On WFF #11: Showbiz puppets
Decider previews the Wisconsin Film Festival
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Regardless of the scorn fanboys face, they'll always adore their worlds of make-believe as long as there are people around to create them. Which raises the question: Is success the only difference between the likes of George Lucas and Comic Book Guy?
The Rock-afire Explosion (April 2 11:15 p.m. and April 5, 5:45 p.m., Bartell Theatre), a "rockumentary" about the now-defunct ShowBiz Pizza Place's animatronic bands and the people who love them, seeks to answer that question. The story centers around Chris Thrash, a car salesman and rabid Rock-afire groupie, and Aaron Fechter, the creator of Rock-afire and now a struggling inventor. Director Brett Whitcomb could easily have mocked these men, but instead he lets their stories unfold through their words and compelling clips of Rock-afire's heyday, with some surprisingly touching results.
Thrash worked as a DJ at a roller rink (where he proposed to and married his wife) and performed odd jobs in addition to his full-time gig in order to afford a complete, working Rock-afire Explosion band. He dotes on the rock-bots as if they were his children, and spawned their recent resurgence with his videos of the gang herking and jerking through cuts from Shakira and Usher.
Fechter owns Creative Engineering, a once-booming business that's now down to one employee years after ShowBiz merged into Chuck E. Cheese's. As he leads Whitcomb through his cavernous warehouse headquarters, Fechter ruminates on the pitfalls of success and fondly remembers the people and the business that once thrived in what is now essentially a creepy, abandoned puppet factory.
In the end, Fechter and Thrash are strikingly similar. Drawn together by their deep desire to keep the band operating at any level, they both exhibit the kind of intense dedication that's both admirable and slightly disturbing. And as Fechter's financial success with the Rock-afire Explosion is all but dried up, Thrash's personal success with the band seems to be just beginning, providing a role reversal that's truly indicative of the co-dependent nature of fans and creators.
For more previews of the Wisconsin Film Festival, please see the On WFF archive.
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