Today, TeeFury is doing one of their special “Twofury” deals with two shirts inspired by Edgar Wright’s The Cornetto Trilogy for $11 each: “Shaun,” by Brinkerhoff, inspired by Shaun Of The Dead and styled like LEGO (at left), and “Three Flavours Crest,” by Arinesart, which incorporates all three films – Shaun, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End (at right).

The sale began at Teefury today, Thursday, January 23, 2014, at midnight EST, and will continue for 24 hours from then, and once it’s over, it will not be sold on the site anymore.

The World’s End
Blu-ray l DVD l Instant l Trilogy
DIRECTOR: Edgar Wright
WRITERS: Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg
STARRING: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan, Rosamund Pike
Universal Pictures
RELEASE DATE: November 19, 2013

There aren’t many words that could effectively describe my level of excitement for The World’s End, the latest movie from director Edgar Wright featuring the tag team of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. The movie completes the Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy, also known as the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, which began in 2004 with zom-rom-com Shaun of the Dead (one of my all-time favorites) and continued with another favorite, 2007’s Hot Fuzz.

The movie follows Gary King (Pegg), a man who’s had trouble with the whole “life” thing and growing up since his high school days. When younger King and his friends—Andy Knightley (Nick Frost), Steven Prince (Paddy Considine), Oliver “O-Man” Chamberlain (Martin Freeman), and Peter Page (Eddie Marsan)—attempted the Golden Mile, a 12-pub, 12-pint quest, but were unable to complete it. Now, 20 years later, he’s on a mission to reunite his friends and complete the task they failed two decades earlier. This is not an easy thing to accomplish as his friends all think rather poorly of King, but he finds a way to make it happen. The reunion goes somewhat smoothly for a bit (as smoothly as they could hope for, anyway), but a random encounter in one of the pubs uncovers some very strange happenings in the town of Newton Haven, and forces the friends to figure out what it is…and also how to get the hell out of there.

The World’s End has arrived; not the actual one (that was back in December 2012, so we were told), but the third and final movie in writer-director Edgar Wright and writer-star Simon Pegg‘s genre-bending and blending “Three Flavours Cornetto” trilogy – read my review here – that also includes Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

This past Tuesday, the soundtrack was made available was released on CD and MP3. As with his filmmaking contemporaries Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, Edgar Wright plans out the various songs he intends to feature in his movies early in the pre-production stage and uses them to express the inner thoughts and emotions of his characters when dialogue simply won’t do the trick. In a recent interview with Indiewire, Wright went track by track on the World’s End O.S.T. and discussed the role each selected tune plays in the film’s narrative.

According to the director the songs that comprise the soundtrack were chosen specifically as a means of linking the character Gary, played by Pegg, to his fruitless pursuit of good times all the time in the face of middle age.

Today sees the North American release of Edgar Wright‘s The World’s End, the final installment of his Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, which began in 2004 with Shaun of the Dead and continued in 2007 with Hot Fuzz (see our review here). The World’s End tells the tale of five friends who as teenagers attempted an epic pub crawl together, but never made it to the final establishment on their list, The World’s End. The friends eventually drift apart and move away, becoming family men with responsibilities and careers, except for Gary (Simon Pegg), who convinces the group to reconvene some 20 years later for another attempt at “The Golden Mile” drinking marathon. But during their one night/twelve pubs adventure, where each person must drink at least one pint per location, the old friends realize that something is amiss in their hometown of Newton Haven, and that there’s more to this quest than just reuniting and reconciling – the world itself is in danger!

Earlier this month, I received some cool swag in the mail from Focus Features that included a limited edition World’s End-inspired The Golden Mile T-Shirt, along with the recently released Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz Double Feature Blu-ray. Then, earlier this week, there were two more deliveries containing twelve pub glasses, each with the name and logo of one of the pubs along “The Golden Mile,” along with a different quote from the film. A note from the studio says there’s even more items to come soon.

The World’s End
Directed by Edgar Wright
Written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg
Starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Martin Freeman
Focus Features
Release Date: August 23, 2012 (U.S.)

“We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we are gonna do. We are gonna have a good time… We are gonna have a party.”

That little speech – abbreviated slightly from its original version – plays a large role in defining the theme of The World’s End, the eagerly-anticipated closing chapter in the “Blood and Ice Cream” (or “Three Flavours Cornetto”) trilogy that director Edgar Wright and his frequent star and co-writer Simon Pegg created a decade ago with the romantic zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead and continued in 2007 with the blazing police action drama spoof Hot Fuzz. The speech was first heard in the 1966 biker movie classic The Wild Angels and was given by Peter Fonda’s character Heavenly Blues. I recognized those lines the moment they were played on the soundtrack.

The World’s End is, I believe, about the futility of trying to recapture your lost youth when you never lost it to begin with. But it is also about how when most of us enter adulthood we take it upon ourselves to abandon our youthful identities completely and replace them with domesticity and responsibility. The five main characters of The World’s End never learned to reconcile the buttoned-down, easy-going side of their personalities with the spirited sense of fun and friendship that defined them as people growing up. The lead character decided to remain a child forever but instead grew into a sad and bedraggled wretch of a human being while his four best friends became hollow shells of what they once were.