The giant, fully motorised Eddie Murphy head that terrorised America: “Can we do that?”
Some people would love to know what goes on inside their favourite actor’s head, but when a gigantic Eddie Murphy visage began snaking its way across America, it was a textbook case of being careful what you wish for.
That said, ‘textbook’ is debatable, because it’s hard to imagine too many scholars sitting there, fingers steepled under their chin and contemplating what would happen if a 16-foot replica of Murphy’s dome were constructed, fully motorised, and then unleashed upon an unsuspecting population.
What happened is that it was fucking terrifying. Haunting, even. A massive inflatable Jeff Goldblum appearing out of nowhere in 2018 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Jurassic Park is one thing, but Murphy’s disembodied cranium ominously zooming down the highways of the United States is something else entirely.
It’s like something out of a horror movie: imagine driving down a dark, desolate motorway, the only source of illumination coming from the headlights of the cars that are sparsely populating the road. Suddenly, in your rear-view mirror, you catch a sight of something, hear a light whirring sound, and get the shiver down your spine to let you know that something chilling is about to happen.
Then, you see it. Approaching in the distance, a blank-eyed expression etched across its unerring face, gliding across the horizon, uninhibited by a neck, shoulders, or any limbs. It grows closer, you can’t quite figure out what it is, but then your jaw drops and your heart plummets: it’s Eddie Murphy’s fucking head.
Obviously, the burning question is why this thing needed to exist. The answer is Meet Dave, the horrendous sci-fi flop where the actor and comedian plays a spaceship. It was a haunting way to advertise what everyone knew would be a shit film, but its origins are remarkably self-explanatory.
“Well, why don’t we create a giant version of Eddie Murphy’s head, and just tour it around the country, and have people be able to get into it and interact inside Eddie’s head?” queried one of its chief architects. “And the executive at Fox’s eyes just got massive, and they got all excited immediately. He was like, ‘Can we do that?’ I was like, ‘Why not? Let’s figure it out.'”
For better or worse, mostly worse, they did figure it out, with Murphy’s dead-eyed dome setting off from Los Angeles and stopping off in Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington, and Philadelphia, before parking up for three days in New York’s Times Square, no doubt traumatising anyone who caught a glimpse of the multiple Razzie winner’s ominous nape careening through traffic.
Almost two decades after its release, what happened to the most inadvertently blood-curdling aspect of Meet Dave? Nobody knows, and its whereabouts remain a mystery, although some people swear that in the dead of night, at the witching hour, it can still be seen lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike.
