My first encounter with pizza robots happened when I was a kid. My initial excitement gave way to anxiety as their performance dragged on. I’d made my first trip to the uncanny valley, and boy, was it disturbing. Years later, I’m still surprised to see the pair of them every time I walk into my kitchen! The only way to deal with fear is to face it, I guess.
You might not know them by name, but I’m sure you remember pizza robots, those animatronic avatars that danced and sang before a piping-hot pie arrived at your family’s table. Here’s the second part in a brief series of how I came to be one of the few who have their own.
When people think pizza robots, they think of Chuck E. Cheese. Another chain, ShowBiz Pizza Place, featured its own band of animatronic critters called the Rock-afire Explosion and bought Chuck E. Cheese out of bankruptcy in 19861. The combined organization rebranded around the mouse in the late 1980s2, but the people behind the Rock-afire Explosion continued to market their show.
In the early 1990s, the company rolled out a second generation of robots with the help of a Louisiana inventor3. Family fun centers like Odyssey Fun World in suburban Chicago lapped the “New Rock-afire Explosion” up! That’s where I found myself a week after the chain announced it was closing a location and jettisoning its animatronics. A group of friends pooled funds, delivered a check, and found themselves the new owners of two full shows! I was too broke for the buy-in, but I joined in to help retrieve everything.
We arrived at Odyssey Fun World in Naperville without knowing what to expect. The New Rock-fire Explosion was smaller than the classic ShowBiz Pizza version, but the show was more complex: characters in the original Rock-afire Explosion shows were anchored in place, but the second-generation version featured a center stage that was mounted to a turntable.
Three main characters rotated around the stage in unison but could individually spin 540 degrees as if they were dancing. The side stages also revolved, revealing hidden sets and characters like Beach Bear and Dook LaRue. It took twelve hours of nonstop work for five of us to dismantle everything! Worn out, we arrived at Tinley Park to repeat the process the next morning.
The situation at Tinley Park was dire. Robots were jumbled in a heap on the center stage! Fortunately, we received some good news: Odyssey’s general manager told us about a third show that was ours for the taking. Anticipating a third location in Buffalo Grove, the chain purchased it twenty years earlier from a defunct skating rink in Waukegan called Magic City. Unfortunately, the expansion never happened.
Magic City’s show was a compact version of the New Rock-afire Explosion with three robots instead of seven. Unfortunately, it came with some catches. The first was that Odyssey’s maintenance team had scavenged the robots for parts. They were in appalling shape! The second issue was that the rest of the show -the turntables, backdrops, lights, valve banks, and speakers- had been rotting away in a trailer for twenty years.
We jumped at the chance for more robots! Someone called the set’s ruined Fatz Geronimo gorilla for himself, but my friends decided to give me the surplus Billy Bob, ShowBiz Pizza’s old bear mascot, in appreciation of my help. I was gobsmacked: I was still new to my group of friends and was only there to help. I had no idea what to do or how to proceed! After I recovered from my initial shock, I determined that fishing Billy Bob out from the mess on stage would be a good place to start.
It didn’t take us nearly as long to tear down the Tinley Park show, so I had time to look over Billy Bob and see what I could do to stabilize him since we were surrounded by spare parts. His left arm flopped around freely, so I rebuilt it. I found a missing foot in the abandoned trailer from Magic City and threw it in my backpack. I grabbed an extra Looney Bird lip and even snagged a show select panel from the back room before it was time to leave.
We got home late. I slung Billy Bob over my shoulder and set him on the sofa as I pondered my new robot. Owning one rocketed me to the upper echelon of ShowBiz Pizza fans, but I felt like a phony. I’d learned a lot about the New Rock-afire Explosion over the years, but I didn’t really know how the robots worked!
I studied up with some of the materials we got at Odyssey. Aside from the eyes, most of the New Rock-afire Explosion’s movements are controlled by air cylinders and rotary actuators connected to MAC valves. Originally, the valve banks were triggered by a biphase data stream from an Apple IIE computer and a bit stripper. Essentially, my bear was a gigantic Teddy Ruxpin!
I wanted nothing more than to restore him, but my progress was slow. I was still in school and working part time, so I couldn’t afford an air compressor or tools. I did have a bicycle pump, though, and it was enough to manually test each of his cylinders. I was surprised to find that most of them were in good shape! I replaced one actuator in Billy Bob’s left forearm, but the enormous cylinder that kept him upright was missing. Some 3D-printed kneecap braces worked in a pinch.
My stepdad and I put together a simple base for Billy Bob out of scrap wood and mounted my show selector panel to the front. I couldn’t help but feel a swell of pride as he stood on his own for the first time in a quarter-century! It wasn’t much, but progress is progress. The road to restoring Billy Bob to his former glory would be long, but it no longer felt insurmountable.
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Sources Cited
1 Chuck E. Cheese files bankruptcy (1984, March 29). The Santa Rosa Press Democrat. p. 4.
2 Golden, M. (1989, October 14). ShowBiz Pizza turns out the lights. The York Daily Record [Pennsylvania]. p. 3.
3 Albrecht, C. (1990, July 15). Magic kingdom. The Lafayette Daily Advertiser. p. 11.
