Showbiz Revisited

The video I had embedded last month that showed a Showbiz Pizza Place training video from the early 80’s was taken down shortly after the posting. For those of you lucky enough to watch it, it was indeed awesome. For those of you who weren’t, I’m sorry that some douche caught wind of it and asked YouTube that it be taken down.
I’m not sure how those things work, but I am sure that you need to be paying attention to the work of Chris Thrash, a 32 year old from Alabama that is doing some very incredible pop culture work.
Thrash, a simple man that enjoys slasher flicks, music from the 80’s and the Bible, has an enviable collection of the entire…THE ENTIRE…Rockafire animatronics collection in his garage. The collection is lovingly set up and fully functional and best of all, Chris regularly programs updates to the machines so that they perform a variety of songs.
There is a website devoted to these song programs and I encourage you to check them out quickly as the word appears to be spreading and, as a result, many of the videos are being taken down because of some ridiculous copyright infringement legalese.
His anonymity is further jeopardized by a movie scheduled for release this fall called The Rock-afire Explosion that tells the story of this mild-manner man who had the good fortune to come across a complete set of Showbiz characters. You see kids, at one time Showbiz and Chuck E. Cheese coincided together, a weird dynamic of different characters, scenarios and locations built by the same company. Ironically, Chuck E. Cheese declared bankruptcy, Showbiz bought out their locations, and the two existed together until the parent company unified the concept at phased out the Showbiz characters. Enter Chris Thrash, who took advantage of the consolidation and bought up the characters to appease some nostalgic memories and because of this curious hobby, he is Glam-Racket’s man of the moment.
There are others…many others…that also share a fond memory of this pop culture icon, but Thrash appears to be a main focus in this upcoming movie that is certainly going to raise a few grins from people my age that remember these strange entertainment centers. What’s crazy is that Showbiz was prominent in the Midwest and I remember feeling a little left out after seeing ads for Chuck E. Cheese because we didn’t have those around here. Now that Chuck E. is all we have, it’s Billy Bob, Fatz, Mitzi and all the other characters that I wish were still around.
Thanks to GloNo for the news tip.