The Rock-afire Explosion (Corporate Voiced) - Yogi Bear Showtape (June 1987)

Showtape Title: SPP The Yogi Bear Showtape
Release Date: June 1987

In 1986, The Newly formed ShowBiz Pizza Time began brainstorming ideas on how to replace the Rock-afire Explosion shows in their restaurants. One of the ideas proposed was to introduce licensed characters into the show. Characters such as Superman, Garfield, and Spider-Man were brought up, but ultimately SPT decided to go with Hanna-Barbara's Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, due to their appear to both children and adults alike. After nearly a year of negotiating the contract, Hanna-Barbera allowed ShowBiz to test market the Yogi show at three of their locations, those being, Augusta, GA, Colorado Springs, CO and Omaha, NE, and if the test was successful, it would be rolled out system-wide at all ShowBiz and Chuck E. Cheese's stores. Yogi and Boo-Boo would preformed on stage left, which was retrofitted to resemble Jellystone Park. Yogi was a retrofitted Rolfe DeWolfe, Boo-Boo was a retrofitted Looney Bird, and Billy Bob went unused. Their cosmetics were designed by Jul Kamen, and the final cosmetics were produced by Creatived Presentations, who helped ShowBiz with the Liberty show a year prior. The showtape was produced by Cry Wolf Music, and written by Steve White. The show features the voice impersonators hired by Corporate as the Rock-afire Explosion, rather the original CEI cast, as ShowBiz was producing RAE tapes at the time. Because of this, this might be one of the last, if not, the final show made with the vocal impersonators. To voice Yogi and Boo-Boo, their original voice actors Daws Butler and Don Messick were brought on, in order to get as much authenticity as possible.

Ultimately, the Yogi Bear show wasn't installed beyond the original three test locations. Because of the fact that only three copies of the reel were ever produced, the showtape was lost for years. All we had of it was Steve White's script and the instrumental demos from Cry Wolf Music. That was until 2020, when the show's writer Steve White found that he had saved a copy of the shows's audio saved on a cassett tape, and apart from a few seconds from segment 2, it was the entire show. He would then share it with the fanbase, and on August 15, 2020, just a day after the Rock-afire's 40th anniversary, it was uploaded to the official showbizpizza.com YouTube channel.

Dook LaRue vocals - Unidentified SPT Voice Actor
Fatz Geronimo vocals - Unidentified SPT Voice Actor
Beach Bear vocals - Unidentified SPT Voice Actor
Mitzi Mozzarella vocals - Unidentified SPT Voice Actress
Yogi Bear vocals - Daws Butler
Boo-Boo Bear vocals - Don Messick

Show Segments:
00:00 - Segment 1 - Who Can It Be Now / Yogi theme / I'm So Excited
07:45 - Segment 2 - Hungry / Every Breath You Take
15:36 - Segment 3 - Let's Hear It for the Boy / So You Want to Be a Rock & Roll Star

Audio Source: https://archive.org/details/introducingyog...

All audio and images in this video are owned by Creative Engineering, Inc. No copyright infringement is intended. This video exists for historical purposes only as a means to archive this audio, so it's not lost forever.