Inside a Nashville garage, vintage robot rock stars get a second act

Why it matters: More than 2 in 5 Tennessee high school graduates in the class of 2025 didn't opt for college as families weigh the cost of higher education and the value of a degree.

• For Ally, Rock-afire Explosion is her college alternative.
• "I learn a lot more being so hands-on than [I would] in a college: fabrics, rubber, mechanics, electronics, programming. So much translates to other fields," she says.

Catch up quick: Ally and her dad Gene, a software engineer with a hardware background, began collecting animatronics three years ago after the movie "Five Nights at Freddy's" introduced her to electronics. That interest led to Rock-afire Explosion, the animatronic rock band from ShowBiz Pizza Place restaurants in the 1980s.

• When a bare-bones bot popped up on eBay, Gene secretly purchased it for several thousand dollars. "Guess who now owns a Beach Bear?" he asked his daughter.

• "I fell to the floor, just bawling," Ally says.
• What followed was the acquisition of three Rock-afire characters: Fatz Geronimo (now voiced by Shooter Jennings), Billy Bob Brockali and Looney Bird.

How it works: Most of these bots run on pneumatics — air that sends a signal to the cylinders and pistons to operate.

• Ally has spent hundreds of hours watching YouTube videos and researching to get her bots running.
• Battle scars, including a recently busted lip, speak to the trial-and-error risks of manual preventative maintenance.
• Weather is a factor, too: Heat can melt the characters' rubber faces and cold can freeze their parts, so the Howells have covered their garage windows with UV vinyl and installed insulation panels along the door to preserve the machinery.

Behind the scenes: The father-daughter duo has purchased and collected bots, backdrops and characters, in varying conditions, from Michigan to Georgia to Peru.

• He says the secret to beating other bidders is simply to be nice. The buyer-seller relationship lasts beyond the transaction: They talk about each other's interests, offer support during trying times and visit one another.

The intrigue: Ally's holy grail find was a full Wolf Pack 5. She says only seven or eight were made and that no one has seen them play in 30-40 years. "I had tried so hard to follow every lead I could find."

• A few months ago, a video surfaced of one of the characters in a Peru theme park. Gene tracked down the owner on LinkedIn.
• "He doesn't speak English, and he had all these people asking about them. The guy had no idea what they were," Gene says. "The whole time, I'm thinking this could be a scam; he could take the money and run."
• Ally's now working on her completed Wolf Pack 5 set, recreating their costuming and cosmetics from when they were retrofitted in Germany.

What's next: Ally and Gene want to start an annual Nashville-based animatronics convention, citing the city's strong convention landscape.

• Ally's career trajectory includes rebooting a family-focused ShowBiz Pizza, where she'll build her own animatronics and continue restoring old ones.
• Gene has long-term plans for workshop classes to teach other kids about bots and electronics.

The bottom line: Gene encourages his kids by example. His dad, a truck driver, once told a non-college-bound Gene that if he took the computer parts he was buying one-by-one at flea markets and got a computer up and running, he'd trade in his truck to get his son a new computer.

• He followed through.
• Today, Gene has invented a medical product for one neighbor and rigged up a mandrake for another neighbor's Halloween Harry Potter display.
• "I'm a fan of seeing her enjoy her passion," Gene says of his daughter.