You ever just remember something for basically no reason, or at least for very little reason? I'm pretty sure most people do. A lot of the time when this happens to me, I usually take it as a sign that I'm supposed to draw something, such as when I drew http://www.furaffinity.net/view/24516660/ and http://www.furaffinity.net/view/23597918/. This time, for literally no reason at all, I remembered this restaurant that used to be in a mall near where I lived that was called Kahunaville. I have little to no memories of the inside of the place, since I don't remember my family ever eating there, it was just a place we would usually walk past, something we would merely see and nothing more whenever we were in that mall. Now, the fact that we never went inside was fine by my younger self because the only real reason it stood out to me enough to still remember it is because they had animatronics, similar to a Chuck E. Cheese, of these talking tiki heads near the front that used to scare the shit out of me. I actually remember those tikis being something of a reoccurring nightmare for me. I remember one that had them surrounding me in my bedroom, and I remember one where me and my family were in the mall and they all disappeared around me, leaving me unattended in a baby stroller that was slowly rolling towards those tikis as they laughed at me. That's why Five Nights at Freddy's struck such a cord with me later on in high school. I didn't have many experiences with animatronics growing up, but the few times I did, they were usually mildly unsettling at best and terrifying at worst. You'd think that playing a game about them coming to life and committing murder with jumpscares would just make them, well, scarier, but it actually had the opposite effect on me. Nowadays I find animatronics more fascinating than scary, to the point that I actually feel kinda bad for finding them so scary before. I mean, is it really those tikis' fault that I was just a wuss of a child?

The tikis weren't the only animatronics they had though, I also remember an animatronic tortoise, which I don't remember being scared of at all, probably because my naive younger self actually thought that it was a real tortoise. It didn't start to creep me out until a few years later with the restaurant probably at the tail end of its life and giving less than zero shits about maintaining the equipment, which left the tortoise in a state of disrepair with torn-up "skin," making it look like a real tortoise that should be dead yet still moved. Nowadays that wouldn't scare me as much, or at least nowadays I can appreciate somewhat disturbing imagery like that. If you told me now that I could go somewhere to see a zombie tortoise that was also a robot, well...just say that out loud! A zombie tortoise that's also a robot, tell me that doesn't sound awesome!

One of my favorite things to do when I remember something I used to be scared of is to go find it again, to face my old monsters head on, only now much older, with more of an awareness of what's real and what isn't, and not as easily disturbed as I was then. Sort of like getting killed by a boss in an RPG and then coming back with higher stats after grinding. (except I actually really hate when games make me do that, go fig) This is usually pretty easy when it's something like a movie or an old TV show episode or something, you can find just about all of those things for free on the Internet. The infamous Nickelodeon "Pinchface" bumper, for example, can be found easily on YouTube. Unfortunately though, this old monster of mine seems to have been a limited-chance boss fight. I'm probably never gonna get the chance to see those animatronics in their entirety again. I've found plenty of photos of the tortoise, (tortoisES apparently, I only remember there being one but apparently there was two) but I could only find a picture of one of the talking tikis, although I remember there being more than that, I wanna say there was two or three, and there's definitely no going back to see them in person with the chain now defunct. Bummer.

Either way, whenever I think of old animatronics these days, especially defunct ones, it makes me really feel like drawing Zonta. You know, because I really needed a reason that badly.