Sylvester Stallone, despite hating frivolities like birthday robots and water conservation laws, once loved a life-size, nude, mannequin version of himself from Demolition Man so much that he used duplicates of it to decorate Planet Hollywood restaurants around the world. With a businessman’s keen eye for movie-themed dining decor, Stallone understood that his customers needed to be able to gaze up at his contorted face, latex body locked in a twisted, half-crouched pose, as they ate.
With the fall of Planet Hollywood, these frozen Stallones disappeared along with the restaurants, vanishing into the cryogenic mists of time, never to be seen again—until now, that is, thanks to the discovery of one bedraggled Sly-mannequin by an Australian antique hunter.
Newsweek reported on the story, explaining that a ceramicist named Bea Bellingham discovered the bound, goblin-hunched Stallone prop while visiting the Katoomba Vintage Emporium antique store in Katoomba, New South Wales. Bellingham, in quotes from the article, says she photographed the “weird screaming doll” without knowing what it was from and posted the pictures on Instagram.
The post is deleted now, perhaps in an attempt to erase Sly’s horrified face from her memory, but was picked up by others on the internet, like Adam Howes, who recognized where the “screaming doll” came from. Howes spoke to Newsweek, stating that “it’s safe to assume [the mannequin’s] origin was the Sydney Planet Hollywood ....”
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Enticed by this discovery, a Reddit user visited the shop to take pictures with the taxidermied Stallone and learned that it was on sale for $6,000 AUD. Incredibly, neither the Reddit user nor Bellingham wanted to drop thousands on bringing the prop into their homes. For her part, Bellingham gave joking reasons for passing on the mannequin, saying that “it wouldn’t fit between the kids’ car seats for the journey home” and that “we already have a sex doll for our dungeon and it didn’t cost me $6K.”
It seems that, just like Ozymandias, time has humbled the “frown, wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command” of the Stallone prop. We can only imagine that $6,000 AUD would have been a steal for this in the mid-’90s. But the world has moved on, leaving behind a warning to all would-be actor/restaurateurs who dream of decorating their establishments with life-size latex recreations of themselves: Look on Planet Hollywood and Demolition Man’s works, ye mighty, and despair!
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