Aaron Fechter invented Whac-A-Mole. He also builds animatronic rock bands for franchises like Chuck E. Cheese’s and ShowBiz Pizza Place. What more could we ask him to contribute? Nothing. He has given great gifts to mankind. But Aaron Fechter demands more of himself. He is trying to develop an alternative fuel that is cleaner burning than propane. A heroic citizen of Earth! But he had a small accident the other day at his warehouse in Orlando. OK it was an explosion. OK, yeah, he blew his warehouse up.
No humans were injured in the blast, which was felt all over downtown Orlando, but it delayed two Amtrak trains and did significant damage to the almost-not-quite human inhabitants of Fechter’s warehouse. The Orlando Sentinel described what a local man saw when he came on the scene in the immediate aftermath of the explosion:
Tim Roth ran through the blown-open doors of the warehouse where experimental cooking fuel had exploded — and stepped into a world of oddities strewn among the broken brick bits. He found himself searching for casualties among the knocked-down suits of armour, animatronics, old arcade games, clown suits and broken lighted signs as if he were in the Joker’s lair.
The explosion, apparently caused by a tank cylinder failure, destroyed a wall of Fechter’s warehouse allowing weird wreckage to spill out. Investigators suspect that a spark from one of Fechter’s animatronic machines ignited the cooking fuel. Footage from the pre-explosion warehouse (below) shows the robots, puppets and other warehouse denizens in happier times. [Orlando Sentinel via Boing Boing]