Itâs your birthday. Youâre eight years old. You just got done crawling on your hands and knees through a labyrinth of sticky tunnels that have never, ever been cleaned. You jump in the ballpit that was briefly closed because a kid threw up in there. Itâs open now, a stoned teenager pretended to wipe it down. You find the filthiest balls and throw them at your best friend, before adjourning to eat the worldâs worst pizza with your unwashed hands. Suddenly one wall explodes in multicolored lights, a broken loudspeaker buzzing an announcement nobody can decipher. Terrifying, unexplained automatons jerk into broken-limbed motion, singing a Beach Boys song they donât have the rights to. This is the happiest youâve ever been. Youâre at ShowBiz Pizza Place, and youâre watching The Rock-afire Explosion Band.
Yes, later theyâd be rebranded for Chuck E. Cheese, Mitzi Mozzarella would lose her rockinâ tits, and the fancy gorilla would be replaced by a trashy mouse, ruining the dignity of the franchise. But for a time The Rock-afire Explosion Band were on top of the world. Created in 1980 by Aaron Fechter of Orlando, Florida, the Rock-afire Explosion would become the sum of his lifeâs work. He actually didnât want that. He did not want to be the guy who made Pizza Robots. He wanted to save the world. He wanted to invent the electric car.
Letâs throw back further, to the 1970s: America was in the middle of a gas crisis, and electricity wasnât yet for liberal pussies. Aaron Fechter wanted to be the solution, but changing the world takes money. So he started a Science Business, which at the time meant going door-to-door asking if people needed any science. That seems like a joke, but thatâs what actually happened. The joke is you hiding recruiter-friendly phrases in white text at the bottom of the four-hundredth resume you send a malfunctioning robot who sorts it right into the trash because it thinks your street name is too ethnic.
For Aaron Fechter, life wasnât on Easy Mode. It was the Tutorial. He simply knocked on peopleâs doors, asked if they wanted any inventions, and that worked. He pressed left stick to move and celebrated his well-earned QUEST COMPLETE pop-up. Behind one of those doors was a carnival grifter who asked if designing rigged shooting games was science, to which Fechter replied âYUP!â With just that chance meeting, and plenty of seed money from daddy, Aaron Fechter was able to start his first animatronic game company and grift his way into history. Itâs the Platonic ideal of the Boomer success story.
Aaron Fechter also claims he invented the original Whac-A-Mole game, but there are some problems with his story. Letâs see if you can spot them! Keep track of your guesses, thereâs an answer key at the end.
According to Fechter, he was at a gaming expo when a carnie named Denny Denton brought him over to a broken Whac-A-Mole game, and asked if Fechter could whip up a working version. Fechter did, but when it came time to sell the game, Denny started loading a .45 Magnum in front of him while explaining âthere are two kinds of people in the world, carnies and suckers, and you ainât a carnie.â Denton cut him out of the deal and sold his Whac-A-Mole to Bobâs Space Racers, a Florida arcade company, who would license it across the world. None of this can be verified, because Fechter says Denton disappeared into the seedy criminal underworld of Gibsonton, a special magical town just for carnies and beyond the reach of traditional law enforcement.
Okay, letâs add up your points. Here are the problems with Aaron Fechterâs story, in no particular order.
- Denny Denton doesnât exist.
- Carnies are a blade people. Ammunition costs money, but stabs are free.
- The magical town just for carnies is somehow a real place, but by all accounts it is subject to human law.
- In the story Fechter tells, he admits he didnât invent Whac-A-Mole. He went to a booth where somebody else had invented Whac-A-Mole, and Fechter thought there was a malfunction loophole for fast inventors.
- There is no malfunction loophole.
The story that Bobâs Space Racers tells is a little different. They own the patent to Whac-A-Mole, which they claim was sold to them by two guys at a gaming expo whose machine was temporarily broken, but they fixed it. Huh, thatâs⌠pretty much how Fechter tells it too, just with the concept of ownership intact. The two names on the patent: Donny Anderson, and Gerald Denton.
Itâs basically the same story from two different points of view â one rooted in our reality, and one from the carnival-themed Shutter Island where Aaron Fechterâs decaying mind is trapped forever.
Sorry, thatâs a spoiler. Maybe for Shutter Island, definitely for Aaron Fechterâs descent into madness. ShowBiz Pizza eventually merged with Chuck E. Cheese, rebranded the Rock-afire Explosion to Munchâs Make Believe Band, and the show went on. Without Fechter. In the early 1990s he split with ShowBiz entirely, fired all of his employees, and tried to go it alone. For reasons nobody could explain, modern children seemed to prefer video games to the bespoke choreography of mostly-broken musical terrorbots. Childrenâs animatronics was a dying industry, and while Fechterâs others creations did manage to take on a life of their own, I donât mean that in the financial sense.
Fechter fell into his backup career: Mad science via IP theft. In 1991 he invented the Anti-Gravity Freedom Machine, which sounds rad as fuck. Tell me what you picture when you read those words. Iâll wait.
You guessed jetpack. Of course you guessed jetpack. Thereâs no way that can be anything but a jetpack that shoots fireworks.
Nope, email. Fechter tried to invent email in 1991, only his version was years too late and named like Evel Knievelâs motorcycle. When the Anti-Gravity Freedom Machine didnât take off, because it was not filled with enough majestic fireworks, Fechter threw everything he had into a new animatronic machine. Iâll let him explain it: “It’s smart. It’s something I think adults will enjoy. It’s a robotic brain, mechanical, not a computer. And it’s going to be relevant to the post-apocalyptic challenges I think we’re all expecting.”
Go ahead, guess.
You guessed Road Warrior-style animatronic death bus. Obviously. Thatâs the clearest way I know to say âRoad Warrior-style animatronic death busâ without tipping off the Feds before itâs fully online and unstoppable.
Wrong again!
In this game, the player tries to bash an animatronic cockroach with a big flip-flop. I guess the roach is what makes it ârelevant to all the post-apocalyptic challenges weâre expecting?â Damn dude, really putting some English on the concept of stealing Whac-A-Mole. It was called Bashy Bug and you may recognize it from nowhere. Nobody bought it, because it suffered a malfunction at the gaming fair where it debuted. Hopefully while he was trying to fix it Fechter locked eyes with a younger, faster inventor and instantly knew that time is a flat circle.
That should be the end of the Platonic Boomer success story: A man of great privilege born at the perfect time dipshits into massive success, goes insane when he realizes he doesnât have a second idea.
But then YouTube came along. A couple of dudes got a hold of his old Rock-afire Explosion robots, made them lip-sync modern pop songs, and created a viral hit. Fechter saw his path backâŚ
And immediately tried to sue it.
“I hated it,” Fechter says. “That was my first reaction. Absolutely hated it. Those were adult songs. That’s not the Rock-afire audience.” He went on to say those YouTube guys were his ânew Whac-A-Moleâ enemies, because the man has self-inflicted mole poisoning and heâll never escape Carnival Island.
I donât know how Fechterâs lawsuit ended. Iâm assuming he successfully sued the hell out of those shitty punks trying to exploit the purity of childhood nostalgia by forcing a beloved robot band to perform adult pop songs. Good riddance, may they rot in hell.
Oh hey, it looks like Aaron Fechter has his own YouTube channel for the Rock-afire Explosion Band now. Letâs check in on that.
It was actually Aaronâs idea the whole time. He went to a YouTube fair and he saw a Rock-afire Explosion Band Does Adult Pop Songs booth, only it was malfunctioning at the time, so he built his own. Everything was going great until a drifter named Yout Ube shot Fechter in the knees and disappeared into the underbelly of Viral Town, where cops fear to tread.
Ganking the idea bought Fechter a few hits, but you can see the views dip sharply even in the thumbnails up there. When things looked their bleakest, Aaron Fechter looked back upon the beach heâd been walking to see a single set of footprints in the sand. He asked Boomer Privilege âwhy did you abandon me there, at my darkest times?â And Boomer Privilege looked upon him and said âmy man, youâve been riding on my shoulders this whole time. You have literally not taken one single step.â
Just as Fechter was about to give it up for good, Five Nights at Freddyâs came out.
Fechter was back on top of the world! See? You entitled kids just need to knock on enough doors, somebody always needs Pizza Robots. Pure bootstraps, baby.
Now Fechter puts on new shows just for his YouTube channel. After thirty years, the Rock-afire Explosion is back with original material! Letâs see what Billy-Bob the bear has to say:
Huh. Most times when somebody says they âget asked one question more than any other,â itâs because theyâre gay and still in the closet. If they say they can only answer that question through song, itâs because theyâre gay and about to come out of the closet with a lot of style. I mean, hell yeah, Billy-Bob. Iâm here for this. Be true to yourself!
Hereâs a sentence you have to speak fluent Hot Dog to understand: Aaron Fechter is Wogglebugging Billy-Bob the Pizza Robot.
The song goes on to explain that Billy-Bob is definitely not gay, but heâs also not ace. Heâs actually really into girls, he just canât get with one. Fechter thought it better to build an incel robot than a gay one. Aaron Fechter, driven completely mad by the endless easy success of Boomer privilege, succumbed to hate. Iâm playing this up, but itâs hardly a twist. All the clues were here. There was actually only one. You shouldâve seen every word of this coming when I first typed âFlorida.â
Hereâs the official Rock-afire Explosion Twitter account. Not his own account, the account of the beloved childrenâs pizza band.
Aaron Fechter surely programs all of his tweets into the Rock-afire choreography board. In some dark Florida warehouse, thereâs a Hillbilly Pizza Robot doing Seinfeldian observational riffs about childrenâs anagrams and hate crimes. Dennis Miller rants about the bump-stock preferences of biological women, beb. Letterman lists of his favorite ethnic bombings.
Wait, that last oneâs real.
You know whatâs weird about this primitive carnival robot choreographer listing his favorite bombings under a Pizza Bear account? I guess a lot of things. But mostly itâs that his favorite bombing isnât his own bombing.
Oh right, letâs get to the bombing.
On September 26th, 2013, Aaron Fechterâs Orlando warehouse exploded. First responders dug through the rubble to find twitching robot limbs and burning gorilla heads. They said it was âlike the Jokerâs lab explodedâ because theyâre fucking casuals who never heard of Professor Pyg. It was such a disaster the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council made a special pamphlet and slideshow just for the incident.
This is not a general pamphlet about the kind of thing Aaron Fechter did, itâs specifically about the time he, Aaron Fechter, blew up his animatronic warehouse while trying to invent a new kind of fuel. There were no fatalities, but there was massive property damage due to the failure of the cylinder he used to store it.
That incredible damage is from one cylinder failing. He had six on premises.
Now, Aaron explains that the cylinder failed due to hidden ârust worms,â which the Transformers Wiki tells me are voracious writhing creatures that inhabit the sea of rust. The Florida Hazmat chief says it because you canât use that type of container for that type of fuel, that even the friction from opening the tankâs valve is enough to ignite it, and that Aaron is lucky to be alive after using this janky ass arc welder setup to make a hydrogen bomb.
Aaron Fechter called his new gas Carbo-Hydrillium, and you can really feel how hard the Orlando Fire Department wanted to roast this nerd as they patiently explained all the stupid shit he just did.
The city said they had to treat the rubble as an active bomb site because the remaining cylinders were so dangerous. Aaron Fechter was cooking with it. He was cooking with homemade hydrogen bombs. I love how the pamphlet points out it wasnât even cheaper. That has nothing to do with the disaster, itâs just to make Aaron look stupid. This whole thing is such a masterclass in calling a guy an idiot in a professional setting. They should teach it in Passive Aggressive Memos, which I assume is an MBA class every one of my former bosses took. The Orlando Fire Department absolutely rejoices in lighting up this Pizza Robot moron for slide after slide after slide:
Is sub-pamphleting a thing, like sub-tweeting?
They donât even allow Fechter the dignity of plausible deniability. After twenty slides of vague barbs, the Orlando Fire Department takes the gloves off and slaps Aaron Fechter right where it really hurts: In the Pizza Band.
I can just picture Aaron Fechter whining to the burning head of his keyboard gorilla like Owen Wilson in The Royal Tenenbaums: âWhy would they make the point of saying someoneâs not a chemist? Do you think Iâm especially not a chemist? ⌠You didnât even have to think about it, did you!â
He was probably just happy they said he invented Whac-A-Mole. Although wait, the Whac-A-Mole Wikipedia page says it was invented in Japan in 1975. Which means, holy shit – weâre multiple layers of IP theft deep. Weâre nesting arcade grifts like parentheses. But then, why would the Orlando Fire Department ever think Fechter invented Whac-A-Mole? Unless, holy shit again â standing there in the exploded rubble of his former livelihood, his Pizza Friends in twitching mounds all around him, a still-smoldering Aaron Fechter looked the approaching First Responders straight in the eye and said:
âFirst thing you have to know: I invented Whac-A-Mole.â
This article is thanks to a Hot Dog Tip from Thrillho.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mickey Lowman, who disappeared into Carny Town and was never seen again.Â