So while I'm waiting to see any response from Oilily about Rosa Pomar's flower-eyed bunny dolls and what looks like a cut-n-dry case of knockoffery, some new developments have come to light about the history of one design element in the case: a bunny with flowers for eyes. Depending on how you see it we could have definitive proof that either:
- Oilily was riffing on Pomar's signature bunny-with-flowers-for-eyes thing as early as 2005, OR
- Oilily's actually has a flower-eyed character named Bobbin Bunny, which they've been riffing on for years now, maybe Pomar got her idea from them! OR
- As Strikkelise's commenter hypothesized in 2006, maybe Oilily and Pomar both drew from the same ancient source, i.e., San Francisco in the late 1970's. "Now they're back, and you don't need medication to see them!" Which leads to...
- The trippy bunny-skull-with-flowers-for-eyes cover art for "Dharma Lady," a single from Geronimo Jackson, an obscure 1970's band from--you guessed it--San Francisco.
Mystery solved, right? Except that Geronimo Jackson doesn't exist. They're a fictional band working its way into the backstory of the WTF TV series Lost.
In other words, based on what we know so far, the most logical explanation for an intellectual property dispute between a Portuguese crafter and a Dutch boho baby company's ten-year-old character is the Dharma Initiative. For some reason, I'm not surprised by this.
Dharma Lady was released on iTunes Mar 17, 2009 [lostpedia]
Now my head hurts. As it often does, when Lost is in the mix.