Category: LEARNING DAY

It’s your birthday. You’re 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. It’s 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 world’s 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 don’t have the rights to. This is the happiest you’ve ever been. You’re at ShowBiz Pizza Place, and you’re watching The Rock-afire Explosion Band.

Yes, later they’d be rebranded for Chuck E. Cheese, Mitzi Mozzarella would lose her rockin’ 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 life’s work. He actually didn’t 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.

Let’s throw back further, to the 1970s: America was in the middle of a gas crisis, and electricity wasn’t 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 that’s 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 wasn’t on Easy Mode. It was the Tutorial. He simply knocked on people’s 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 “YUP!” 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. It’s 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. Let’s see if you can spot them! Keep track of your guesses, there’s 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 “there are two kinds of people in the world, carnies and suckers, and you ain’t a carnie.” Denton cut him out of the deal and sold his Whac-A-Mole to Bob’s 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, let’s add up your points. Here are the problems with Aaron Fechter’s story, in no particular order.

1. Denny Denton doesn’t exist.
2. Carnies are a blade people. Ammunition costs money, but stabs are free.
3. The magical town just for carnies is somehow a real place, but by all accounts it is subject to human law.
4. In the story Fechter tells, he admits he didn’t 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.
5. There is no malfunction loophole.

The story that Bob’s 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, that’s… 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.

It’s basically the same story from two different points of view – one rooted in our reality, and one from the carnival-themed Shutter Island where Aaron Fechter’s decaying mind is trapped forever.

Sorry, that’s a spoiler. Maybe for Shutter Island, definitely for Aaron Fechter’s descent into madness. ShowBiz Pizza eventually merged with Chuck E. Cheese, rebranded the Rock-afire Explosion to Munch’s 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. Children’s animatronics was a dying industry, and while Fechter’s others creations did manage to take on a life of their own, I don’t 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. I’ll wait.

You guessed jetpack. Of course you guessed jetpack. There’s 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 Knievel’s motorcycle. When the Anti-Gravity Freedom Machine didn’t take off, because it was not filled with enough majestic fireworks, Fechter threw everything he had into a new animatronic machine. I’ll 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. That’s the clearest way I know to say “Road Warrior-style animatronic death bus” without tipping off the Feds before it’s 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 “relevant to all the post-apocalyptic challenges we’re expecting?” 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 doesn’t 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 back…

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 “new Whac-A-Mole” enemies, because the man has self-inflicted mole poisoning and he’ll never escape Carnival Island.

I don’t know how Fechter’s lawsuit ended. I’m 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. Let’s check in on that.

It was actually Aaron’s 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 he’d been walking to see a single set of footprints in the sand. He asked Boomer Privilege “why did you abandon me there, at my darkest times?” And Boomer Privilege looked upon him and said “my man, you’ve been riding on my shoulders this whole time. You have literally not taken one single step.”

Just as Fechter was about to give it up for good, Five Nights at Freddy’s 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! Let’s see what Billy-Bob the bear has to say:

Huh. Most times when somebody says they “get asked one question more than any other,” it’s because they’re gay and still in the closet. If they say they can only answer that question through song, it’s because they’re gay and about to come out of the closet with a lot of style. I mean, hell yeah, Billy-Bob. I’m here for this. Be true to yourself!

Here’s 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 he’s also not ace. He’s actually really into girls, he just can’t 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. I’m playing this up, but it’s hardly a twist. All the clues were here. There was actually only one. You should’ve seen every word of this coming when I first typed “Florida.”

Here’s the official Rock-afire Explosion Twitter account. Not his own account, the account of the beloved children’s pizza band.

Aaron Fechter surely programs all of his tweets into the Rock-afire choreography board. In some dark Florida warehouse, there’s a Hillbilly Pizza Robot doing Seinfeldian observational riffs about children’s 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 one’s real.

You know what’s weird about this primitive carnival robot choreographer listing his favorite bombings under a Pizza Bear account? I guess a lot of things. But mostly it’s that his favorite bombing isn’t his own bombing.

Oh right, let’s get to the bombing.

On September 26th, 2013, Aaron Fechter’s Orlando warehouse exploded. First responders dug through the rubble to find twitching robot limbs and burning gorilla heads. They said it was “like the Joker’s lab exploded” because they’re 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, it’s 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 “rust worms,” which the Transformers Wiki tells me are voracious writhing creatures that inhabit the sea of rust. The Florida Hazmat chief says it because you can’t use that type of container for that type of fuel, that even the friction from opening the tank’s 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 wasn’t even cheaper. That has nothing to do with the disaster, it’s 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 don’t 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: “Why would they make the point of saying someone’s not a chemist? Do you think I’m especially not a chemist? … You didn’t even have to think about it, did you!”

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 – we’re multiple layers of IP theft deep. We’re nesting arcade grifts like parentheses. But then, why would the Orlando Fire Department ever think Fechter invented Whac-A-Mole? Unless, holy shit again – 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:

“First thing you have to know: I invented Whac-A-Mole.”

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.