You know those big illustrated boards with holes in? You poke your face through and you have the body of a cartoon wizard or something, and someone takes a photo. You get them at the seaside and tourist destinations.
They don’t appear to have an official name.
Though Wikipedia says that one common name is a photo stand-in and boy is that article a wild ride.
POINT ONE:
The use of an image on a board that could be held up as a foreground below the chin was patented by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge in 1874.
Photo stand-ins came earlier than this version, but Coolidge’s success made them popular.
Who is Coolidge? ONLY THE DOGS PLAYING POKER DUDE.
Yes, I know. It gets better.
POINT TWO:
The earliest inspiration might be tourist attractions in 19th century Egypt, where a face hole was cut out of a sarcophagus and a sphinx statue (probably plaster reproductions) so that a photo can be taken where the tourist pretends to be a mummy or sphinx.
Who do we have a photo of, posing in an actual ancient sarcophagus in Cairo in 1894?
Well, here is ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND of Austria, handlebar moustache and all, pretending to be a mummy.
20 years later he was assassinated in Sarajevo and events dominoed over four weeks into the First World War.
What.
Art Spiegelman, cartoonist, author of the beautiful, harrowing, Pulitzer-prize winning graphic novel/memoir Maus about his father and the Holocaust, was also the inventor of Garbage Pail Kids.
Charlie Mingus, considered one of the greatest jazz musicians and composers in history,
wrote a book on how to train your cat to use a human toilet.
These events are not even coincidences, there’s no acausal interconnectedness here. There is no moral to this story. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.
You know those big illustrated boards with holes in? You poke your face through and you have the body of a cartoon wizard or something, and someone takes a photo. You get them at the seaside and tourist destinations.
They don’t appear to have an official name.
Though Wikipedia says that one common name is a photo stand-in and boy is that article a wild ride.
POINT ONE:
Photo stand-ins came earlier than this version, but Coolidge’s success made them popular.
Who is Coolidge? ONLY THE DOGS PLAYING POKER DUDE.
Yes, I know. It gets better.
POINT TWO:
Who do we have a photo of, posing in an actual ancient sarcophagus in Cairo in 1894?
Well, here is ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND of Austria, handlebar moustache and all, pretending to be a mummy.
20 years later he was assassinated in Sarajevo and events dominoed over four weeks into the First World War.
What.
Art Spiegelman, cartoonist, author of the beautiful, harrowing, Pulitzer-prize winning graphic novel/memoir Maus about his father and the Holocaust, was also the inventor of Garbage Pail Kids.
Charlie Mingus, wrote a book on how to train your cat to use a human toilet.
These events are not even coincidences, there’s no acausal interconnectedness here. There is no moral to this story. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.