There are days, o my readership, when your humble badass freelance entertainment journalist buddy Steve feels like a doddering old relic staring into the abyss of tomorrow and not liking what he sees down there one bit. I’m feeling OLD, and there is good reason.

A small personal lacunae, folks–if you’re nearing your thirties like me, or have just started down that particular bunny trail to hell, you may well remember relentlessly pestering your parents (sorry, mom and dad–I’m guilty on this point myself!) to take you to a little place called Showbiz Pizza, a very special place to children of the eighties because it contained everything in it that children of the eighties demanded in their entertainment.

Everything, including greasy, poorly-made pizza, small carnival-style rides, various games of chance, those lovely bleeping blooping time-wasters called video games, and of course, headlining every sold-out show, Showbiz Pizza’s very own resident house-band, the Rock-Afire Explosion. A collection of large, jerkily moving automations that quite possibly harbored the ultimate goal of breaking free of their moorings and running amok in the audience shrieking something like “we sacrifice this audience to you, the mighty Forbin Project!” in the grandest sci-fi tradition, the Rock-Afire Explosion alternately delighted and terrified small children for years.

Including, of course, this small child, the author of this piece, who unbelievably once was a small child himself.

Those of you who, like me, remember the Rock-Afire Explosion might well be interested to know that there is a documentary of the film coming out later this year. It’s kind of nice, in this largely post-arcade era (go ahead, name three arcades in a fifty mile radius of your house. If you can do it I’d be downright amazed. Even more so if you can do it without a connection to the words “restaurant” or “miniature golf”.) to know that the old symbols of the past have not yet been completely forgotten and that people still care about really really dated animatronic figures, not for their now-aged technology, but rather for their symbolic value and their deep sentimentality. Yeah, sure, these days the Rock-Afire Explosion couldn’t keep a four year old sitting still for more than fifteen seconds but back in the day we could sit through a whole set and that’s saying something.

We remember these guys. That’s not an easy thing to do nowadays. Children’s entertainment has always been a cutthroat industry, and there were always plenty of sources gunning for our precious attention and our parents’ equally precious dollars. But even a raging cynic (guilty!) can’t deny that, back then, the Rock-Afire Explosion was almost certainly our first concert, and man, did we enjoy it.

Tags: hobbies, pop culture, web

Popularity: 1% [?]

Categories: Movie stories //