Volo Museum

We saw King Kat play Beat It and King play Jailhouse Rock. While these animatronics are huge and absolutely impressive, the fact that they use the original versions of songs instead of covers makes them a little less interesting to me. They don't have their own "voices".

The Rockafire Explosion at Volo is outside, and plays every 30 to 45 minutes. We kept a timer going and returned multiple times in order to catch as many shows as possible in our four hour trip. We saw Guitarzan, the new unique Volo show, and I Will/One on One.

(I took a couple personal videos, but these guys are well documented so I don't have any photos to add.)

1912 Hupfeld Style I/32 Helios Concert Orchestrion

This orchestrion isn't usually open, we caught a mechanic opening it up!

1924 Wurlitzer Style 157 Band Organ

Gavoli Style 48 Key Fair Organ

1933 72 Key Carl Frei Street Organ "De Tiet"

In one of the showrooms, they also have a 72 key Decap dance organ (not the exact organ, but the same model). I didn't get photos because I was too busy drooling over the visible punchcard book and its mechanism:

These shooting gallery games aren't Pepper's Ghost cabinets, but they use a similar mirror setup to extend the length of the playfield down into the back of the cabinet. This allows the cabinet to be nice and skinny, sitting well near the wall. If you'd like to learn more and see them in action, here's some good videos about the William's Aqua Gun and Chicago Coin's Super-Scope Rifle. I wasn't able to find a specific video of Chicago Coin's Riot Gun, but it seems to operate very similarly to other Chicago Coin rifle games.

These next two are REALLY cool. They use lightboxes and shadow puppets to animate a driving simulator. The mechanics remind me of the handheld version that Adam Savage owned as a kid, which he dissects in this video here. To see them in action, here's a video of Motorcycle, and Speedway, plus this series of a Speedway restoration to really show how it works! Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

All of these are simply amazing machines, the physical logic takes so much ingenuity and skill to create. All of these predate digital sound, so Motorcycle and Speedway's crash sound effects are created live with a pice of metal picked up by a record needle. The way the circular "track" is angled to create the illusion of a 3-dimensional scene is just beautiful here and would be an impressive thought even in normal shadow puppetery.