They, Robot

DURING ONE OF my first trips to Atlantic City sometime in the late 1980s, I remember wandering around one of the casinos (I think it was Trump Plaza, but I could be wrong) and stopping to watch a soft-rock lounge band. They'd been tucked onto a small stage in a forgotten back corner, far away from the action on the floor. It was a four-piece outfit with a blond female singer, and they were limping their way through bland covers of bland songs by Barry Manilow, Lionel Ritchie and Phil Collins. I was captivated by this, only because I've always had a thing for lame lounge acts—and this one seemed even lamer than most. More pathetic, certainly, hidden away from everyone the way they were. Maybe they just weren't motivated to put on a good show.

Nobody else seemed to be paying any attention to them whatsoever, which is why I didn't want to go right up and stand in front of the stage. Too obvious. Instead, I stood back and off to the side, watching them from a distance while trying to pretend I wasn't watching them at all. It was a pretty sad scene.

When they finished their set, nobody clapped, because nobody noticed. The singer dipped her head in a small useless bow, and the stage lights went down. But nothing else happened after that. The drummer didn't stand up, the guitarist didn't run off stage for a drink or a cigarette. They all just stood perfectly still, the woman still bowing.

It took five minutes of hard staring for me to confirm that no, in fact they weren't moving at all. I didn't dare go any closer to investigate—I suddenly knew what I was looking at. They weren't moving because I'd been watching a bland animatronic lounge band. That's when I got scared.

(As Morgan pointed out recently, you have to wonder why the casino would put all that money and effort into getting themselves an animatronic band that sucked.)

Animatronic creatures didn't start to really bother me until I got older. There was something too realistic about them—and at the same time, something that couldn't be trusted. Ira Levin was clearly thinking the same thing when he sat down to write The Stepford Wives. All it took to convince me was one singing bear.

As with most kids, I guess, my first encounter with animatronics came via the good graces of the Disney Corporation. On my family's first trip to Disneyland in 1970, they took me to the Hall of Presidents. It was a little creepy, but no big deal. More than anything else, it was boring. Bunch of stiff, dusty old figures standing around talking. I had never heard of animatronics before, and for all I knew, these "presidents" were just bad actors. That's why I was puzzled afterward to hear my dad talking about how strange and disturbing it was to see them stand up and talk the way they did. Even after he explained that they were robots, I still thought it was boring.

More exciting was the jungle cruise, with its animatronic giant spiders, killer hippopotamuses and dancing, spear-waving cannibals. And the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, too. That was my favorite, and I insisted that any handy adult relative take me on it "just once more." In the course of one day, I must have ridden through that damn thing five times.

I don't know what it's like nowadays (especially after the movie), but 30-plus years ago, it was jam-packed with scenes of high-seas violence, torture and white slavery. Plenty of visual fat jokes, too. Men were slowly drowned in barrels by treasure-hungry pirates; others were being whipped. Some women were being auctioned off to a crowd of drunken ruffians, while others were being chased in circles by horny degenerates. Corpses and liquor bottles littered the dioramas.

("Family entertainment" was a hell of a lot more fun before we started feeling compelled to protect our children from everything.)

After learning that all the people I was seeing down there were animatrons, I became fascinated. It sure was a lot better than those damned presidents had been. Later in the gift shop, I picked up a book about Disney's animatronics factory, and studied it until it fell apart. Didn't learn a thing about robots, really, except that they could be made to do some really twisted things.

Most of the time they weren't doing anything twisted, of course. Most of the time they were made to do only stupid crap—like spin in circles while singing "It's a Small World," or play in an awful soft-rock band. But sometimes even things that seem the most innocuous on the surface—like singing a Phil Collins song in a casino—can be much more disturbing than a bunch of pirates auctioning female captives off to the highest bidder.

Case in point: Chuck E. Cheese's singing bears.

The kid-friendly pizza-and-games joint famous for its birthday parties, costumed characters and animatronic stage show arrived in Green Bay after I was too old (in my own mind, at least) to appreciate such things. Still, a number of my friends from school were anxious to have their birthdays there. As I remember, I only attended one, but that one was enough.

The pizza was bad, the noise level was incredible, the sensory overload of the games and the lights and the screaming kids almost made my head explode. I wanted nothing to do with the guy in the mouse suit. Come to think of it, I don't even think I much liked the kid whose birthday it was.

I was relieved when the overheads went down, the stage lights came up, and the Bear Family Singers (or whatever they were called) started to move, because that meant it was time for most of the kids to sit down and shut the hell up.

I was probably 11 at the time, and my early fascination with animatronics had faded to little more than a vague interest—probably because there wasn't much by way of animatronics in the Green Bay area. Chuck E. Cheese was pretty much it.

Given the audience, it was a fair enough show, I guess. The bears' movements in general were slow, but well-synched as they performed standards, birthday songs and a few mild, inoffensive versions of 60s hits. It was all very gentle and saccharine.

Near the end of the show, however, a short female bear with heavily made-up bedroom eyes slid her way into the spotlight at the front of the stage. There, very sweetly and very sadly, she sang "I Wanna Be Free."

I had that Monkees album at home, and I knew the song. Sitting in that restaurant, I knew that something strange and wrong was happening. It's a fucking kid's birthday party at a pizza parlor, and you got a robot bear singing a grim and maudlin break-up song? What the hell's that all about?

Nobody else seemed to notice, but I was dumped into an inexplicable depression for the rest of the day. Had I been older and more cynical and not feared animatronics, I think I would've thought of it as subversion at its finest—a real mind-fuck, tossing that monkeywrench into a kiddie party like that. But I wasn't old enough or cynical enough, not just yet. It was just weird and wrong and disturbing.

I never fully trusted animatronic creatures after that afternoon. You never knew what they were going to pull. o