CRESTVIEW — Anyone who's sung along with the "Let's all go to the lobby" concession stand movie promos will instantly recognize the new motif on Coney Island's front window.
Baker artist David Schroeder said the iconic dancing hotdog —accompanied by dancing popcorn boxes and candy in 1960s movie theatre advertisement films — inspired him.
Restaurateur Julia Phillips asked Schroeder, a longtime friend and Coney Island hotdog aficionado, to come up with a window design. After preparing a scale drawing for Phillips' approval, he enlarged it, taped the pieces together to make full-sized art, and traced it on the window with a marker.
Over four nights, working three to four hours each evening after his job at the Sandestin Hilton, Schroeder made his design come to life on the Main Street eatery's window.
"I'd work all day, go home, get my kids situated and then go paint," he said.
While it was Schroeder's first storefront painting, he has been dabbling in art since his youth. "I've done everything — from drawing, painting and tattooing — a lot," he said. "I've been doing it all my life."
"I love what he's done. I like the bright colors and it captures the eye," Phillips said. "It's a completely different take on what we had before."
Phillips was so pleased with the result — which replaced a years-old, partially scraped-off rendering of a tropical island — she asked Schroeder to update the sign on the side of the restaurant.
Schroeder said he would incorporate the old tropical isle motif under the arched "Coney Island" letters, using a palm tree for the "I."
As a fan of the decades-old hotdog emporium and friend of founders Phillips and Mable Edge's chosen successor, creating its new window art was a labor of love, Schroeder said.
Redoing the sign will be an equal pleasure, and it will be a bit more convenient because he can take the sign home to work on it.
"I love Coney Island. If I could eat it every day, I think I would," Schroeder said.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: 1960s cinema ad inspiration for restaurant's window art