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Want A Dinosaur? Or A Sphinx?

April 14, 2009

The relocation — or “adoption” as it’s known locally — of the giant statues formerly at Magic Carpet Golf in Tucson, Arizona, is nearly complete.

But if you yearn for two of the biggest statues, the toothy dinosaur or the sedate Sphinx, they’re still available.

“Each would take 20 grand, maybe more, to move,” said Charlie Spillar, who’s been working for the past 14 months to find homes for all of the statues. “They’re built of concrete and steel, so even if they semi-disintegrate they can be fixed fairly easily.”

Charlie, who works for Valley of the Moon (another Tucson statue attraction), is a sculptor who once had some of his works bulldozed by an uncaring property owner. “I said, ‘I’m not gonna let that happen to these guys,'” Charlie recalled when he heard that Magic Carpet Golf had been bought by a car dealership. “It’s Lee Koplin’s work [the creator of Magic Carpet Golf] and he’s dead. As an artist, it’s like our immortality.”

The three-story-tall Tiki — the largest piece — was successfully moved late last year. The giant “Poo Monkey” was just relocated to a private home only a block from where Charlie lives in the Dunbar Springs neighborhood (“Anything goes here,” Charlie said). Valley of the Moon has taken five of the sculptures for its own art display, including the howling tree stump and an alien head named “Goop.”

The dinosaur and sphinx are all that remain, and Charlie asks that all interested adopters e-mail him at cspillar@q.com. He personally sees a practical advantage to the Sphinx. “It would make a really good studio,” he said. “You could actually live in the thing. You could have a nice little apartment in there.”

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