It's a long running Panic joke that our local Panic Subway always, always has two of the same kinds of soup on display. The soup sign always looks exactly like this — two slots, one soup. Eternally, now and forever. (And if you stare at the sign for a while and cross your eyes, a bitchin' unicorn pops out!) In all fairness, I should note that this is mainly a running joke among those of us at Panic who can actually stomach the spectacular blandness and molecular-level smell embedment of visiting a Subway. Not everyone here is as tolerant, like Steve. Me, I've traditionally enjoyed¹ Subway because, as I always say, "When you eat at Subway, it's like not eating anything at all!"

Anyway, after snickering at the whole DoubleSoups™ situation for a while, I decided it was time for a change, a change from within. When they weren't paying attention — which is usually — I slid out one of the soup cards, traced it on to the back of a local weekly newspaper, drew a couple key crop lines, went back to the office fired up Adobe Illustrator, and went to work, template-style.

The end result:


For one whole day, our Subway featured delicious, piping hot Bison Noodle Soup.

Now, I will agree that "Bison Noodle Soup" isn't the most obvious comedy choice here. But it's not easy: the comedy threshold is very delicate. The goal is to fall somewhere in the realm of extremely general believability. If you do something outright offensive ("Poop Soup"), or something too obviously insane ("Horn of Unicorn" or "Children Con Carne"), you'll only accomplish one thing: the next customer will look, laugh, ask, and the sign will be taken down immediately.

No, my friend, you want the sign to stay forever. You want, as happened to us, big burly men to take a look at the sign, ponder it for quite some time, and apparently seriously consider ordering the Bison Noodle Soup before having second thoughts. The game here is to pick something funny, but not so funny as to elicit questions. Longest time wins!

Here are four .pdf alternates we've prepared for you. Just print out, trim on the dotted lines, and simply slide it into the soup slot (oo-er!) of your own local Subway. It can go in front of the existing card, for massive non-damage.


And for the truly adventurous, here's my template file. Note that I used Helvetica Neue Black for the font which, frustratingly, isn't a perfect font match, as you can see. Is there a semi-condensed version? Maybe they used Arial... probably. Anyway, I really want to see your ideas! Get crackin'!

Subway Soup Template.ai.zip (4.84 MB, Adobe Illustrator CS2)
(If you manage to pull off your own stupid soup trick, make sure to take a picture, let us know, post in the comments, and maybe we should start a Flickr group. Also, Panic is not responsible for you being kicked out of a Subway. Which seems extremely unlikely.)