People raved about the videos.
They featured giant, robotic animals playing in a band. Children of the '80s remembered the band as the animatronic act from Showbiz Pizza Place. Only here the gorilla, bears, mouse and company weren't singing "Happy Birthday" or other songs they remembered from childhood.
Here, on YouTube, they were performing Britney Spears, or Bubba Sparxxx, or Usher.
Billy Bob, the one-toothed moonshining bear, sings, "Well come here baby and let daddy show you what it feel like," in Usher's "Love in This Club," a video that's gotten nearly 800,000 views in two months. But the people were confused. The lips moved in perfect sync. In the background, a sun and moon said "hey" and "ho" right on cue. At one point, a sidestage curtain opens to reveal a wolf sporting a hand puppet. The puppet raps Young Jeezy's solo while the wolf does the call-and-response bit.
"I don't understand. How did you do this? The lip synching is perfect. Do they really play this song at a pizza place?" asked one viewer in the video's 600 comments.
Some people thought it was clever editing or video manipulation.
The truth is as astle of Texas filmmakers to create a documentary feature that will be seen in film ounding a story as the videos themselves. It has, in fact, inspired a coupfestivals this fall.
It's a story about a Phenix City man named Chris Thrash.
The fan
Thrash, 32, sells used cars. He's happily married. He's got a baby.
He had a good childhood, punctuated by visits to Columbus' Showbiz Pizza Place. He was 7 years old on his first trip, and that ranks among his happiest memories still. And it sounds silly, he knows, but he always felt a connection to the giant animals on the pizza parlor's three stages --- an animatronic band called the Rock-afire Explosion.
The furry ape behind the keyboards, slightly menacing (or downright nightmarish to kids who were too young) was named Fatz Geronimo. That buck-toothed bear was Billy Bob Brokali. The mouse cheerleader, Mitzi Mozzerella. But the guitar-jamming Beach Bear and especially the dog named Dook LaRue on the drums were always Thrash's favorites.
Their names, their costumes, and to some extent even their voices were silly. But their music was serious. Among their shows was a medley of The Beatles' "White Album." In 1984, Showbiz bought bankrupt rival Chuck E. Cheese restaurants, and over the next eight years old parlors were rebranded as Chuck E. Cheeses. The robotic characters were changed, their shows made friendlier for younger children. Thrash, and other fans who grew up with the earlier, edgier Rock-afire, hated what they'd become.
"I am not a fan of Chuck E. Cheese," he said, spitting the mouse's name through a clenched jaw. "It appeals more to 5-to-10-year-olds. The Rock-afire was more rock 'n' roll. They were magical. It wasn't children's music, it was grown-up music."
He had a copy of the single record released by the make-believe Rock-afire Explosion, called "Gee, Our First Album." He used that album to cling to the memories, but: "Damn, you get tired of listening to that," he said.
Surfing the Internet one night, he stumbled on a Web site created by an inventor named Aaron Fechter, the Rock-afire Explosion's creator.
Thrash got in touch with Fechter, hoping to find that the inventor had tapes of the original Rock-afire concerts he'd be willing to share or sell. "All I really wanted from the man was a CD of the original show," Thrash said.
He got more than he bargained for.
The inventor
In the 1970s, Aaron Fechter invented what he thought would be a fun pneumatic arcade game. He sold the prototype to a company --- without patenting it first.
The company supposedly didn't even change the name when they mass-produced the game: Whac-a-Mole.
Fechter was more protective when he created the animatronic band. He performed, and still performs, some of the voices himself. That made Fechter's offer to Thrash, one of Rock-afire's biggest fans, almost unbelievable.
He offered to sell him a complete set of the Rock-afire Explosion robots. They were still in shipping crates from years before.
Thrash bought them.
He won't say how much he paid, but they cost each Showbiz restaurant nearly $149,000 in the '80s. He also bought a pre-fabricated shed for the backyard, a set of compressors, a computer to run the show and other necessary gear.
The band itself needed a little rehab.
"It's kind of like buying a car in 1983, parking it in a garage, putting a cover over it and coming back 20 years later," Thrash said. "You can't just put in the key and drive it off. Things dry rot. Things go bad."
And Thrash had no experience in pneumatics, robotics or programming.
"I pretty much had to just figure it out," he said. He and friends assembled stages to mimic the original three-stage setup. He solicited help from experts on the Internet. They gathered as much memorabilia as they could afford to decorate the place. They made curtains and rigged them to garage door openers.
And three months later, he was creating his first show.
He choreographed the band performing to rapper Bubba Sparxxx's "Ms. New Booty," and he uploaded it to the video sharing service YouTube.
The film
That's where Brad Thomason, a Houston grad student studying English and screenwriting, saw the video.
He e-mailed a link to his buddy, Brett, a self-taught filmmaker obsessed with the works of greats like Kurosawa and Bergman.
Whitcomb's and Thomason's first film was "Beneath The Bridges," a 2005 short about the homeless population in Houston. Now they wanted to make their second one a short about Chris Thrash and his passion for the Rock-afire Explosion.
Over the course of several months, the two Texans convinced a reticent Thrash of the plan.
"He was really apprehensive," Whitcomb said. "He doesn't like interviews, doesn't like media. It's actually kind of nice. I'm used to everyone wanting attention. He's telling me MTV won't leave him alone."
In all, a four-person film crew spent almost a week in Phenix City filming. Two days in, Whitcomb realized he had more than a 20-minute short to put on the Web.
"We knew it was kind of a different film after that," he said. They'd discovered a whole Showbiz and Rock-afire fan community online. And the 54-year-old Fechter had gotten in touch with them.
They added trips to Florida, where they interviewed the eccentric inventor.
"We got a lot of footage from Aaron, from back in the '70s, when he was making the robots. He had documented everything," Whitcomb said.
"This is something pretty big," he thought. "It's not just about Showbiz. It's a character study between these two guys."
Whitcomb is wrapping up a final cut of the film, called simply "The Rock-afire Explosion." Its international premiere is set for the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam in November. He hopes the world premiere will be at Austin's South by Southwest Film Festival or Sundance.
The future
The buzz seems to have re-energized Fechter, though he was initially unhappy with his characters performing songs that were too risque.
You won't find "Ms. New Booty" on YouTube now, though "Love in This Club" is still around, with Billy Bob talking to his "shawty." Ironically, the one that's gotten the 800,000 hits is indeed Thrash's film, but grabbed and reposted by another user. Fechter's even jumped into the game, creating versions of songs by Shakira, Madonna and indie band MGMT.
Thrash has choreographed nearly 40 songs, most of them sitting on a hard drive in front of his homemade stage for him and his friends to watch.
He defends their performances of adult-themed songs, saying they're no racier by today's standards than, say, Rocky Raccoon's homicide from decades earlier.
"Rock-afire always pushed the envelope on what was appropriate," Thrash said. "Billy Bob had a moonshine still. Looney Bird --- he's a drunk bird. Come on, he's a drunk bird."
He doesn't know what will happen after the film's release. He's toyed with the idea of opening a restaurant, so that other people can enjoy the show for the sake of nostalgia or the sake of their children.
"I never realized in my wildest dreams a documentary film crew would be here," he said. "I'm just riding and we'll see where it goes."
But he knows one thing: "No one can ever take this show away from me again."
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