Jesse Ramdeo

Mas­quer­ad­er John­ny Stollmey­er is chang­ing the way peo­ple view the no­to­ri­ous boast­ful ban­dit, best known as the Mid­night Rob­ber.

For over two decades Stollmey­er has been parad­ing his own spe­cial­ly de­signed in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the Car­ni­val char­ac­ter but main­tained the dark el­e­ments which make it one of the most pop­u­lar yet mys­te­ri­ous tra­di­tion­al mas.

Stollmey­er said the idea for the King Cor­beau Mid­night Rob­ber was born out of Toron­to Car­ni­val years ago, and since then it has un­der­gone a se­ries of evo­lu­tion.

“I had no pre­vi­ous ex­pe­ri­ence of rob­bers, but I re­alised this idea need­ed to be cre­at­ed, so I went and did a lit­tle re­search and I found some tra­di­tion­al rob­ber speech­es and I cob­bled to­geth­er some of it with my own speech,” he said.

He ex­plained that on his re­turn to his home­land the King Cor­beau al­so found a nest­ing ground.

Stollmey­er said, “I be­came part of the rap­so fra­ter­ni­ty and I per­formed my speech and then Bryan Hon­ore, leader of mys­tery raiders band, a small group of mid­night rob­bers in­vit­ed me to join the band, but lat­er in the year 2000, King Cor­beau died and was re in­car­nat­ed but most re­cent­ly I have be­come King Mal Cor­beau.”

Stollmey­er has ditched some of the old west­ern Amer­i­can fea­tures of the Mid­night Rob­ber cos­tume and added fea­tures such as a grim red cor­beau mask and wings.

He, how­ev­er, still ac­cen­tu­ates his out­fit with a large hat fash­ioned in the shape of a satel­lite and us­es a whis­tle to punc­tu­ate his speech and com­mand the at­ten­tion of all.

De­spite his de­lib­er­ate evo­lu­tion of the tra­di­tion­al char­ac­ter Stollmey­er has been mind­ful to re­main true to the vil­lain sto­ry teller’s dark un­der­tone.

“I think main­tain­ing tra­di­tion is im­por­tant and I be­lieve the mid­night rob­ber has a large po­ten­tial for artis­tic ex­pres­sion to con­front some of the dan­gers that our civil­i­sa­tion is mov­ing in­to, so I al­ways use my char­ac­ter to ad­vance the cre­ation of sus­tain­able hu­man cul­tures,” he said.

Ac­cord­ing to Stollmey­er, just like the tra­di­tion­al mid­night rob­ber char­ac­ter, his por­tray­al of King Cor­beau al­so in­jects fear and peaks in­ter­est from cu­ri­ous on­look­ers, “the on­ly thing I can go by is the num­ber of peo­ple who want to take pic­tures with me on car­ni­val Mon­day and Tues­day and I am a very pop­u­lar char­ac­ter, I think King Cor­beau has got­ten some at­ten­tion over the year and is recog­nised by many peo­ple.”

Stollmey­er says he is com­mit­ted to pre­serv­ing the lega­cy of the mid­night rob­ber and his unique mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the tra­di­tion­al char­ac­ter will breathe new en­er­gy in­to the boast­ful ban­dit.