#kooser bot

[fauxfickle]

New fruitcake dawg just dropped

[animatronicappreciation]

Hey can you talk a little about Dolli Dimples animatronic?

Sure! So Dolli Dimples was a cabaret character at Pizza Time Theatre. Her original VA, Donna Miller, was an actual piano bar performer that the PTT execs found and asked to be a VA for them. Donna Miller then performed the Dolli I showtape, which is my personal favorite of the two. Dolli II was performed by Lady Bianca, who also voiced Sally Sashay. (Please don't try to contact Lady Bianca; she wants nothing to do with the fandom anymore.) Their voices are very similar, but Donna Miller's voice has a deeper richness to it, in my opinion. Fun fact, Donna Miller was only 19 when she performed Dolli I!

Dolli was first installed at Kooser Road, which was the second PTT to open. She was a latex character at first, much like the portrait bots, but there was only ever one latex Dolli produced (to my knowledge), and all the other Dollis were the cyberamic version we know and love today.

Dolli was a bit different from other CEC characters in that she was made exclusively for adult consumption. (Artie Antlers was much the same, but B.B. Bubbles was much more child-friendly than either of them.) She was big, boisterous, raunchy, and incredibly flirtatious. If a hippo could ever possibly have any sort of sex appeal, that would be Dolli. She flirted with the audience, she talked about her numerous ex-husbands, she had pretty significant breasts... as Dolli put it herself, "there's a lot of Dolli to see!"

Speaking of Dolli's breasts, I want to address something that's a bit of a controversy in the fandom. Yes, Dolli Dimples had a breast movement, but it's not what you think. It wasn't like she had jiggle physics or whatever. Her breast movement was a breathing movement, much like the birds in the Tiki Room have. Since she's so busty, it makes sense that you would be able to see her chest rise and fall with her breathing. It's not anything lewd, I promise.

The only Dolli Dimples that's intact today (the Dolli owned by Captain Slappy) actually doesn't have her breast movement working. The piece that moved the breasts was a lever that pressed up the particle board the breasts were mounted to in order to create the movement, but the particle board on Slappy's Dolli has pretty much disintegrated, so the lever pushing up doesn't really do anything anymore. He's decided not to restore the particle board because the movement's repetition ends up tearing Dolli's dress, and since this is the only working Dolli in existence, he wants to keep her dress intact.

If you want to see a Dolli in action during her heyday, [here's] some footage from Charlie Cheese in Australia. You can see her breast movement in action in this footage!

-- Mod Possum

[fauxfickle]

YOOOOOO, NEW GAAPS STORYBOARD JUST GOT ADDED TO THE CHEESE-E-PEDIA

[fauxfickle]

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him! We have the technology!

Over the past few week I've been looking at the old Kooser bots as one does and thought to myself, "These can't be THAT different from the cyberamics. I can reverse engineer that right?" So here is the fruitcake dawg himself. I probably wouldn't try building them anytime soon since I don't feel like explaining why I am constructing a 4' dog out of rubber and metal to my parents, but hey maybe once I move out.

I almost decided on Munch, but he's basically a sheet of plywood with some fur glued on which isn't really that interesting, so I picked Jasper instead. Also picked him mostly because I feel that his face would be easy to sculpt a mold for, especially since his face is so thin and he's probably at least 50% muzzle. The real challenge would be all those wrinkles around his eyes but other than that, his face isn't too complex. Only thing I'm not sure about is if his nose is part of his mask or is just glued on. It doesn't really have the same texture as the rest of his mask but who knows.

My first thought was to just get a cyberamic Jasper and try to stretch a mask over him but that's easier said than done and would just look bad. Plus, after looking over pics, I quickly realized that cyberamic proportions are way off for him. His eyes would be too far apart, his neck would be really short, and his shoulders would be too wide. Seems a lot smarter to just build him from scratch. His clothes can be snatched from a thrift store too which is a nice little bonus.

Again, these are far in the future plans, but I've been looking at sculpting tutorials, animatronic videos, etc. and I feel like once the mask is sculpted and furred, that's like most of the hard part done.

[fauxfickle]

Another month, another info dump of things you already know, or the search for "The Great All-American Pizza Show!"

Last time, we talked about the Citrus Heights commercial produced by Bob Wilkins Advertising Inc and it's potential showing at the Orinda Theatre. The bad news is that I don't know anyone from CA and I don't have anywhere near a big enough platform to spread the word. Was it there? Was it not? We'll never know! Good thing is that the Psychotronix Film Festival is putting on another show in May at Foothill College, also in CA.

But on to other news! I finally got a response from PBS about Ben Wattenberg's segment on PTT. They said they didn't have it so yeah...

I've been looking around for Ben Wattenberg's 1980 and PM Magazine listings on Ebay, hoping for maybe a DVD copy or something but nothing comes up. These aren't really my top priority since they aren't part of TGAAPS but it helps me from burning out looking at a million commercials

Let's move onto the real meat and potatoes, the ads themselves. Starting with the Citrus Heights commercial, I've been doing research on Bob Wilkins' ad company and you'd be surprised how scarce info is on it. His obituary states that he made ads not only for PTT, but Lay-Z-Boy as well. This newspaper from 1981 says that his agency makes over $1M annually and was doing "amazingly well" which makes it all the more stranger that there's so little documentation of it. I also found a house in Oakland, that was used by the company at some point. I won't link the house, the company is so far removed from it and I don't want the people living there to be bothered. Something funny I found while looking on other search engines for traces of BW's agency is that Bing's AI assistant literally uses my post as a source. It's surreal seeing the info I wrote be regurgitated back at me by an AI. Weird...

Now the animated ad! I'll admit, I've been slacking a bit when it comes to looking for this ad, however I found 3 people on Linkedin that worked for Colossal Pictures during the late 70s. Also found out that Adam Savage from Myth Busters worked for (C)P at some point. Hmm, having your company initials be CP wasn't the smartest move in hindsight. Maybe that's why they added the parenthesis.

Something that wasn't found by me :( was a storyboard for one of the live action commercials. From what I've heard, it was posted in the showbizpizza.com discord server and spread from there. In the bottom left it says UBC which I can't really link to anything. I thought maybe it could be a production company, or an acronym, but I've got nothing. Maybe it just says Inc. Bottom right isn't much better, it's completely illegible and the first page of the storyboard is in even worse quality. An exciting find for sure, but not one that really helps me.

Or so I thought! In the end card it says (location tag), not just "Kooser and Blossom Hill". Unlike the radio ad, nothing in here denotes any sort of specific location like having a certain guest star or cabaret act. Sure it uses the Winchester bots, Kooser bots, and Mopsey sisters but people aren't really going to pay attention to whether the backup singers are mops or crows and they probably wouldn't even notice the small diffences between the portrait bots and a cyberamic in a 60 second ad.

Here's my big theory though. Oh yeah, we're getting conspiratorial! Someone asked me about that forum post I discovered that mention a PTT jingle from 1978 - 1980. Way back in my first post, I found that this person was most likely from the Detroit area, and probably didn't see the ads that I thought at the time were only in the Bay Area and aired during early 1980. I thought that because the ads ended around spring and the first store to open in MI was around November, this person was simply misremembering the "Smile America" ads from 1982. It's been a few months, and in that time I've learned probably more than any sane person should know about this campaign, and while looking at the store lists on the Cheese-e-pedia after that person mention the post, I realized something that made me feel like a complete idiot. The first PTT to open in MI was in Westland. I looked up where that was, and low and behold, Westland is A SUBURB OF DETROIT. I felt so stupid but also really happy that this tiny detail actually meant something. My theory is that maybe, just maybe, one of, if not a few of these ads were aired outside CA with the location tags edited for each store. PTT has done that before, so I feel it's not totally out of the picture for them to have done it few years earlier. If this is true, then it expands this search from just CA to Nevada, Utah, Texas, Arizona, Ohio, Colorado, North Carolina, and of course, Michigan.

I still want to keep most my searching in the Bay area, but I think this could lead to exciting things. Or I could be delusional, who knows? Until next time!