Rye & Cole
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2024
1:11:38 · 1.2M views · Jun 23, 2015
A 2008 documentary by Brett Whitcomb about the Rock-afire Explosion, the animatronic band built for ShowBiz Pizza Place restaurants. It follows the band's history and the fans who keep the machines and their technology running.
HN commenters point to it whenever Chuck E. Cheese animatronics come up, as the best history of the band's direct ancestor and its devoted preservationists.
3 comments from Hacker News
Somewhat related is the The Rock-afire Explosion band from ShowBiz Pizza Place. There is an excellent documentary on the history and some of the fans preserving the technology. this video
Anybody vaguely interested in this story would probably enjoy this documentary about the the direct ancestor of this band. this video
WARNING: RANTY STREAM OF CONCIOUSNESS ESSAY AHEAD I just recently started building FOSS in this space in stealthmode, things are not looking good long term. Animatronics as an artform are facing extinction. There are VERY few people in the community with technical expertise to maintain the mechanical and technical aspects of the characters. And companies are abandoning them en masse in favor of screens. To illustrate the HN relevant challenges lets walk through the "stack" of a singing rat. You have the mech itself, its guts a stationary frame made of some material with mechanical extremities attached to it. that are usually animated using either compressed air, or servos. As well as some kind of control board witha bank of relays for actuating said servos/valves. Each character is then connected to a central control box that takes in movements for the entire stage as well as audio or even video to play back in sync. Those movements are all encoded differently just to make this super easy btw :) Lets actually talk about movements next! There are many different companies that produced different shows for Familiy Entertainment Centers and theme parks, all of them programming movements on bespoke systems, as no standard had ever existed. Those movements being stored in a variety of ways. Many of the original Chuck E Cheese and Showbiz Pizza place signals from the late 70s to the early 90s being stored on Reel to Reel tape. Left audio channel being the human audio and then the ri