Another heads up.

Whistle while you work... (A B A G F# G A)...

Oh, hey folks. Doing a little dusting, I haven't been in here lately. Lots of work and some projects going on, sorry 'bout that.

I trust everyone's been in good health and has lots of summer-ey things to do.

I have all kinds of things to do myself but needed to take a second to point out something I find curious and neat.

Last Sunday we took Kiara to one of the myriad miniature golf courses in town. She wanted to play at the one with the all the giraffes and alligators and elephants, so Gator Golf it was.

Inside the ticket counter/arcade/concession house I was paying for our game when I suddenly snapped my head to my left -- d'you know that feeling that something in the room is familiar, important, something you want to see, but you're not yet sure what it is? You cast your gaze about, searching, searching...

It took a second but I finally found it, rocking slowly back and forth inside the shooting gallery:

Now, to the untrained eye, this is just some local yokel character in the typical Ol' West bank shooting gallery game... but to the informed observer, it screams Disneyland!

This HAS to be based on a famous face sculpted decades ago by Disney legend Blaine Gibson, who gave the world the Hitchhiking Ghosts, the Partners statue of Walt and Mickey, every President in the Hall of Presidents, and almost every memorable character face from the classic Disney rides.

Here's a cast of the original creation at bottom center (and a very 

lifelike bust and hands of Walt Disney, don't you think?)...

... and here's a cast from that face as it occupies a shelf at my 

friend Dr. Shocker's House of Horrors.

... and in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, the prisoner standing up

uses this face. 

This face is used in numerous characters in the Pirates ride and in the Haunted Mansion (a princely ghost among the tombstones most notably) but I could not locate any decent images of them. However, I know you've seen this face for many, many years.

It's why I snapped to attention and began looking around... I knew I'd seen something that was very important to me, something that is a part of my visual set of tools, my childhood memories.

So now, look again at the rockin' chair fella from the Ozarks:

... and try to tell me that whoever made this figure for Gator Golf wasn't trying his or
her damnedest to copy Gibson's well-known and iconic style!

I love it, by the way. I mean, if you're going to steal a look for life-sized figures from another artist, you can't do better than stealing from the now 92-year-old genius Blaine Gibson.

DDSP!