Great job, Internet!: George Lucas' long-lost arena stunt show, Super Live Adventure, strikes back

“People screamed in the audience and fainted, and it was this whole big thing because you saw this actor get his head chopped off on stage,” said Kucan. It was this guy who was so big that they had made a puppet of his body. The show had five or six little people in it, and one of them would climb inside this giant puppet. His head was about chest level so that he would look out through the chest. He had sort of levers inside so he could move the arms and legs, and he would walk towards me. Then the head was just a prop, obviously stuck on top of his shoulders, and I would whack that thing as hard as I could, and it would fly off of him.”

Overeager cast members like Kuncan would sometimes pick up skills on the fly. After a knife thrower blew out his knee in rehearsal, Kucan jumped at the chance to toss a 14-inch knife at a woman during the Indiana Jones section. “I remember saying to them, ‘Yeah, I know how to throw knives,’ and they’re like, ‘What do you mean you know how to throw knives?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I have black belt in kung fu. What can happen?’ So they give me these 14-inch giant throwing knives. They’re as long as your forearm, and a single rotation, which means you’re standing very, very far back for the target, but it’s such a big knife, it literally rotates one time before it hits. I did that for six months. That was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done in my life.”

Of course, there was also a tiger involved in the show. It was put together by Ringling Brothers, after all. “The guy who trained the tigers had done nothing his whole life but train tigers,” Roberto said. “He grew up in that, and we got a few days off and a bunch of us were going to fly over to Thailand for like four days on the beach, and we invited him, and he said, ‘Well, I can’t. I gotta work on the tigers. Tigers don’t understand days off. If I don’t show up for four days, when I come back, they’ll eat me. That right now they think I’m bigger than they are because I raised them since cubs, but if we don’t do the same thing every day, there’s gonna be a problem.'”

The massive production required a stage over one acre wide and five stories high, 150 cast, crew, and staff members, two Bengal tigers, two horses, and four dogs, according to TheRaider.net. “There were more than 400 costumes and 1,616 costume pieces[…]Over 140 musicians recorded the original music score, including the 76-piece London Symphony Orchestra, 17-piece big band, and an 18-piece rock ‘n’ roll band.” There was a gigantic inflatable jukebox, Jabba the Hutt, and the Millennium Falcon, which would land on the stage. 

Audiences ate it up. Across 198 performances, the show held residencies in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and more. “You had an audience of 8,000, 10,000 people,” said Roberto. “We had fans who would come. Show after show after show, hold up signs, wait outside the door, follow the show from city to city. There were some super fans there. The guys who played Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones had people lining up with gifts outside the stage door.” People returned so frequently that Kucan remembers looking out into the crowd and seeing fans performing all the steps to the American Graffiti number. 

“It was an expensive ticket back in the day, and there were people who came 12, 13, 14 times, and so a lot of them learned the dances,” Kucan said. “I can remember at times looking out into the audience, and there would be portions of the audience doing the dances that we were doing on stage. There was a young woman who sent me my very first fan letter. I would get letters from her a couple of times a week, and she started sending me presents. I started sending her stuff back. Sometimes a prop would wear out, and we’d get rid of it, so I sent her some of that.”

The cast was filled with up-and-coming stunt performers, many of whom went on to successful careers in Hollywood and Broadway. Mike Massa was Harrison Ford’s stunt double for years, and Tony Angelotti doubled for Johnny Depp for the Pirates Of The Caribbean series. Deidre Goodwin starred in Nine and The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Broadway, and Michelle Potterf appeared in Chicago for 11 years on Broadway. Roberto continued as a stunt performer, even landing a gig in Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular in Orlando, before jumping to full-time on-camera work, appearing on All My Children and as the host of Shop ‘Til You Drop in the early ’00s. Kucan, now retired from show business, got his doctorate and became a physical therapist. Meanwhile, the mostly American cast’s dialogue was overdubbed by the actors who dubbed the characters’ lines for the films’ Japanese releases. 

A state-of-the-art production at the time, the show never made it to the States, aside from a couple of previews that George Lucas attended. Much of the show had been lost to time, but now, thanks to Roberto, we can see what a live mash-up of Lucas’ pre-prequel work would look like. Frankly, it belongs in a museum.