Good news for all those people hankering for unrealistic facsimiles of dead people: The Denver Wax Museum, which officially closed its doors circa 1981, lives on in an even stranger manner than the one displayed the grotesque operation's original 919 Bannock Street location. Turns out that when the wax museum closed, the Forney Museum of Transportation purchased its figures -- and when the Forney moved from its cramped digs on Platte Street, now home to REI's flagship store, to its spacious new 140,000-square-foot facility at 4303 Brighton Boulevard, the museum decided to stick a bunch of its waxy acquisitions in its vehicles.
The result turns an otherwise ordinary visit to the vast transportation museum into an otherworldly experience. Amelia Earhart's famous "Gold Bug" Kissel Speedster, complete with a bug-eyed Earhart sitting behind the wheel. A wispy-haired Mark Twain hiding in a forsaken corner, passing the time with Huck Finn (somebody must have forgotten that authors usually aren't spotted with incarnations of their fictional characters).
But possibly best of all, for some odd reason the Forney gift store is selling a bunch of kitsch-tastic postcards from the wax museum. Just looking at them brings back Technicolor memories filled with Bazooka Bubble Gum wrappers and rubber-band balsa airplanes. The wax museum postcard shown above of everybody's favorite man-eater, Alfred Packer, makes us really wish the Forney folks had stuck the hungry ol' bugger inside the Herbie the Love Bug car on display, just to fuck with the kiddies. If you want some of these postcards for yourself, best get to the Forney quick before we here at Westword go back and buy them all up to send them to everybody we love.
