Dusty, The Cowboy Dragon

Dusty was the brainchild of the restauranteur, Drake Orson, after his son's love for dragons and cowboys. Drake wanted to open up a western-themed restaurant with games, a wide selection of not-so-healthy foods, and a live show from the animatronic band (basically a Showbiz Pizza Place in a different universe). Drake wanted a dragon to be the main attraction of the restaurant and then started to conceptualize the design, which started off as crude doodles of a dragon in a cowboy hat. Not being much of an artist, he contacted an old friend of his, Jules Goldstein, to draw out some possible designs, as well as different names for the character. Most of the names were Darrel, Draco, Dudley... but none of the names stood out to Drake. Jules then yelled out "Dusty" out of frustration, as Drake had found the perfect name. Jules also came up with three different designs for Dusty:

-a fierce green dragon with a guitar, brown cowboy hat
-a smaller, cute version of first design
-a complete different design of a blue dragon sporting a shirt, vest, gloves and boots, as well as a fiddle

Drake decided on the latter, and the rest is history.

The animatronic version of Dusty was designed by the engineers Drake ordered to create. Although they have pleased Drake in the end, there were some... interesting design choices made for the robot. Dusty didn't have a tail. A TAIL! One of the engineers stated that implementing a tail would be a "mechanical nightmare". Another engineer stated that there weren't enough parts to construct a tail. Another odd choice was that the head of Dusty looked more like a "cow" instead of following closely to Jules's design, this is evident with the ears since Jules made them resemble dog ears.
The animatronic would also have a problem with one of the eyelids being halfway shut.

Despite what the engineers had to go through, Dusty was extremely popular with both adults and children alike. Nobody seemed to notice anything off about it!

Dusty (character) and art belongs to me