This writer has been in and around the casinos of Las Vegas, on and off, since 1997, and I thought I'd pretty much seen it all during that time-frame, but I confess when this QoD arrived in the "in" box recently, I had a similar reaction to the comment-poster on TripAdvisor who, when someone posed the same question, responded with: "How much were you drinking?" (Other sarcastic remarks included: "My wife smoked a pack of Camels at the Luxor years ago. Are those the camels you're talking about?")
However, it turns out that you were not experiencing an oversized-margarita-inspired hallucination and that there was indeed at one time a pair of animatronic talking camels residing at the Luxor. In our quest to find out more, we even came across the website of a California-based sound designer named Michael Hooker who, it turns out, lists their vocals among the claims to fame on his resume.
Apparently, the camels debuted with the hotel, back in 1993 when Las Vegas was at the height of its "theming" frenzy, and he explains that they were a $100,000 practical joke, although "an industry leader in animatronic design" and his own first foray into the field of themed-entertainment sound design.
Although one tourist whose affectionate reminiscences of the dromedary duo included the fact that she'd personally named them Humpy and Lumpy, it turns out that their official monikers were Elias and Jody, the first names of two friends of the Luxor's head developer. Jody was the haughty female, while Hooker describes Elias as "the dumb$h!t," noting that his real-life namesake was in fact a doctor!
Originally located in an oasis area in the casino, they were later moved first to the casino lobby and then, in 2003, to the walkway between Luxor and Excalibur, where you recall seeing them. By this point, however, the camels had evidently seen better days, with the vocals often not working, and this was the era that saw Las Vegas move away from the over-the-top theming of yore. Then Luxor President and COO Felix Rappaport set in motion the ongoing "de-theming" of the property (although no one as yet has found a way to "de-pyramidize" it), explaining in 2009 that it was obvious "the competition has just moved by it. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that it needed to be freshened up."
This "freshening up" spelled the end of the road for musty old Elias and Jody (we still prefer "Humpy and Lumpy"), who most likely ended up in a landfill somewhere, we regret to inform you, while the company who had employed camel-voice creator Michael Hooker (Creative Presentations) has since gone out of business. As a side note, the de-theming and modernization of the Luxor also saw the demise of the special Sigma Derby game in the casino, which featured racing camels, as opposed to horses (see below).
For those of you who either miss them, or who still think we're making all this up, we present a couple of links, one to an example of their (completely cheesy) repartee, and another to a little snippet of the camels in action on YouTube.
