06 : celebration station

hello ᵔ⩊ᵔ! i'm currently very fixated on animatronics, so i wanted to make a blog post talking about my favorite set of bots (...instead of cluttering my instagram stories mentioning them)

brief content warning: robots! broken down and startling to look at robots. if you have a fear of man made machines, this is not for you. this post will also be image heavy (and probably long) so back out now lest your laptop shit itself in horror.

topic of the day: celebration station & the pantones

ok, well, mostly just the pantones. celebration station is the name of the restaurant/pizza place establishment that had those bands installed. its the same premise as chuck e cheese or showbiz pizza (in fact, the company was made because of the success of those brands...) where you eat pizza and play arcade games while a robotic band plays in the back. we care about the robotic band 🫵

the places with the most information about them are the merrillville, IN (opened 1982) and springfield, PA (1984) locations. i'll talk mainly about these due to basically all information we have on the band coming from these two spots.

to start with, the pantones were created by the company "creative presentations". they have a lot of other animatronic groups made over the years with a distinct style to them. that distinct style is also because they kind of just reused the same base model of a character and redressed it but like. whatever. we'll get into that

pictured below is a lineup of the characters of the pantones, as well as a page from a creative presentations brochure.

pictured in the brochure (left to right) are purrscilla purr, doc the fox, and big bear. lowkey i don't remember which set of animatronics these are but if i had to guess it would be the rockford, IL set (the first opened location). in order to avoid utter image spam i placed high quality photos seemingly taken from the same shoot as the one in the brochure here in a postimages gallery. it includes doc & big bear as well as major moose! these are probably the best pictures we have of the characters to date (alongside the cover of the brochure including harry hound, which i... forgot to add. oops)

with this you can easily see the design theme they were going for here :) very glitzy and sparkly outfits. in a few recordings of them posted online all the characters are shown wearing masquerade-like masks? which i don't think is ever explained.. going off a guess, its probably related to an event / special night celebration station hosted. other places did these sort of things all the time where the bots would be switched out or dressed up based off themes they had set up (colander night at showbiz, for example). so it wouldn't surprise me if that's the reason why

the rockford and springfield locations share these glittery outfits, and initially merrillville did too. the bots were removed in 2001 for that location, but at some point before then the bots were renovated and changed into a western saloon theme. one thing very unique about them is the animatronics were placed on separate layers - 3 of them were on the upper floor, and 2 were placed on the lower floor. notably, big bear was removed from the lineup and instead two monkey characters were added, named elsworth & putnam. remember how i said creative presentations reused stuff? well they have a shitton of monkeys so they slapped two in here. iirc putnam was a preexisting character from a set of a fully primate band

i'd say merrillville is my purrsonal favorite due to their history, renovation, and later sightings. the new outfits for the characters are very charming & the unique setup of the show really makes them stand out. doc the fox's plaid outfit is especially cute .. ♡♡. here's some photos of the stage in decent quality.

pictured: harry hound (left) and major moose (right). these two were on the bottom layer of the stage. not pictured: elsworth, who popped out of the window between them

pictured (left to right): purrscilla purr, putnam, doc the fox. this ones a little shoddier but you can see the framing of the stages + where it connects to the bottom half. peep the cute harry star

also noteworthy that both of these photos are christmas themed, and thus the stage and characters have been redressed for that purpose

now you may be wondering: these pictures are old as dirt. celebration stations arent really a thing anymore (besides like one location idk)... so where are they?

the answer is a little fun. to start with, merrillville is the only location that's band has been seen post-removal. every other set is currently MIA and presumed destroyed or in the hands of someone who has no clue of their history. so where did the merrillville bots go? random water park in indiana.

the first image shows a person next to doc the fox (a great way of showing how big these things are), and at his legs seems to be a slumped over purrscilla. the next image shows them both together, as well as the WOOF radio prop for harry hound.

again, for the sake of limiting how many images appear here, i included the rest of the photos in this image gallery if you'd like to view it. it features putnam, major moose, and a closeup of purrscilla. important to note that elsworth & harry hound are nowhere to be seen in these photos, but it could just be that they werent photographed at all.

now WHY were they here? no one knows. boooo yeah boring answer sorry. i'm speaking of this in the past tense because they have indeed moved. initially this was posted to flickr by the user agnis, but i'm since unable to find the original link. whats funny - i have seen the original post! when i was like 10 or something. i presume its either buried in the caverns of flickr or has been removed due to robot fans flooding it. the post must be older than 2016 as that's the earliest i remember seeing it. the poster originally mistook the characters for those of the rockafire explosion before being corrected and editing the caption of it

so since that was posted, they have disappeared from the storage area... and no one knows to where. for well over a decade, these bots have once again been lost to history. except...?

in september of 2025, the user deshawnkaba posted this image to their instagram

purrscilla purr! alive! she is a VERY far cry from her glory days - even compared to the water park storage saga. the poster stated this was taken from a discord server, where a person stated their uncle works at a scrapyard and happened to stumble upon her. what ridiculous luck man. she has since been rehomed and a restoration process will begin, but i don't believe the owner of her has been made public. even if we don't see her again after this... i'm just happy to have seen her again at all, and especially knowing shes in the care of someone that values her history and understands robotics

and, of course, i have another image gallery to share. this was the follow-up that clarified she was saved from the scrap yard, and it contains a handful of photos showing her dreadful condition. i'm kind of just impressed her blue eyeshadow has survived this long.

as i'm writing this post, she is currently the only surviving bot of any pantones/woof radio band. with 6 installations, this means theres possibly 5 other purrscillas in the wild... but i won't get my hopes up, as company policy for a lot of these places was to destroy and scrap the bots after closure. maybe the world will surprise us with another thing like this, idk!

that's all that i'll talk about for now. i have many, many more things to say about this pawticular band and discussions about their showtapes and resurfaced videos... but for now, the basic introduction and follow-up of the bots has satiated me. if this fixation sticks you can fully expect me to make more posts about them & other animatronic history. again, a big thanks to deshawnkaba on instagram for making the discovery of purrscilla public and sharing photos of her. toodles!