The Bunny Museum was weird as hell.
If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you know I do my best to refrain from disparagement– everyone’s just out there doing their best, and as a general rule, I won’t come down on a thing just because I don’t personally like it.
But The Bunny Museum? Yikes.
Look, I’ve even been to the Clown Museum and Motel in Nevada, which literally features images of glowering clowns (brandishing butcher knives!) on the outside of the building– and that was less off-putting than The Bunny Museum.
Let’s start with the entrance, which was littered with strange (chemically high?!) bunnies in murals, and somehow, the official logo for the museum featured a white bunny with RED EYES. This was, perhaps, an indication I should have turned around– but I’d already come this far and found street parking in LA., so… onward I forged.
I paid the entry $12 fee to a stoic woman at the desk (I’d come to realize later that she was the owner and proprietor, but that was not made clear at the time). The slogan of The Bunny Museum is “The Hoppiest Place on Earth”– but the vibe was more dirge than disco. It was pretty quiet within, and most sections were low-lit, which wasn’t the most joyful setup. There wasn’t any music, instead– an unsettling quiet hung about in the place.
Now, you may be thinking– but hold on, for that kind of money you could have gone to see a movie– which you probably would have enjoyed much more– no arguments there.
Stepping into the exhibit space, it was clear this was going to be less “museum” and more “massive collection of knick-knacks”– and to boot, it would be the ‘floor-to-ceiling’ style of the latter. Seemingly every inch of the walls, display cases, and shelving was occupied by a rabbit fashioned out of different materials: ceramics (!), metal (!), plastic (!), stuffing (!), oil paints (!), and… oh god, rabbit poo (!).
Apparently, there are “over 30,000 items” in the collection– which is what people say when they have truly lost count of the number of things in their possession.
And so, reader– because I went and saw The Bunny Museum, YOU have to, too.
I now present: photos of the hoarder-horror-slapdash that was The Bunny Museum.
There were a few facts about bunnies thrown around for good measure on tiny placards– but this was clearly not the intent of this place. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but thousands (hundreds of thousands?!) of little bunny faces staring at me was not exactly it. Sometimes, I’d get that creepy feeling of being watched, and look up to find a bunny positioned somewhere above my head (as happened with the turquoise stuffed bunny below).
And here’s the thing: bunnies are cute, taken alone. Even bunny-sculpture-plate-rendering-things can be cute when there’s one. But when there’s dozens, then hundreds, then thousands?! It might have been the massive number of them that felt so off-putting, in retrospect.
Though, in my defense, there some WERE genuinely creepy items: case in-point, the little baby-bunny looking things below that had buck teeth, and inexplicably, pug-like faces (!?). Or the bird bath garden bunny, which had ‘serial-killer-standing-silently-outside-your-house-in-the-rain’ vibes (also below). Yep, below is the most cursed section of items, so beware.
Now, I’d like to direct your attention to the smiling bunny face in the middle of the stuffy pile above– there ya go. Now that you’ve seen it, you can’t un-see it. Is it asking for help? Is it smiling because it knows something you don’t? Is it using RFID technology to steal your identity?
Speaking of things I can’t un-see, one of the last exhibits involved the aptly-named “Poop Ball,” which had been created specifically for the museum (BY the museum owner, mind you). There was also “Mike Kelley’s Poop” — a jar full of bunny droppings, potentially from one day in 2009? I don’t remember, because I honestly might have blocked this part from my brain.
That photo of the woman in the red dress who is cuddling the sh*t out of bunny merchandise? That’s the proprietor of The Bunny Museum, Candace Frazee. Turns out, Candace had greeted me at the door herself. Her dedication to the art of all things bunny was impressive, and she was working hard to share her obsession with the world– something I always admire in very dedicated individuals.
That said, The Bunny Museum ended up feeling less like a fun, good-natured celebration of bunnies, and more like a mashup of some of the weirdest bunny memorabilia available. The energy of the place was just a little muted, almost serious– and frankly, a destination I was more than ‘hoppy’ to leave.
Posted by Sun
