I♥Tucson Reason #2 - The Bambi Bar Sign

Sometimes you wanna go - where everybody knows the bar is named after an exotic dancer, but there are really none working there.

There's just something about the local watering hole that adds so much character to the neighborhood. It adds depth and true grit, and lends the ponciest of gated cul-de-sacs an air of don't-eff-with-me awesomeness. The Bambi Bar is such a place - not only remarkable for its ability to attract the booze-ridden-down-trodden masses - but also for the aesthetic effect that it has in this otherwise tony area off of Speedway Boulevard.

It's hard to believe that this was once a bare wall.

The verdant waterworks mural on the east side of the Bambi are no doubt a treat for weary desert eyeballs, but the real prize here is the actual Bambi Bar sign.

Detail of the roadside sign - a misunderstood and little appreciated work of art.

Casual passers-by are often puzzled by the cryptozoologic nature of the Bambi Bar signage. Although most just assume the animal is a deer, others concoct fanciful stories of the origin of this mysterious iconography. Some say that it is a coyote wearing a Venetian plague mask, or a wallaby that had been mated with a hell-hound.

The truth behind the Bambi sign is much more mundane. In the 1960s during the Vietnam war, the Disney company was looking to launch short films in the vein of their famous anti-Nazi propaganda piece starring Donald Duck, called Der Fuehrer's Face (1943). The relaunch of this with an anti-Viet Cong twist was considered a patriotic move by the company, and soon Bambi's Punji Pit was given the greenlight by the studio. Intended as a cautionary tale, this short showed this Disney character succumbing to the perils of combat, including the killing of innocent rabbits, and the use of opium.

As public opinion of the war effort waned, the company ultimately decided to shelve the project. Original cels of the incomplete movie short were thought to have been lost; however several were recently unearthed in Tucson area garage sales, definitively proving the inspiration for the Bambi Bar signage.

Hand-painted cel from the opium scene in Bambi's Punji Pit.

So, fellow Tucsonianites take note - there is always an awesome back story to those things you see around our fair city but do not understand. Everything but the giant snake bridge, that is; I'm pretty sure that is just a group hallucination.