
According to The Sheffield Star, the customer in question had said the image directly relates to the practice of assaulting black people in the U.S.
That the image directly threatens, or implies, a racist assault. They said if they were black and came across someone wearing that particular T-shirt, they would know just where they stood.
Primark said in a statement that the T-shirt in question was licensed merchandise for “The Walking Dead,” and that the image and quote were taken directly from that show. They said any offense caused was wholly unintentional, but they sincerely apologized anyway. You can watch the actual scene, depicted on the T-shirt, in the video below.
‘The Walking Dead’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan says people are stupid
Meanwhile, as soon as he heard about the controversy, our hero “Negan” in the form of Morgan, headed to Twitter to say “Holy crap, people are stupid.”
"The Walking Dead" and the “Eeny, Menie, Minie, Moe” finale
Rather ironically, when the season finale aired in April last year, with Rick’s merry team all kneeling and lined up for the kill and Negan swaggering around reciting the rhyme, there was no huge outrage.
OK, fans were extremely worried and wanted to know which of their heroes was about to die, but the public made no real outburst over the rhyme Negan was reciting. Only now does some bright spark customer spot the T-shirt and suddenly make it a thing. Here is an image of the so-called, "fantastically offensive" shirt.