What a blast! Wisconsin company home of the T-shirt cannon

 

NEW BERLIN, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Wisconsin is known for beer and brats, but did you know is also the T-shirt cannon capital of the world? FX in Motion, based in New Berlin, has little competition for their swag delivery systems, which owner Todd Scheel calls "weapons of mass entertainment."

Scheel did not invent the T-shirt cannon, but you might say he perfected it. His company's largest can deliver a ridiculous payload of swag.

"The biggest single gun in the world, this is a quad barrel... it can shoot 372 T-shirts in twenty seconds," he said.

Starting with a single-barrel gatling-style T-shirt gun back in 2007 sold to the NBA's Memphis Grizzlies, FX in Motion has been encouraging an arms race in the sports entertainment world. Scheel says pro and college teams everywhere are clamoring for bigger and better.

"The New York Giants got a triple-barrel gatling gun, the first in the NFL," Scheel said, "well the (New York) Jets, they're like wait a minute, they're feeling a little left out... they got two."

The subject of a few lawsuits, and plenty of hijinks, the T-shirt cannon is ingrained in American culture. In 2019, police in Oklahoma say a woman used one to fire drugs and other contraband into a prison. Scheel says Australian customs seized one of his creations for months, mistaking it for a real weapon. And the T-shirt cannon is responsible for at least one casualty, albeit a fictional one. The Simpsons killed off Maude Flanders when cannon-fired T-shirts knocked her over a tall stadium ledge.

Scheel says FX in Motion has about 50 products to liven up the game or any other event, and that the next big thing in sports entertainment is not far off.

"The ideas are in my head. All it takes is a team to come to me and say we have the budget for it," Scheel said.