Down south, in the small town of Sandy Hook, Mississippi, there’s a roadside shack where a once-beloved but long-forgotten band from the 1980s still plays.
It’s the kind of place that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking — just a nondescript wooden building with a tin roof overhead and a couple old gas pumps out front. Handwritten signs posted to each pump read “Smitty’s Super Service.”
Inside, it’s a different story. For children of the 1980s, the interior of Smitty’s Super Service is pure, nostalgic magic. It’s where you’ll find the Rock-afire Explosion, an eight-piece animatronic rock band once featured prominently at a chain of arcade pizza restaurants called Showbiz Pizza Place. The band was — and still is — unusual. There are two bears — Billy Bob Brockali and Beach Bear — on bass and lead guitars, respectively. Fatz Geronimo, an 800-pound gorilla with a penchant for flashy jackets, is the group’s frontman and keyboard player. Rodent Mitzi Mozzarella provides accompanying vocals, while the hound Dook LaRue drums. Then there’s Looney Bird, another vocalist, and ventriloquist wolf Rolfe deWolfe and his hand puppet, Earl Schemerle. Together, they provide comic relief from the pronounced seriousness of the rest of the show.
At the height of the restaurant’s popularity in the mid-1980s, the Rock-afire Explosion was playing thousands of shows a day in hundreds of Showbiz locations. Spread across three large stages, members of the band would perform skits and banter back and forth between raucous performances of familiar songs from Michael Jackson, The Beatles or Olivia Newton-John.
To a kid like Damon Breland, owner of Smitty’s Super Service, trips to Showbiz Pizza and similar themed restaurants — most notably, the king of arcade pizza chains, Chuck E. Cheese’s — were rare and treasured treats.
“Back in those days, it was like a mini-vacation,” Breland, 44, said via a video call from his South Mississippi home. “There were prizes, games, little bitty amusement rides … It was something to experience in the ‘80s.”
Born and raised in Walthall County, Breland, like a lot of kids during the arcade boom of the 1980s, wanted to visit Showbiz every chance he could. When his grades were good, his parents would haul him to one of several nearby Showbiz locations — Jackson, Gulfport or New Orleans.
“My mother and father created a monster early on, even though they didn’t know it,” Breland said. “Every six weeks, I knew to keep my grades up, and that was the reward.”
But as he grew, Breland’s interest in pizza, arcade games and animatronic animal bands gradually faded. Showbiz, as a brand, disappeared in the early 1990s, after the company purchased rival pizza restaurant/amusement chain Chuck E. Cheese’s. Rather than continue operating as Showbiz, the company adopted its rival’s branding … including its animatronic show, Munch’s Make Believe Band.
Just like that, the Rock-afire Explosion was a band without a gig. Even for those ‘80s kids for whom Fatz, Billy Bob and their bandmates were once an important part of the childhood experience, memories of their lively performances gradually faded.
Reunion tour
While traveling home from New Orleans one night in the early 2000s, Breland caught a familiar face out of the corner of his road-weary eye.
Red feathers. Big, Skee-Ball eyes. Yellow beak. It was Looney Bird, smack in the middle of a sign for a new pizza restaurant: Looney Bird’s.
Suddenly, all of those childhood memories came flooding back.
Although short-lived, Looney Bird’s had a few locations: Orlando, Florida; Jackson, Tennessee; and Covington, Louisiana. Breland lived just an hour away from the Louisiana location. He made it a semi-regular stop, a place to relive long-forgotten childhood memories. By that point, the Rock-afire Explosion had been missing from popular culture for more than a decade.
Predating the rise of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, which made it easy for members of niche fandoms to find each other, Breland found an online community via a website dedicated to Showbiz Pizza. They’d talk about their childhood memories of the Rock-afire Explosion and Munch’s Make Believe Band.
“You want to talk about a rabbit hole,” Breland said. “Alice got deep quick.”
During those early years of rediscovering a beloved childhood memory, Breland discovered something else: eBay. Still relatively early in its life, the online auction site was where anyone could sell just about anything. No matter how unusual the item on offer, a seller could find someone willing to buy it.
Aaron Fletcher, founder of Orlando-based Creative Engineering Inc. and creator of the Rock-afire Explosion, was one such seller. The company was offloading used animatronics to accommodate a move to a new location. Anything that had once been inside a shuttered Showbiz location was being auctioned off.
With no plan for what he would do with it in mind, Breland set his sight on purchasing an animatronic band.
“That’s where it happened,” Breland said. “I’m on a dial-up internet connection in the middle of the night on a tube screen sitting there refreshing (that auction).”
The determination paid off. When the auction closed, Breland owned his own copy of the Rock-afire Explosion.
“What I won on eBay looked like a bunch of terminators,” he said. “Just bare metal. No mask. No fur. No costume. There was a lot of refurbishment needed.”
Breland flew to Florida, rented a truck and hauled the robotic band back to South Mississippi … where he promptly tucked the skeletal characters away in his father’s garage for a couple of years before being moved into an empty convenience store once owned by his grandfather.
This would eventually become Smitty’s Super Service. Eventually. First, Breland would have to put the band back together.
That would be in the literal sense.
Super-servicing Smitty’s
Because members of the band were in their skeletal forms, Breland had to work from the inside-out to put them back together. He learned along the way.
Using a copy of the “blue book” — a roughly 5-inch-thick three-ring binder filled with diagrams and breakdowns of the robotic band — Breland brought the cast of colorful characters back to life.
“Every hinge; every bolt; every pin. That was the bible; that was how I learned,” Breland said.
Everything’s pneumatic, running on air and piston power. Things can go awry quickly, Breland said. There’s a lot of maintenance involved in owning and running a collection of giant robots that each weighs several hundred pounds.
“Some of the characters have 23 movements by themselves,” he said. “So, you’ve got one-hundred-and-whatever movements across the show. Lights that have to be checked, because they’ll burn out.”
Breland learned quickly that he needed to fix any problems with the characters early on. Small problems grow large quickly.
“If that piston is still sitting there, going through whatever motion it is, but it’s not going the way it’s supposed to go, it’s going to hit something else, it’s going to tear through the mask, it’s going to tear through the fur,” he said. “A little problem can become a major problem if you don’t handle it soon. That has been a big key in keeping this show going.
“Had I known then what I know now and had saved up, I could have gotten something that was in much better condition,” he added. “But I would not have had that learning curve.”
Breland kept his eyes open for more items from shuttered Showbiz locations. Over the years, he bought the character’s skins and costumes. He even bought some parts from that nearby Looney Bird’s when it inevitably closed. He picked up decorations that once lined the walls, the toys exchanged for tickets, some of the old arcade games and rides. He added the various members of Munch’s Make Believe Band and other Chuck E. Cheese’s merch.
Gradually, one piece of Breland’s childhood at a time, Smitty’s Super Service sprang to life.
“It was begging, bartering, buying … whatever had to be done to get whatever was needed,” he said. “Even when it had the show in it running those first few years, it wasn’t Smitty’s to me yet. The more the collectibles started getting there, the artwork on the wall, adding the other characters … It took a life of its own.”
The band plays on
Stepping through the doors of Smitty’s is like stepping back into a very specific portion of an ‘80s kid’s memories. And like old memories, everything’s jumbled together. Characters and collectibles from Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurants face characters and collectibles from Showbiz. Merch from both restaurants intermingle. He even has a row of old Showbiz booths in which guests can sit and relive their memories.
“Everything that I have was something that was moth-balled in the ’80s,” Breland said of Smitty’s.
It’s a private collection, open by request, so the wear-and-tear on the animatronic shows is minimal. It takes a couple of hours to set up the show for guests.
Its audience is growing. Although open only by appointment, Smitty’s is one of just a handful of locations people can still see the Rock-afire Explosion perform. Besides a licensed show in Barboursville, West Virginia, inside a former Showbiz location that’s been rebranded as Billy Bob’s Wonderland, there just aren’t many places to see Rock-afire.
“That’s it. That’s the only public show,” Breland said. “You drive up any day of the week, and you can see it.”
The rest are in private collections — inside of barns or in basements or set up inside of garages — or have been converted into other shows.
The Rock-afire Explosion saw a resurgence in popularity in the mid-to-late 2000s thanks to YouTube and a 2008 documentary detailing the history of Creative Engineering Inc., Showbiz Pizza Place, the Rock-afire Explosion and its fan community. Breland was featured in that documentary.
In recent years, the number of visitors to Smitty’s has grown, coinciding with the removal of animatronic bands inside of Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurants and the rise in popularity of the video game “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” which takes place inside a fictional restaurant similar to Chuck E. Cheese’s.
These days, Smitty’s has more visitors than Breland can handle.
“It’s a fine line, doing it as a hobby where I still can enjoy it,” he said. “I’ve had emails from England; I’ve had visitors from Alaska … It’s crazy to think that this show had that much reach.”
It has greater reach than that. Those who make the pilgrimage to Smitty’s are often caught off-guard by the sight of the band … of coming face-to-face with childhood. As the band springs to life — Fatz hammering away at the keys; Billy Bob plucking at his box guitar; Rolfe deWolfe and Earl Schemerle cracking wise — those adults are suddenly ‘80s kids again, hanging out inside a Showbiz or Chuck E. Cheese’s. They can practically taste the pizza.
For Breland, it’s these moments that keep Smitty’s doors open.
“It’s amazing to see that a 43-year-old animatronic band that hasn’t been in the mainstream since 1991 can still have that effect,” he said. “The ‘80s in general were so much simpler. You rode out on your bicycle during the day; you’d come back home when the lights came on. Those days are gone.”
Well, not quite. Not at Smitty’s, at least.
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