I saw this sign briefly, from a distance, while driving [some weeks ago] and was momentarily worried it portended the opening of

a Shoney’s in the area. you know bad news is afootly when I, me, worry about a buffet joint,

since I have a stomach of steel and a chemical resistance to 1.5-star yelp ratings. A contributor to my shoney disinclination, surely, is my long-held disdain for Shoney Bear. On the next occasion I mentioned shoney’s, I also took issue with the Shoney Bear.

just about the most generic “generic character” character there is. red shirt, blue pants, and the mouth always, ALWAYS open like that. A weird buckety scoop a fraction of the width of the upper part with an unsettling red bean cradled in it.

Note how the “updated” version still is fundamentally awful, just more modern digital corporately-executed awful. The previous artist had to learn how to write the stylistic text of the restaurant name into the drawings but this one probably just copy-pasted it. I would consider the brown pants just SLIGHTLY less boring than blue pants, but the addition of red mascot shoes and an ugly baseball hat pushes it from “funny animal,” with human traits but living in a vaguely defined wilderness area and doing childish things, to “furry,” essentially a regular person with an animal head who does boring things like go to school and play mobile games or just exist in a white void, which is worse. And STILL with the mouth like that.

and here is a picture of somebody else asking me about the darn bear. It really transcends the dining experience.

kids apparently abuse mascots in general, which would be great if actual humans being paid minimum wages, and apparently starving to death and struggling to sit upright didn’t have to directly inhabit their costumes, but I am inclined to wonder if kids hate Shoney Bear specifically, or if it was just me who did, and if not, why not?

that can’t be it; where I come from, people put up signs that evoke Shoney’s, and also write web pages about seeing those signs.
ALSO I am aware that historically Annie Oakley, a fictionalized version of which appears in the film still I just showed, comes from Ohio, a long way from Shoney’s origin zone of West Virginia, but historically Oakley wasn’t a prancing nitwit who lost a shooting contest to a man on purpose so 1950s American patriarchs wouldn’t feel threatened either so I can imagine the movie version came from Shoneyland.