CHICKASHA – “Whether you love it or hate it, it works,” Economic Development Council President Jim Cowan said recently about the leg lamp statue downtown.
The statue is a 50-foot-tall replica of the one that figures prominently in the 1983 film, “A Christmas Story,” a holiday staple for many years on Ted Turner’s TBS and TNT networks.
The leg lamp statue is a copy of the lamp in the film: a long, slender leg in fishnet stocking and black high heel, supporting a lampshade trimmed in fringe. The 40-foot-tall lamp stands atop a 10-foottall crate imprinted with the word “Fragile” (or, as the late Darren McGavin pronounced it, “fra-jee-lay”).
The statue was manufactured out of fiberglass by Midwest Cooling Towers. The grand opening of the sculpture was held on Nov. 5, 2022, and the statue is on display year-round. The statue is located adjacent to the train depot in “Old Town” Chickasha.
Last year the tourist attraction drew more than 51,000 visitors, many of whom returned to the site at least once more, and spent an average of 37 minutes each time, data provided by Placer Labs software indicated. Chickasha’s leg lamp has been visited by more than 95,500 Americans from 46 states and the District of Columbia.
A map of the United States that Cowan showed during an EDC meeting March 11 was splattered with dots that appeared in every state but Wyoming, South Dakota and Vermont. Those dots represent ZIP codes of individuals who clicked on the “Visit Chickasha” website, he explained.
Cowan said he was interviewed on radio stations in Dallas, Texas, and in Seattle, Washington, about the leg lamp. And during spring break this week, Chickasha anticipates an influx of visitors, many wanting to see the leg lamp statue, he speculated recently.
The statue has garnered attention worldwide. An “exposure” map of the entire globe showed that not only is the statue popular in the U.S., residents of several foreign countries – including Britain, Germany, Spain, Brazil, China, Nigeria, South Africa, India, Indonesia, and Australia – clicked on the “Visit Chickasha” website during a two-week period when publicity about the leg lamp “went viral” in 2020, Cowan related.
Chickasha’s original, inflatable leg lamp was publicized throughout the U.S. and even in Britain that year. A story about the inflatable leg lamp appeared on the front page of the London Daily Mail newspaper on Dec. 24, 2020.
There’s even a Leg Lamp Lodge in Appleton, Wisconsin. If you click on their website, you might see a leg lamp – which one Chickasha resident has publicly condemned as “lascivious” – that’s identical to the one in the 1983 film.
The leg lamp statue was “a selling point” in attracting millionaire California businessman Chet Hitt to Chickasha a little over two years ago. Legal concerns Nevertheless, opposition to the statue was revived in January when a letter posted on social media alleged the iconic leg lamp statue violates trademark and copyright laws.
The letter was issued five months ago, on Oct. 2, 2024, by Markel Service Inc., claim service manager for Evanston Insurance Co., which issued commercial general liability insurance policies to Communities Foundation of Oklahoma d/b/a Chickasha Community Foundation (CCF), which owns the leg lamp statue.
Evanston “is [in] receipt of Turner Entertainment Co. and Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. notice of claim alleging trademark and copyright infringement.” The letter advised that Evanston “reserves the right to investigate this matter and disclaim coverage for any damages that are not covered” under the insurance policies previously mentioned.
“Based upon a review of the loss notice and information” provided in correspondence dated July 17, 2024, “Warner Brothers is alleging that CCF has utilized derivative copies of props and trademarks” from the 1983 film “A Christmas Story” – specifically the “Leg Lamp” statue.
Warner Brothers also alleged that CCF “utilizes the Leg Lamp and other Warner Brothers trademarks (i.e., the WB shield) in … merchandise sold at the gift shop…” The gift shop does in fact sell such merchandise officially licensed by Warner Brothers.
Warner Brothers contended CCF built the leg lamp statue over their objections and asserted claims under the Lanham Act for trademark and infringement” and “demands that the structure be removed and destroyed.”
Almost certainly Warner Brothers knew about Chickasha’s inflatable leg lamp as early as 2020, when publicity about it went viral. Yet WBEI never threatened legal action over the inflatable leg lamp.
Despite threats, no lawsuit filed Steven M. Fogelson, vice president of business and legal affairs for Warner Bros. Consumer Products, responded Jan. 7, 2019, to an inquiry from Evan Talley, an intellectual property rights attorney in Oklahoma City.
“We have reviewed your request” in reference to the Chickasha leg lamp “and have determined not to grant you the permission that you have requested,” Fogelson wrote.
Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. “reserves all rights in and to ‘A Christmas Story’ and all copyrights, trademarks and other intellectual property rights to WBEI subsisting in or associated therewith.”
And in an email dated March 15, 2019, Oklahoma City attorney Ryan Leonard advised Tim Elliott of Standley Systems, a leg lamp booster, that “Warner Brothers will almost certainly seek to enforce their copyright and you’ll end up in a lawsuit.”
Six years later, “There is no lawsuit,” Cowan told those attending the CEDC meeting last Tuesday, March 11.
“As a board member of the Chickasha Community Foundation, we are not aware of any legal action against the CCF,” Cowan wrote in statement he delivered to the Ledger and posted on the CHICKASHA, ‘Politically Speaking’ Facebook page in January.
Records of U.S. district, appellate, and bankruptcy courts indicate no such lawsuit has been f iled by Warner Brothers Entertainment nor by Turner Entertainment.
Further, neither Warner Brothers Entertainment nor Turner Entertainment had filed any litigation in Grady County nor any other district court in this state, the Ledger found during searches of the Oklahoma State Courts Network in January and again on March 12.
NBC News, too, backs off story Cowan notified
Southwest Ledger on March 13 that he had been “talking to NBC National News for two weeks about WB’s threat of a lawsuit.” A news crew was scheduled to be in Chickasha that day “to do the story,” and he sent them “a lot of documents.”
On March 12, after reviewing those documents in detail, Cowan said, “They called me back and said they weren’t coming because they didn’t feel like WB was serious about the lawsuit.”