Can you believe this guy never went to a pizza party at Chuck E. Cheese? Actually, Jack Turner missed out on most of the animatronics-heavy TV shows, movies, and restaurants that made this rare breed of furry, mechanical, musically gifted robot a legend.

So how exactly did a 23-year-old with no longstanding relationship with Charles Entertainment Cheese (that’s right: Chuck E. Cheese’s middle name is Entertainment) become the foremost animatronics whiz in the country?

Naturally, it all started with YouTube. In 2014, 11-year-old Turner was poking around online when he kept coming back to a video that piqued his interest: YouTuber Markiplier playing Five Nights at Freddy’s. The game, in which a gang of murderous animatronic animals stalks a night-shift security guard, stirred something up inside the boy that couldn’t be coaxed away. Not even the 24-hour-long Nyan Cat video could compete. He’d stumbled upon his life’s purpose… he just didn’t know it yet.

While the game was fun enough, Turner found it wasn’t the jump scares that held his interest—it was the psycho animatronics featured in the game. He became fascinated by their real-world counterparts. He wanted to know how they worked, what they could do, and—most importantly—how he could get his hands on one.

Those questions sent him down a long Google rabbit hole that ended at the Rock-afire Explosion —the band of singing, dancing robot animals that played to families at ShowBiz Pizza Place (later rebranded as Chuck E. Cheese) through the 1980s. Inventor Aaron Fechter created the lineup, which included a keyboard-playing gorilla, a guitar-strumming polar bear, and a cheerleading mouse named Mitzi Mozzarella.

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