Pa rum pum pum pum

My kids and I encountered the drum from Maze in an indoor children's play centre.



They had colour-coded symbols associated with each themed room, with lines leading along the hallways to the rooms. The boys had at least as much fun following these labyrinth lines as they did playing in the rooms themselves.



The drum was the symbol for the percussion centre, which they called the BOOM ROOM. I found this kind of funny because that's how some people around here tend to facetiously punctuate the announcement of an intentionally terrible solution. (You can find a fine example of a BOOM-worthy solution here. Although in that particular case all it earned was an extended middle finger. Another classic is found in the incredible Room 24 Mazecast at 24:40.)



The snare drum image is one of the repeating items in Maze (along with bottles, toy ducks, white birds, and others). It appears on the door to 20 in room 1, and also over the unmarked door to room 17 in room 33.

In room 1, the drum seems to be part of the DCBA solution, which possibly indicates that you should look for backward letters and possibly indicates that you should choose door 26 (cup = C = 3) because of the three-ey stuff on the easel, or even because of the reference to bronze (bronze medal = 3) in the text.

In room 33, the drumsticks point to the correct door, but there seems to be no particular reason to trust them, unless you think that the stick hidden under the couch in 35 is a clue to trust them. (Room 35 seems to contain clues pertaining to rooms on the way out of the Loop.) But the many musical instruments in 33 (drum, horn, flutes, fiddle) seem to hint at some other music-related solution tying them all together.

My current thought about repeating objects is that the fact of their repeating is a red herring: the objects serve different, unrelated room-specific purposes in their various locations. It's tempting to want to read "snare" as a warning, but neither of the drums indicate Trap doors, so that doesn't seem to go anywhere. Who knows!

NOT VERY RELEVANT TO MAZE BUT NEVERTHELESS IMPORTANT AND SEASONALLY APPROPRIATE : If you have not seen Grace Jones's rendition of "The Little Drummer Boy" on Christmas at Pee Wee's Playhouse, go watch it RIGHT NOW.