Via Grapevine Texas Online, I learned that the Grapevine City Council this week approved the purchase and installation of two animatronic gunslingers to wow what I assume will be huge crowds at their new Convention and Visitors Bureau building. And I mean, why not? Got to spend those hotel tax dollars somehow.
But the report was sorely lacking in details. So I visited the council agenda to find out more about these custom-made figures, which will be named “Harris and Sam Bass.” An Ohio company has been contracted to create the figures, which are to be of thin build and between 6-foot-6 and 7-feet tall.
Harris is to have a thick, bushy mustache, like that of Grapevine CVB executive director P.W. MacCallum’s Uncle Steve. (Says so right in the contract). Â The designers have also been given Lee Van Cleef, a character actor frequently seen in old television and film westerns, as a model. Sam Bass is supposed to look, presumably, like famed outlaw Sam Bass. The cost is only $161,840.
They’ll fight each day for about four minutes, at noon and 6 p.m. And why doesn’t the city of Dallas have a set of these? Get on it, DCVB.
Here’s hoping they are as awesome as the Colonel Sanders installation the same company created:
