#ANIMATED
Jack’s Animatronic Warehouse
April 29, 2026
DEFINITION: Endowed with life or the qualities of life
At first glance, the warehouse feels ordinary.
But behind the doors waits a strange chorus of blinking lights, old speakers, tangled wires, fiberglass smiles, and an entire forgotten world suspended somewhere between childhood wonder and faded nostalgia. And somehow…against all odds…it’s alive again.
However the most unexpected part of entering Jack’s Animatronic Warehouse isn’t the animatronics.
It’s the people.
On this particular evening, Dan Craig, Kate McAllen, Barb McDowell, Scott McDowell, and Chuck Vaughn gathered together once again, former employees of the St. Joseph ShowBiz Pizza Place reuniting to experience the Rock-afire Explosion for the first time since the restaurant, opened on the Belt Highway in 1984, closed decades ago.
Suddenly this wasn’t just a warehouse filled with old animatronics. It was a reunion.
Before the curtains open guests gather around a glowing screen for a nostalgic journey through the history of ShowBiz Pizza, complete with vintage footage, behind-the-scenes clips, and the story of how a childhood fascination with animatronics slowly turned into Jack Turner’s mission to preserve them.
And then the magic happens. Slowly the vintage curtains that shroud the stages (built over two years from the original blueprints) part and the Rock-afire Explosion comes into view. Familiar music erupts through the speakers as the Rock-afire Explosion “The world’s greatest animatronic band” come roaring back to life. Billy Bob, Mitzi, Fatz, and the rest of the crew move and sing once again like they had never missed a beat.
Long before modern screens and virtual reality attractions took over family entertainment, animatronic bands were everywhere. Pizza parlors, arcades, skating rinks, and family fun centers across America once relied on singing robotic characters to entertain crowds of kids celebrating birthdays beneath flashing lights and the smell of pizza.
The band itself was originally created by Aaron Fechter and Creative Engineering, Inc. for ShowBiz Pizza Place restaurants during the 1980s and early 1990s. Over the years, the characters would go on to inspire countless pieces of pop culture, including loosely inspiring the wildly popular Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise.
For an entire generation, places like ShowBiz Pizza weren’t just restaurants. They were events.
Now many of those characters have disappeared entirely — scrapped for parts, abandoned in storage units, or lost when businesses closed and trends changed. But inside this warehouse in St. Joseph, one collector has quietly become the caretaker of a strange and oddly emotional piece of American entertainment history.
What makes Jack’s work especially fascinating is that these aren’t replicas. The animatronics inside are genuine surviving characters rescued from closed entertainment venues across the world. Some arrived damaged. Others arrived in pieces. Restoring them requires patience, technical knowledge, creativity, and the willingness to preserve technology that most people would have considered obsolete years ago.
But that challenge is exactly what drew Jack in at the age of eleven. In a disposable world where everything feels temporary, there’s something deeply significant about somebody dedicating themselves to preserving childhood wonder one moving robot at a time.
Walking through the warehouse feels less like visiting a collection and more like stepping backstage into another era. Everywhere you look there are remnants of childhood memories scattered between shelves and stages…painted props, vintage electronics, old show tapes, faded costumes, pneumatic tubing, and animatronic performers patiently waiting for another encore.
And surprisingly…people care more than you might expect.
Fans travel across the country to see these animatronic bands perform again. Because places like ShowBiz Pizza were never really about pizza.
They were about birthday parties. First dates. Little league celebrations. Arcade tokens. Friday nights. Family traditions.
The animatronics just happened to be the soundtrack.
Maybe that’s why the reunion inside the warehouse felt so emotional. For a brief moment, a group of former employees weren’t remembering a closed business anymore. They were reconnecting with a chapter of their own lives they thought was gone forever.
But wait a minute, the Rock-afire Explosion is having a cultural comeback.
Recently the legendary animatronic band appeared in the music video for “P.O.V.” by Clipse featuring Tyler, The Creator. Directed by Cole Bennett of Lyrical Lemonade, the video featured the Rock-afire Explosion rapping and performing alongside the artists. Thus, introducing an entirely new generation to the strange charm of animatronic entertainment.
According to Bennett, the idea came together after learning that Pusha T and Malice grew up visiting ShowBiz Pizza as kids. Suddenly something that once felt forgotten became relevant again.
Only in St. Joseph could something this wonderfully unique quietly exist behind an ordinary warehouse door.
A city built on history has always had a way of preserving stories others overlook. Sometimes those stories live in mansions and museums. And sometimes they’re hidden inside a warehouse where a retired animatronic band is still waiting for the curtain to rise one more time.
Honestly, that feels pretty uncommon.
#LEADERSHIP
Real change in almost any environment happens from the inside out. And no one knows just how to create the kind of contagious change a community needs like the community members themselves. In St. Joseph, and many communities like it, a revolution is happening around this kind of grassroots-based leadership – and it’s only just begun.
#Exuberant
It’s not paintball. It’s not even a water balloon fight. It’s foam warfare, and there’s a good chance you’ll want to join the fun.
#INSPIRING
Dwayne Blakely just has a way. A way with football. With fitness. And with inspiration.
#INVENTIVE
For several area students, a summer afternoon doesn’t involve much channel surfing. Instead, they’ll be practicing new skills and refining others, such as giving commands. Building functions. Envisioning new virtual worlds. Making specially-created animated heroes. Working within the access interface. And coding on the back-end, for front-end awesome action and results.
#GENEROUS
There are countless uncommon places in St. Joseph that help make this city uniquely awesome. Key word, “help.” Creative, quirky, historic and just plain fun parks, buildings, businesses and restaurants are great, but it’s the people that make the difference. It’s the people that come up with the ideas. It’s the people that run these businesses. It’s the people that take the lead and build something worth bragging about.