The YouTube video for Usher’s "Love in This Club" looks like a standard fan tribute. But rather than pictures of the R&B crooner or girls dancing to the chart-topping song, the grainy clip shows a furry bear dressed in striped overalls, enthusiastically strumming a guitar and singing. A tuxedoed gorilla plays keyboard, a cheerleading mouse handles background vocals and other animals join the jam.
Meet the Rock-afire Explosion, the animatronic musical mascots stationed in ShowBiz Pizza Place restaurants in the ’80s and enjoying a YouTube revival thanks to a series of videos in which the reprogrammed robots rip through songs by Usher, The White Stripes and others.
"The Rock-afire Explosion videos went viral, as they say, and all hell broke loose," said Aaron Fechter, the 54-year-old inventor who created the robots in 1980 and now maintains a warehouse full of mothballed mechanized performers.
The new Rock-afire Explosion clips deliver an entertaining mix of nostalgia, humor and irony that are key ingredients in the making of a viral internet hit. As the videos have grown in popularity, they’ve caught the attention of documentary filmmakers as well as hipster bands hoping to surf the viral wave much like Weezer did with its memetastic video for "Pork and Beans."
During Rock-afire’s heyday, the groups sang upbeat medleys of songs by The Beatles or Frank Sinatra at ShowBiz pizza joints.
Today’s updated set-list revival comes partially courtesy of Chris Thrash, who purchased a vintage set of Rock-afire robots in 2006 and began putting them through the hip-hop paces and posting the resulting videos on YouTube a year or so later.
While Fechter was wary of the new videos at first — they were posted without his authorization or consent, and include some racy lyrics that don’t exactly jibe with Rock-afire’s family-friendly image — he saw a spark of potential when one of Thrash’s videos tallied nearly 500,000 views in a matter of weeks.
"I decided to make an investment in the whole YouTube phenomenon," said Fechter (pictured above), who works to train a handpicked crew of programmers to crank out new shows every month. Fechter even recruited the original Rock-afire Explosion vocalists to re-record some hit tunes, like Shakira’s "Hips Don’t Lie."
An online bidding system developed by Fechter puts internet users in the producer’s chair as they pay to get new songs produced. For now, Fechter says that after paying his staff of programmers he’s just making "beer money" from the online venture, but it’s a fresh start for an enterprise that’s lain stagnant for more than two decades.
Back in the ’80s, Fechter managed a staff of 300 to manufacture and program sets of Rock-afire Explosion bands for placement in 200 or so locations around the nation. But shortly after ShowBiz Pizza Place bought rival kiddie chain Chuck E. Cheese in 1984, Fechter maintains the newly reformatted dining empire wanted to retire his creations and employ their own.
"The company [didn’t want] to license characters from me anymore — they wanted to own my characters," said Fechter. "But I believed I had a future with the Rock-afire Explosion beyond what they wanted to do with it."
Fechter, who retains those copyrights to this day, says he elected to settle the company’s debt by accepting 80 Rock-afire machine sets, or "shows," in lieu of payment. He keeps the sets in a 35,000-square-foot warehouse in Orlando, Florida.
Since his split with the restaurant chain, Fechter’s been slowly selling off band sets to amusement parks around the world — and to a select few interested individuals.
"Nowadays it would cost several hundred thousand dollars to build a set," said Fechter, who offered some sets to fans like Thrash who promised to take care of them.
"I sold them [to fans] for next to nothing to put them into the hands of people who loved them," he said.
Travis Schafer, the 28-year-old founder of fan site Showbiz Pizza.com, said he paid $12,800 for a new set Fechter posted on eBay in 2005.
"My dream as far back as I can remember was to own a Rock-afire Explosion stage show," said Schafer.
Actual bands have also been drawn to the Rock-afire Explosion. Hipster electro-dance band MGMT reached out to Fechter for Rock-afire cameos in its music videos. Others, like punk rockers Against Me, saw their own singles get remixed by the robot band and shared online.
"[Our label] sent me an e-mail and said, ‘Have you guys seen that Rock-afire website?’" said Tom Gabel, guitarist and lead singer of Against Me. "’It’s some guy who … programs them to play along to songs that people vote for. You guys won.’ And I was like, ‘Cool.’"
One of Thrash’s early videos caught the eye of a pair of Texas filmmakers, who investigated the phenomenon and made a documentary about Rock-afire fans.
"It’s a story of two things — the story of how Rock-afire came to be and how it came to disappear…. It’s sort of a tragic story there," said Brad Thomason, one of the directors of The Rock-afire Explosion, a feature film slated to screen at film festivals later this year. "But it’s also the story of Chris Thrash, who single-handedly brought it back into the public arena by putting shows on YouTube."
Fechter says he hopes the documentary and the YouTube resurgence will lead to a higher demand for videos, bigger endorsement deals and possibly a television show. "The question now is [whether it’s] a nostalgic flash in the pan or is there something there? I say, let’s see if we can create quality content that will give us a new life."
Till then, he says he’s content to see his creation entertaining a new generation on YouTube.
"Just surviving is a talent," said Fechter. "I knew from the very beginning, if we could hang on long enough, some day the Rock-afire Explosion would live on again."
Photos courtesy Brett Whitcomb/Brad Thomason
See also:
Underwire 2.0: Jenna Wortham’s Google Reader, FriendFeed**, Twitter; The Underwire on Twitter and Facebook.
