Billy Bob (Animatronic)

Source metadata
Type	Animatronics
Start date	1980
Tags	ShowBiz Pizza Place, Creative Engineering, Rock-afire Explosion
Contributors	CECMentor, Livelycheese, Stripes, Kathydra, Anonymous, TutorialTimeYt

The Billy Bob Animatronic was one of the main Classic Stage animatronics produced by Creative Engineering Inc. The animatronic would first be developed in April of 1980, before debuting at the Jacksonville, FL (9820 Atlantic Blvd) on August 14th of that year.

History

Billy Bob was first designed by Creative Engineering's main artist Dave Thomas at the request of Aaron Fechter and was named after two people, David ,,Billy Bob Irvin,one of the artists at Creative Engineering and Aaron's college roommate, and Robert L. Brock (Bob Brock)the co-founder of Showbiz Pizza Place.In the original Concept art Billy Bob is significantly thinner with lighter colored fur similar to some of the later versions of the Billy Wilbur (Animatronic) .

The first Billy Bob animatronic debuted on august 14th 1981 at the Jacksonville, FL (9820 Atlantic Blvd) store.This version of Billy Bob had very dark brown fur,claws painted brown and shared his mask with the second iteration of the character Billy Wilbur (Animatronic) dubbed as the ,,Beta mask. This design would be slightly toned down with the next few bots produced,giving Billy Bob shorter but still dark fur.In 1981 after months of work, the art department headed by Essie Fechter,with the artists led by Dave Thomas, the newly designed Billy Bob was brought upstairs from the art department of Creative Engineering which resided in the basement of the Orlando, FL (47 W Jefferson St) plant.This new redesign of Billy Bob gave him significantly lighter fur. Shortly after this Billy Bob's mask was resculpted again.This version is typically dubbed as the ,,Showbiz Standandard mask

Billy Bob animatronics would continue to be produced up until 1983. The January batch would be the last used inside ShowBiz Pizza restaurants, and would be kept and stored for future openings, while Creative Engineering would continue to produce bots until June. Now with a surplus of bots, these would need to be sold to other family entertainment centers. Through the Concept Unification process, Billy Bob would be the only character not used during this process, and was ordered to be destroyed or used for parts.

Around 1995 Billy Bob's mask was resculpted again for unknown reasons,but it's likley due to Creative Engineering at one point losing the original mold for his mask.This version was used at various venues such as Animal House Pizza , Gulliver's Kingdom Stage , Gulliver's World Stage , Gulliver's Land Stage.Shortly after another mask was sculpted for Billy Bob off of a plug of the Showbiz Standard mask to give him more round and defined features,this mask is still in use to this day at various venues and is considered the ,,current mask version.

Alongside this mask another version of the mask dubbed as ,,Crowsfoot sculpted in 1981 was accidentally used on a few shows notably Adventure Landing , and the first mask on the Tweetsie Railroad Stage .This mask was very porly sculpted,with the mouth being far too shallow and the creases on the side of the face are practically non-existent.This caused the mask to be put under intense stress causing it to rip and deform very quickly.In 2024 Creative Engineering as an experiment went back in and added improved mouth creases similar in style to those used on the Showbiz standard Billy Bob mask

Design

The bot is a brown bear in yellow and red striped overalls, holding a 4 string guitar carved out of a log with bones as tuning knobs. He has two ears, beige skin with rosy red cheeks,one tooth sticking out of his bottom jaw,dark blue eyes and black claws. A yellow bird with white and green tufts on it's head nicknamed 'Birthday Bird' sits on the neck of his guitar near the head.

Mechanical Structure

The frame of Billy Bob's mech is mainly constructed out of alluminum square bars(hollow tube for the beta bots,solid for standard production) with various smaller steal parts,includig rods,clevises and mounts.The character like almost every other Creative Engineering bot runs on pneumatic cylinders produced by the companies Cylinders & valves inc. , Fabco-Air Inc and Clippard Minimatic.These cylinders are than actuated with Mac valves

Movements

The bot has 20 movements

Movement	Valve	Bit	Grey box Drawer
Mouth	1	46	Bottom
Left Eye Lid Raise	2	47	Bottom
Right Eye Lid Raise	3	48	Bottom
Eyes Left	4	49	Bottom
Eyes right	5	50	Bottom
Head Left	6	51	Bottom
Head Right	7	52	Bottom
Head Tilt Left	8	53	Bottom
Head Tilt Right	9	54	Bottom
Head Up	10	55	Bottom
Left Hand Slide	11	39	Bottom
Right Arm Raise	12	56	Bottom
Right Arm Twist	13	57	Bottom
Right Elbow Twist/Strum	14	58	Bottom
Right Wrist	15	59	Bottom
Guitar Raise	16	40	Bottom
Body Twist Left	17	61	Bottom
Body Twist Right	18	62	Bottom
Foot Tap	19	44	Bottom
Body Lean	20	63	Bottom

Additional source metadata

Field	Value
manufacturer	Creative Engineering

Import provenance

Imported from Cheese-E-Pedia at source revision 274f085c7132d784f81b7a4cbd96e7a0922db854. Source material is provided under CC BY-SA 4.0.