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.