Only in America can you find statues of Nathan Hale, Jack Brickhouse and Bob Hartley all within a block of each other.
Actually, only in Chicago — because that’s where Jack Brickhouse announced Cubs games for 40 years, and that’s where Bob Hartley practiced psychiatry from 1972-78. (It’s unclear why, exactly, the Tribune Co. immortalized Revolutionary War hero Hale outside its headquarters. He wasn’t from Chicago.)
The trouble is Bob Hartley. He isn’t real. Oh, the statue is real enough: Hartley sitting in his chair gesturing towards an empty bronze couch is just as big and shiny as Brickhouse sitting in his recording booth, script in hand. But Hartley himself never really treated psychotic Chicagoans. He’s the sit-com character that Bob Newhart made famous 30 years ago and Viacom revived for TV Land, which paid for the Michigan Ave. statue it unveiled in July.
There’s also a bronze Mary Richards statue in downtown Minneapolis, flinging her beret into the air right where Mary Tyler Moore did it in the opening credits of her show; a Ralph Kramden statue at the entrance to New York City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal; and a Sheriff Andy and Opie Taylor statue in Pullen Park in Raleigh, NC. All are brought to us by TV Land in an “effort to honor people, places and moments from our TV heritage by recognizing the site as a ‘TV Land Landmark,’” according to the network.
Feh, four statues of beloved sit-com characters. They’re charming, actually. What’s the harm? But add in the Madison Avenue Walk of Fame unveiled in September during Advertising Week, and this icon worship starts getting out of hand.
The Walk of Fame immortalizes American’s five favorite advertising characters, chosen from a slate of 26 candidates by the 500,000-plus votes that consumers cast this summer. The AAAA, which hosted the first-ever Advertising Week and the Walk of Fame, extended the six-week voting period another two weeks, ostensibly because voter interest was so high that AAAA didn’t want to turn off the spigot. Have people spent more time weighing the Aflac Duck against Mr. Peanut than considering Bush vs. Kerry?
Kellogg used e-mail and p.r. to rally votes for Tony the Tiger and the Keebler Elves in a show of good-natured sibling rivalry. Here’s this tidbit from Tony’s bio on a Kellogg press release: “His wife, Ms. Tony, daughter Antoinette, and son Tony, Jr. all live with him in Battle Creek, Michigan.”
When a cartoon tiger has a backstory and a sit-com shrink has a permanent site on Michigan Ave., it’s too much. It worries me, this immortalizing fictitious characters. Have we no real heroes to honor anymore?
It also bugs me that statues have been co-opted as a marketing medium. I worry that it will lessen our reverence for the serious statues that pay tribute to real people — the National Iwo Jima Memorial Monument, the Lincoln Memorial. It sounds crochety and old-fashioned, but I believe that certain public places — libraries, schools, city halls, churches — should be marketing-free. And statues should be for civics, not commerce.
You’re thinking, Lighten up. The Statue of Liberty is a fictitious character. Think of the TV Land monuments as sculpture, not statuary. (In fact, TV Land uses the terms interchangeably, calling the Hartley monument a sculpture and its Andy Griffith Show tribute a statue in the same paragraph.)
Hey, I loved that whole fiberglass Cow Thing when Chicago first did it in 1999. Hell, every city has its fiberglass mascots these days. Such sculpture makes for good (if overplayed) temporary public art. But Bob Hartley, permanently parked across the street from Nathan Hale? A Tony the Tiger plaque in the sidewalk, with a new bronze plaque added each year?
Maybe it’s all that bronze that bugs me. So serious.
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