While recent carnival sculptures have been little more than heaps of packed snow, the theme for this year's carnival, inspired by "2001: A Space Odyssey," has produced an entire glowing, futuristic landscape modeled after the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's famous movie.
The sculpture, designed by Winter Carnival co-chair Raymond Gilliar '01, consists of a 22-foot high tower of clear ice filled with green lights. In the background stand six 10-foot tall figures.
The figures, according to sculpture co-chairs Ian Laing '01 and Lisa Salzer '04, represent evolution, with the statues near the tower appearing upright and human-like and those further looking more like apes.
The sculpture emulates the opening scene of "2001: A Space Odyssey," which featured a gray monolith surrounded by monkeys intended to symbolize the coming of man.
"It will be a different twist on the traditional sculpture," Carnival co-chair Amish Parashar '03 said.
Sculpture design techniques, however, remain similar to those of years past. Chicken wire and a wooden frame provide the sculpture's shape, onto which students pack and form snow.
But while this year's endeavor might exhibit more creativity than in recent years, warm weather has contributed to a decline in participation and subsequently a downfall in sculpture quality over the past decade.
The 1992 Winter Carnival's 26-foot tall sculpture of Dr. Seuss' the Grinch may have perched on a beer keg in protest of the College's new alcohol policy, but the sculpture-building students had no kegs of their own. Before the College banned them, kegs and other alcohol on the Green used to draw many more students to contribute to the building effort.
Three years later, a howling wolf perched on a rock melted, turning into "a phallic symbol in the middle of the Green," according to a previous issue of The Dartmouth.
And in 1997, the sculpture of a knight on horseback collapsed in the middle of the afternoon while artists were putting on the finishing touches.
But even when the weather cooperated, the students themselves sometimes wreaked havoc on the sculptures.
After being criticized for a lack of aesthetic appeal, 1994's abominable snowman was mysteriously decapitated. Perhaps the year's theme --"When Hanover Freezes Over ... All Carnival Breaks Loose"-- was taken a bit too literally.
In 1991, students spray-painted the 20-foot sculpture of King Neptune in his Dolphin-drawn chariot in an effort to cancel Winter Carnival as a protest of the Persian Gulf War.
Last year's ski jump and skier faced an untimely demise when the skier fell off his jump, leaving little more than an unsightly mound of snow.
Before the downfall of carnival sculptures in the 1990s, however, sculptures were bigger, better and seemingly never thwarted by warm weather.
It took a fire-breathing dragon sculpture -- fueled by a butane tank -- to warm up the Hanover Green in 1969.
The extreme cold weather of 1955 forced the College to destroy the Nanook sculpture of an Eskimo riding a whale with dynamite by the College.
1987's 47.5-foot saxophone-playing snowman sculpture even made the Guinness Book of World Records as the tallest snowman built standing.
The long history of Winter Carnival's snow sculptures began in 1925, when students built a gateway of blocks on Alumni Field. Four years later, the Green became the permanent location of the sculptures.
