Intro to the Rock-afire Explosion
Show Stage (Unknown Year)
The Rock-afire Explosion was an animatronic band created by Creative Engineering for ShowBiz Pizza Place restaurants in August of 1980, which continued at its locations until 1992- where they were retrofitted with Chuck E. Cheese's characters as the new Concept Unification Stage . The Rock-afire also appeared at family entertainment centers starting in the late 80's, and continue to be at various centres to this day.
Characters / Animatronics
The RAE consisted of a large cast of animated characters which have mostly stayed the same for its entire run:- Billy Bob - A brown country bear with a sweet disposition and the main mascot of the Rock-afire through both ShowBiz and the RAE's future outings. Is best friends with Looney Bird.
- Looney Bird - A silly red bird that lives in an oil drum. Initially started as a goofy drunk, but slowly became a "tech nerd bird" with interests in various technologies.
- Mitzi Mozzarella - A gray cheerleader mouse depicted usually as a stereotypical teen girl. She is the only canonical character to age, being born January 1, 1971.
- Beach Bear - A white bear who likes to surf and be cool.
- Fatz Geronimo - A keyboard-playing gorilla from the Audobon Zoo forming the centerpiece of the band and the leader of the Colander Head Movement. Is self-aggrandizing and a philanderer with "potentially" a wife named Esmerelda. Canonically wrote the 1984 Louisiana World's Fair Theme, which was in real life created by Fatz first voice actor- Burt Wilson.(1)
- Dook Larue - A brown dog drummer with an affinity for space. Portrayed as dim-witted during skits, but with a powerful singing voice during songs.
- Rolfe Dewolfe - A gray ventriloquist wolf, being a former K-Mart lounge singer- now manager of the band, performs various skits with Earl on their stage- or comes out to harass the main band. He is greedy and selfish, believing he has a large fanclub that inflates his ego.
- Earl Schmerle - A yellow muppet-looking sidekick to Rolfe as his ventriloquist dummy, which Rolfe carved from wood himself. Earl uses every opportunity to antagonize and demean Rolfe as his foil. It is hinted at multiple times in shows, and stated directly by CEI, to be a real living dummy, and that "...the only one whose trying to pretend Earl isn't alive is Rolfe".(2)
Additionally, Rolfe & Earl have been rotated out of the cast on occasion to bring in new guest characters, such as Santa Claus and the Statue of Liberty (Animatronic) , and notably big-nosed human Uncle Klunk . Klunk, atleast in his ShowBiz debut, was a goofy personality calling up various characters to bounce off of, alongside his bird Murray. The initial Creative Engineering take by Jeff Howell, as originally intended for the character, presented more as an awkward talk-show host- with a bird named Click.
History
The Rock-afire Explosion, taking combined elements and characters from their prior Wolf Pack 5 and Hard Luck Bears shows, debuted at the Jacksonville, FL (9820 Atlantic Blvd) ShowBiz Pizza Place on August 14th, 1980. Early iterations of the show had varying animatronic mechs, masks, accessories, clothing, props, painted elements, and more- but this would be refined throughout the first 4 years. The band would be given a new showtape every few months to play, usually consisting between 30 minutes to an hour of songs and skits. Additionally, all shows had the 3-Birthday Reel , which allowed birthday segments to be queued up at any time.The showtapes for the first few years were mainly compilations of various skits and segments all unrelated to eachother. Each tape would combine new segments with ones from previous tapes, giving titles like RAE Classic Hits , 12 Shows Special , and Best of Rock-afire Explosion '82 This would even culminate in test markets recieving a Show Selector that let customers choose any skit in any order to play.
By July of 1981 the shows best segments would start making their way onto records with the first as Rock-afire Explosion Record 1 (1981) , which would continue for most of the RAE's life at ShowBiz. By 1982 the band would get a full LP with Gee, Our 1st Album Vinyl Record (1982) . 1981 would also be start of Rock-afire themed merchandise, kicking off with a plush doll line of the main cast. Later on various hats, mugs, and pewter items would be for sale.
The first show to begin having segments extend into multiple parts would be ShowBiz Pizza '82 Tape in Spring of 1982, having the "Feelings Skit", "Crying Skit", and "Satisfaction Medley" back to back. The Spring Shows '82 tape would then spread these across the runtime. Tribute to Abbey Road would feature a much larger production with rented musicians, 3 original songs, children for backup vocals, and finishing with a 14-minute Abbey Road Medley. Mitzi would also be recast from Aaron Fechter, who played 5 other characters, to Shalisa Sloan, now having a proper female vocalist.
Mid-80's
The first fully-themed tape would be RAE Christmas '82 , which now also featured Rick Bailey as Beach Bear, again replacing Aaron, and switching his early personality of a goofball to being more laid back. Later that month the first 'live' showtape would debut as New Years Eve Countdown '82' , which was set to play once at a specific time at all ShowBiz Pizza Place's to coincide with the New Years countdown.In March of 1983 the first major event for ShowBiz would commence, being the Crazy Colander Head Night (Event) , pitched by Creative Engineering based on their own company in-jokes. It would encourage customers to wear crazily decorated colanders on their heads for Wednesday nights during the month. A full line of promotional material, an hour long employee-exclusive promo tape called the Save The Colander Telethon (1983) , live show props, character costumes, showtapes, and more would be sent to stores. Both the birthday show and main show would be fitted entirely around the event, with multiple segments interjecting to dicsuss the event. A special show could also be called upon from the Birthday reel as the "Colander Indoctrination" every Wednesday night during the month. An employee would play a live character called 'Johhny D. Jockimo' that interacted directly with the cast.
Directly riding off the success of the event, July through September would feature The Amazing Uncle Klunk Traveling Show (Event) , which had the 40 Uncle Klunks dispersed and moved around between various stores as a travelling show that replaced Rolfe & Earl temporarily. September through November would see another company-wide event called ShowBiz's Fabulous Fall Festival (Event) , which featured new showtapes played on different nights of the week, a complete rerun of Crazy Colander Head Night, and a new set of promotional material to collect. The year would end off with Klunks now being dressed up as Santa and distributed to various stores for the Santa On Stage Show 1983 (Event) .
After 1983 events would almost fully stop outside various infrequent uses of Klunk and the various other characters he would be retrofitted as. By this point the Rock-afire was now transitioning to fully themed showtapes which had various tiny plotlines interwoven between all the skits. 1984 would feature themes such as Magic Night , Trivia Night , and Country II .
Lull Period
Due to clashes between Creative Engineering and ShowBiz Pizza Place over various things, 1985-1987 featured barely any new show content, likely with stores running previous years shows in the interum. The only major changes would be the introduction of Billy Bob Interactive Animation in 1984, which allowed employees to control and voice Billy Bob for birthdays, the Family Vision program in 1985, which had a projector display random videos during the breaks between showtape segments, and a similar concept of ShowBiz Pizza Programs by late 1986, which instead played just music.Due to ShowBiz Pizza merging with Pizza Time Theatre in 1984-1985, various merchandise and promotional material would begin showing up around 1986 featuring Billy Bob and Chuck E. Cheese together. Creative Engineering would also attempt their own Billy Bob merchandise in 1986 with the unreleased Mini Billy Bob (Animatronic) , trying to capture the success of the likes of Teddy Ruxpin. By 1987 ShowBiz Pizza, already running the production of Pizza Time Theatre showtapes and with little from Creative Engineering to use, would begin producing their own set of shows, featuring a whole new writing style and voice cast. These would continue the themed show idea, except now splitting shows into multiple parts- each with their own theme. These could then be reused to fill content of later tapes in the year.
Last Years With ShowBiz
By 1988 ShowBiz's would begin modifying their stages into the ShowBiz Pizza Campground theme, fit with new TVs for displaying showtape video- due to Creative Engineering beginning to license out the Rock-afire to other family entertainment centers. This would help distinguish their shows from the competition and keep up to date with advancing technology. FEC's were now recieving the Rock-afire's vast back-catalog, just with any references or skits pertaining to ShowBiz muted or cut.The Rock-afire's original cast would return in '88 with a whole new wave of shows, generally considered as the Cyberstar era- named after the new TV showtape program. Going forward these would adopt ShowBiz's multi-themed show standard, allowing various mash-ups of older content to be reused through the upcoming years. New content would slow down into the 90's, with the last new segment coming as the 'Olympics' segment for the SPP Best Of 2 show in December of 1990. In June of 1990 ShowBiz's would begin Concept Unification , which would rebrand the stores and its characters to that of Chuck E. Cheese's . This would continue through 1992 until all stores were switched over. The last ShowBiz show would be SPP Best Of 5 from 1991-1992.
NRAE & FEC's
By the early 90's Creative Engineering now had to focus on earning money through lisencing out to FEC's, which meant moving units of their old Rock-afire shows- still in storage from their last production in 1983, and creating new ones. The first attempt would be the Mijjins , which only featured Billy Bob and Fatz as just part of the random cast on the stage. The Mijjins would eventually be reworked into the New Rock-afire Explosion , which brought the entire cast into a unified animatronic design called 'Dance-a-tronics'. Characters positions were shuffled into a new arrangement on the NRAE stage with less cohesive pairings. Each design was changed to feature a slimmer, shorter look- and a whole new set of clothing. This would even be addressed in a promotional tape with Fatz gawking at his and Billy Bob's older appearances, citing them as "...much fatter back then". Despite this, future content would still be sent out to both FECs with a RAE (now called the Classic RAE or CRAE), and the NRAE.Both shows would also come retrofitted with a new Karaoke system that let audience members participate with specially crafted showtapes. These would have the characters actively encourage singers to come up and do most of the singing themselves. A new showtape delivery system was also developed around this time, with each FEC recieving a different selection of randomly selected songs. The Rock-afire throughout the 90's was now entirely either cut up edits of single songs from their prior catalogue, or whole new batches of single segments. Production quality would take a massive hit post-ShowBiz, with tape quality/mixing being much poorer, and a lot of instrumentals now being lisenced from other companies rather than made in-house.
Early/Late 2000's
By the late 90's much of Creative Engineering's staff was fired, leaving showtapes to completely stop by 2000. The early 2000's would only see various contracted tapes be made, such as the Bear Review Showtape , Smitty's Super Service Station Show , and Hannah Banana Tape . By this time an early animatronics fandom would form, which would interact heavily with Creative Engineering. The only main Rock-afire content to come out would be a set of podcasts by Billy Bob called 'Billy Bob's News Blast'.Into 2008 the The Rock-afire Explosion Documentary would release to film festivals and later home video, marking the history of the RAE and its then-upcoming fandom. By this point the New Rock-afire had been abandoned, and focus was mainly around the Classic RAE- especially as its nostalgic fandom centered around the ShowBiz-led show. Around this time Creative Engineering would also begin posting small bits of new shows, either lipsyncing the animatronics to pop song audio, or making covers of pop songs. As nostalgia for the Rock-afire was bringing more attention to CEI, they were able to do an exclusive showtape for the local Electronics Arts studio (the Electronic Arts Awards Show ) featuring live interaction of the characters, the audience, and Aaron Fechter.
2010's to Present
In 2013 the RAE would participate with CeeLo Green at the 'CeeLo Green is LOBERACE' concert in Las Vegas, Nevada for the song Fuck You . Later in June CEI would get into controversy over the release of the Eve of Destruction ft. Earle Schmerle show video, which featured a lot of political commentary and Earl saying a slur. The video would later be removed. On September 26, 2013, and event called The Blast would occur, where an explosion would damage a large portion of the remaining Creative Engineering offices, including the animatronics. CEI would later commemorate this event with art depicting the RAE in the wake of The Blast.The late 2010's would not feature much new RAE content, as CEI focused more on tours of its old building and interacting with its growing fanbase- especially after the release of Five Nights at Freddy's. 2016-2017 would have fans pay for birthday dedications from characters Aaron Fechter voiced. These would have a programmed introduction- but would just play a standard birthday tape for the remainder of the video. Around this time various new plushes and figures of the characters would release, alongside CEI selling parts of their old animatronic shows on eBay.
2020 would see the near-simultanious release of two digital animatronic simulators of the Rock-afire, the first being Rock-afire Replay , which was a fangame released for free on GameJolt with many updates throughout its development. The second would be a few months later with the official The Rock-afire Explosion Simulator announced on Kickstarter with a very early demo playable. The official simulator would only attain $1,140 from 41 backers by the first month out of its $27,000 goal, and was cancelled. The fan-game would continue into early 2021 until legal threats from Creative Engineering would cease its production. Fans would still have access to the older builds through the coming years, while CEI would later decide in late 2022 to try again with another official simulator- being the upcoming The Rock-afire Simulator .
In the 2021, an infamous poorly-maintained FEC with uneasy relations to CEI, Billy Bob's Wonderland , would have full repairs made to its show stage. Alongside this, fandom events at the location would begin taking place. The turnaround of the establishment would later lead to Creative Engineering making amends with its newest owner in 2023- lisencing out a line of RAE themed merchandise for BBWL to produce and sell.
In mid-2024, the Volo Auto Museum at Volo, IL (27582 Volo Village Rd) would license out a Rock-afire Explosion stage and various showtapes, forming a good relationship with Creative Engineering. By 2025 CEI would have set out plans for a brand new full themed and sung showtape exclusive to Volo- set with a new cast to replace unavailable voices. Volo would also attain a lisence to create Rock-afire merchandise- also set for 2025. Billy Bob's Wonderland during their 'Billycon V' event in the Summer would also see Creative Engineering make an official video appearance.