THE ROCK-AFIRE EXPLOSION

When it was released a couple years ago, The Rock-afire Explosion was a meager contender on an exhaustive wave of fringe fandom docs. The niche arguably arrived with '97's Trekkies, underwent a semi-piss take from Christopher Guest's Best in Show, and shredded with '07's new classic about kill-screen mastery The King of Kong. What resulted was a gush of saccharine truth that continues to pervade film festivals today. Each entry in this genre's a barely-fluctuating recipes of nerd sincerity and had-to-be-there nostalgia with encroaching hints of darkness and depression. The familiar beats in these docs---unfortunate tattoos of devotion, severe cases of man-child syndrome---are hole-punched in Rock-afire, but where the film forks is in the scope and subject matter.

At just over an hour, The Rock-afire Explosion attempts to tell several different stories in relatively little time. First there's the story of Rock-afire, the defunct animatronic band; the band's unfulfilled inventor, a man of singular vision; then there are profiles given on individual members of the band's tiny fanbase; and lastly there's the rise and crash of motherfucking Showbiz Pizza. Subjectivity aside, Showbiz is an under-analyzed thematic Goliath unto itself. A chain of dining establishments long synonymous with '80s babies of divorce and their insatiable respite via pop-n-wow entertainment, Showbiz was Vegas for the unformed, suburban adolescents it attracted. It was a place where attention spans were cleaved by a parlor band of robotic, wise-cracking animals and a sea of video game screens. Today, perhaps the only thing that comes close is the Alamo Drafthouse, which is likely attended by many Showbiz-alums.

The best explored subject in the doc is Rock-afire's inventor, a Floridian named Aaron Fechter. By his late 20s, Fechter's creations had him overseeing a multi-million dollar business and several hundred employees. With his army of bootleg stoner-Muppets, Fechter managed to sneak secret message into the mass-manufactured act. For instance, Fechter waxes environmental with the inclusion of an impatient bird intoxicated-from and surviving-on oil. That shit went over fatheads then, one detail that makes the doc worthwhile. Fechter's ambitions were cut short, due both to a rush by investors who over-expanded the franchise, and to changes in tech-fashion.

The most effective tonal and visual coup for the film is a tour given by Fechter through the shuttered Rock-afire production studio and warehouse. Shelves of dusty rubber molds and half-costumed mechanical skeletons sit next to sculpting tools left untouched for two decades by now dead employees. You want to warn a camera man to find the nearest exit and then Fechter himself admits it's spooky as hell. In truth, it's only half as spooky as when kids witnessed--sometimes literally overnight-- Showbiz Pizzas bought up by and converted into Chuck E. Cheeses': the shameless, ghettoized imitator. Not to get treacly, but in its way, that midnight conversion was, for a generation, the slimiest evidence that America had a huge, previously unforeseen propensity for fuckery. The 9/11 of pepper flakes.

The Rock-afire Explosion, embedded below, is now available in its entirety on Hulu. An earlier cut I screened in 2009 included more music by the Super Furry Animals, the omission of which kinda blows.