Sunday, December 19, 2010

A Christmas Tale.... Melbourne's Myer Window Display

December, 2010 - On a recent trip to Melbourne I was lucky enough to come across the Christmas window display in the Myers department store in the Burke Street Mall. For those that are unfamiliar with Australia, Melbourne is the capital city of the state of Victoria, and long time arch-nemesis of Adelaide... though they they themselves see Sydney as their arch-nemisis... now that I think of it, who considers Adelaide their nemisis. Hopefully someone out there.

BTW - these were taken with my so-so mobile camera, so appologies for the quality. Those phones are damned handy however in an emergency!

Anyhow... I thought I'd just throw some photos up, coz I was kinda impressed. The window displays tell a story, actually narrated by Santa (of course), and the figures are all wonderfully detailed and animated (I have no idea how, but it was well done). The story itself, well, that would take too long to explain, but needless to say there was a Christmas tree, and lots of dancing (kinda Jane Austen-ish).


As Santa explained, there's got to be a beautiful damsel. Actually, Santa's looking a little Evil Santa here...especially with his army of toy soldiers behind him. 

And as is the wont of these stories, there's of course a dashingly handsome prince-like figure, who enjoys riding swans and chaining up dolphins for his transportation pleasure.


There is some market bazaar action as well...  


And what Christmas story would be complete without some freakish long-legged clown figures... it would appear that there was more than carpets being sold at that bazaar!... This must be the Fellini-esque version of  the Christmas Tale. 


And did someone mention the levitating cake decorations? 

Still when you've had this much Christmas Cheer, you may as well have a nice romantic (though somewhat foggy) dance. Just as long as it doesn't start raining cake decorations. This cake wasn't like some sort of "special brownie" was it?

And to cap it off... a horse drawn carriage ride through some kind of psychadelic tunnel through the time-space continuum. 

So I guess, I can honestly say that I envy Melbournians their Christmas displays. That's some crazy stuff right there, but I wish it was the crazy sort of stuff that we had here in Adelaide. I have to say that Adelaide has a lot to learn from our big brother across the border. It's quite strange, but Adelaide has (or at least had) a fairly strong arts community... but we seem to lack the sort of pizazz that you see in large international cities. But we'll see shortly the sorts of things that Adelaide has to offer...

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