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In 2019, my friends bought seventeen abandoned New Rock-afire Explosion robots from Odyssey Fun World in suburban Chicago. Against all odds, my Billy Bob was one of the first of them to come back to life! Most of the other robots seemed destined to stay comatose, but I sought to change that when I bought Fatz.

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. I didn’t mean for this to extend so long, but here’s the penultimate part in a brief series of how I came to be one of the few who have their own.

I succumbed to a euphoric blend of joy and accomplishment when Billy Bob performed skits from the Gold Collection tapes for the first time. It’d been a quarter century, but the robot I’d rescued from a scrap heap was back in service! Unfortunately, not everything was perfect.

As originally installed, Billy Bob stood on a stage with a huge rotating turntable. Combined with individual platters that rotated within the main system, the arrangement made it seem like the members of the New Rock-afire Explosion were dancing. We couldn’t cram all of that infrastructure into our U-Haul truck, so Billy Bob wound up bolted to a box after he came home.

Beyond the stage, he was still missing the hefty pneumatic cylinder that let his knees bend. I replaced the servo motors behind his eyes, but my custom bit stripper didn’t support them and they remained static. It became clear that my Billy Bob would never live up to his full potential in my stewardship, but at least he was set to perform again. I was content! I wanted more robots, and that’s when I remembered Fatz.

Billy Bob was the face of Showbiz Pizza, but the mighty gorilla Fatz Geronimo was the heart and soul of the Rock-afire Explosion. The classic show featured him front and center, and three “New” Fatz robots were part of the Odyssey Fun World haul. All of them were taken by the time I got in on the action, but Fatz from Tinley Park remained in storage nearly two years after we picked him up.

Eventually, I saw an opportunity to liberate him. The guy who bought Fatz lived in Florida, but the emerging pandemic complicated his plan to travel a thousand miles to pick Fatz up. I’d seen the robot in person and in storage, and sensed its owner’s interests had shifted. I made him an offer and became Fatz’s third owner a couple days later.

Fatz still stood on his original turntable, so I had high hopes for his mechanics. He was about as cosmetically-sound as Billy Bob had been and still sported fur on his arms, hands, and legs. Unfortunately, Fatz was without a face. I later learned that some kid made off with it just before we arrived in Tinley Park to dismantle his show.

My first objective was to restore Fatz’s mask. It turned out easy: the buddy who poured and painted my Billy Bob mask was ready to make a second mold from an intact specimen we collected. Unfortunately, the donor mask was a train wreck: not only had it melted, but it had ripped into a bizarre Glasgow grin! Somehow, my buddy wrestled it back into shape.

It was then that I realized I’d befriended a true artist. After my friend put Fatz’s mask back together, he used it to make a plaster mold. He poured liquid latex inside, emptied the excess out as it cured, and popped out a new mask. Just like Billy Bob’s, the mask was poured to OEM spec. Then it was mine.

My new mask was an exact copy of the refurbished one, down to impressions of the duct tape in the mouth and the snaps that connected it to Fatz’s skull. I’d upgraded to a bigger air compressor by the time Fatz’ face was done, so I bought him a new gold jacket and fired the robots up. It took about twenty seconds to learn that Fatz was a basket case.

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