John: Good evening friends!

Adrianne: Hey, John!

Billy: Hey!

John: A note to our listeners when you email hello@underunderstood.com, we all get the emails. So I have a question for the three of you. Did any of you read the email that we got with the subject line “Rockin’ Broccoli Mystery”?

Adrianne: I did not because you told me not to.

John: Okay, good. So, no one read it?

Regina: Yeah, I think you should establish that we also then proceed to fight over who gets to actually read it.

John: Yeah. That’s how this works. So I was the first one to read this particular email and I’m glad I was because I was destined for this story. Today’s story comes to us from a listener named Matt. 

Hi, is this Matt?

Matt: Yeah, this is John?

John: Hi, how are yah?

Matt: I’m good. How are you?

John: I called Matt basically right away when we got this email, because this question is extremely strange and extremely narrowly something that I am into.

Matt: As a kid, I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its suburb, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. And my mom was very thrifty and had a lot of coupons and things like that. So we would go to one store for milk and another store for meat, that sort of thing. And one of them was called Homeland Grocery Store.

John: So Homeland grocery seems to be an Oklahoma based grocery store chain. I assume none of you are familiar with this grocery store chain?

Adrianne: No. 

Billy: No. 

Regina: Definitely not.

John: According to Wikipedia, it started off as a spinoff of Safeway and broke into its own thing in 1988. And Matt told me that when he was a kid in the 90s, his local Homeland grocery store was filled with singing animatronic characters.

Billy: Oh.

Matt: I have this lingering memory about these animatronic vegetables and fruits and flowers and salamis, and all sorts of different  grocery store items at this grocery store. And you would go around and press the button and they would activate, they would do their singing and dancing and whatever.

Adrianne: Should we tell our audience that John is obsessed with animatronic bands?

John: You can’t tell them.

Adrianne: I just feel like the listeners should know that you could basically not suggest anything that was more exciting to John specifically.

Billy: You know what other grocery store has singing animatronic characters.

John: Oh, no. Which one? 

Adrianne: I literally have no idea.

Regina: Wait, is that a thing?

Billy: Yeah. My favorite all time grocery store.

John: What grocery store?

Billy: Stew Leonard’s.

Regina: I’ve never heard of Stew Leonard’s. What is Stew Leonard’s? 

Billy: It’s Incredible. I mean, I’ve never actually…

Regina: Wait, are you about to say you’ve never actually been to one, but it’s your favorite grocery store? How does that add up?

Billy: No. I’ve been to one. what I was trying to say was, I’ve never lived close enough to one, to go to it regularly.

John: What makes Stew Leonard’s so amazing?

Billy: There’s like one main pathway you can take through the store. It’s designed like a theme park. It’s engineered to give you a certain experience as you travel through the store.

And like the theme park, it includes animatronic characters. People talk about Wegmans like it’s great. It’s fine. The bathrooms are very clean, but it’s not an experience like a Stew Leonard’s.

John: Or apparently like a Homeland grocery store is the animatronics that Matt described are wild.

Matt: They had a pineapple when you first came in, that would greet you to the store. They had a cow at the dairy section. I think they had a butcher too, you know?

John: Wait, are you saying there was an animatronic butcher? Like a human type? 

Matt: I think so, but I’m not sure, but there’s also a pickle in salami that would do a kind of standup routine together. There was a fruit band, it was like reggae in style. This could all be way off base. I was six or whatever, four or five. So I’m not a hundred percent sure, but there’s definitely Rock and Broccoli and his vegetable band.

Billy:  Rock and Broccoli. 

Adrianne: I love how the child mind fills in these gaps of memories.

John: Were these parate displays throughout the store? Or was there one like an animatronic section in the store?

Matt: They were separate displays. So there was the pineapple when you first enter, there was the cow by the dairy section, the fruit by the fruit, there was also a sunflower by the flourist that would sing something. I just kept saying “The pineapple’s broken again” or some kid throws something at the broccoli or whatever. I don’t know.

John: This is all really, really vivid to Matt, right? Like, He remembers a lot of detail. Like, I think more than you would be able to just fill in from memory. And he’s been trying to find more information about these animatronics for years. Like who made them, why are they in a grocery store? Like basic questions, but there’s basically nothing about these animatronic characters on the internet. He can’t even find photos or videos.

Matt: So I contacted you folks because this seems like something you’d be interested in? Your show says, “Answering questions that the internet can’t answer”  and I’ve tried to search for it every now and again, even posting on Reddit and the Oklahoma sub Reddit to see if anyone remembers this.

John: Okay. So I found Matt’s  Reddit post on our slash Oklahoma. I can share it with you. 

Adrianne: Homeland grocery store character’s question mark?

Billy: I’m really trying not to talk about Stew Leonard’s. I found some photos of the Bible from my one visit. 

Adrianne: Billy stop it.

Billy: Okay.

Adrianne: The top comment is, I grew up in Edmond and I definitely remember the vegetable rock band from Homeland location, but I don’t know which one, this would’ve been 1995 to 1998 or so.

John: Yeah and then there’s a couple others down here of… 

Adrianne: Lots of affirmations. This was not a false memory.

John: It wasn’t a false memory, but also nobody is like, “Oh yeah, I know the whole story behind these animatronics” or like, “Right. I remember any songs” or anything. It was just, Matt is definitely the person on this thread who knows the most about the animatronics, but he’s here looking for more information. Right?

Adrianne: Not very helpful.

John: Not very helpful so Matt starts Googling for, I guess, vegetable animatronics, we didn’t really get into what he was Googling, but he found some YouTube videos of this other animatronic thing called Melody Farm Follies.

Adrianne: This is so weird.

Billy: This reminds me so much. We should say that it’s basically a whole set, right? It’s like a whole barn on a farm. And the barn’s cut open, and you could see all the characters inside of it, but it’s basically like a whole set.

John: Right. It’s a contained set and it’s full of singing fruits and vegetables and barn animals. What we found out is that Melody Farm Follies is kind of like the traveling show and it goes to events like state farms and stuff. So there’s a bunch of YouTube videos of this particular vegetable band, like an outdoor fair, like a kind of open off the side of a truck.

Here’s the interesting part, Matt says that some of the characters in Melody Farm Follies are the same ones that he remembers from being in Homeland.

Matt: They definitely have some of the characters, like the broccoli’s there. I remember the tomatoes are kind of like out of line are there, but this seems more like a touring state fair type thing.

John: But Matt also says that the songs, the Melody Farm Follies characters sing don’t match the ones that he remembers from Homeland. 

Do you remember any of the songs that they sang?

Matt: Yeah. The one I remember the most is the Rockin Broccoli song, where he goes

I’m Rockin Broccoli

I’m here to say 

you have to eat your vegetables every day!

Adrianne: Its name is Rockin Broccoli, but it raps.

John: Okay.

Matt: That at least that song has been kind of an inside joke between my brother and sister and myself for the past 30 years or so. It’s definitely stuck with us. This could be like a game of telephone where we heard it one way 30 years ago and we just keep repeating the wrong thing. So that opens up, who wrote the songs? Who created these things? There’s kind of a lot of questions

Adrianne: Lots of questions for sure. 

John: So many questions and beyond who came up with these things, why was there a handful of animatronics in an Oklahoma grocery store to begin with?

Matt: In my mind, the backstory I concoct was that the owner of Homeland, his nephew or his son or his daughter or a sister or something like that was really into animatronics, “Dad I got this great idea. This is going to be the wave of the future. I think of all the money you’ll make” and tied it in.

Billy: I think it’s interesting that you said that there were these traveling ones that went from like state fair to state fair. I could see if you are a grocery tycoon in a certain part of the country where state fairs are a big thing, maybe you go to the state fair and kind of scope out different opportunities for your business. Like, “Oh, this person makes really good corn bread and they’re looking to expand it. Oh, and this person has animatronics!”

John: So, you’re saying that the grocery store owner saw them at a state fair and said, I have to have those in my store permanently?

Billy: Yes. That’s my theory.

John: It’s a good theory. I mean, I just have a lot of questions about these things.

Adrianne: Did you look on eBay for any of these animatronic characters?

John: Can I own one?

Billy: Can you learn how to program it? 

Regina: I don’t think that was the takeaway. No.

Billy: Can it become the fifth member of the podcast?

John: Hang on. I’m just searching eBay now. 

Billy: Oh my God. What if you have, yeah, it answers your door for you.

John: Nothing on eBay. 

Okay. So the way I see it, there are four basic things I need to find out. Number one, were these characters actually in Homeland or his Matt’s childhood memories, some kind of invention? Number two, if they were real, who created them? Number three, what happened to the characters? Where are they now?

And as a bonus, number four stretch goal, I would love to reunite Matt with a recording of Rockin Broccoli rapping about having to eat your vegetables. And I really hope I can answer all of these because I promised Matt I would.

Matt: My brother and sister don’t care, no one on Reddit seems to know what I’m talking about. My parents don’t remember it. I feel a little bit like I’m holding the Rockin Broccoli flag here and dying on this hill by myself.

John: We believe you, so we’ll find it.

Matt: All right. Awesome. Take care.

John: Welcome back.

Adrianne: Hi, John. Welcome back to you!

John: Welcome back to me!

Billy: His name is John and he’s here to say he’s got some answers for us today.

John: Sure! All right. Let’s dig into some Homeland grocery stuff. 

I thought it would be useful to find out everything that I could about animatronics in grocery stores.

Adrianne: Is this a big industry?

John: This is a pretty big industry. So when you start looking for these, it turns out that there’s kind of a lot of robot characters in grocery stores.

Adrianne: This is so unfair. Why have I never experienced this?

Billy: Don’t they have them in the North East?

John: I don’t think this is a great proportion of grocery stores. It’s just that it’s a greater proportion than you would expect it to be. 

Adrianne: Okay. 

John: And it’s kind of a global thing. In New Zealand, there was this chain called Big Fresh, and the idea was that it would make grocery shopping a destination, it was kind of a recreation of an outdoor market, but indoors.

Billy: Well, this looks utopic.

John: These are kind of the bare minimum, I think for it to be called animatronics. They’re like just, just plaster characters that are like tomatoes and stuff on moving platforms. There’s a pig…chicken…

Billy: They’re like rotating.

Adrianne: I like the 1999 timestamp at the bottom of this VHS, that’s been uploaded to YouTube.

John: There is this place called Jungle Jim’s International Market in Ohio and they have animatronics all over the store.

Regina: Is that the raisin bran guy? 

Billy: Yeah, these are like licensed ones.

John: Yeah, this is Kellogg’s..Keebler.

Billy: Keebler…raisins..sunshine…tiger. 

John: I got the feeling that Jungle Gym was like a reclaimed animatronic thing because it was actually a literal robot from Chuck E. Cheese that sings Elvis songs. Then we have a grocery store chain in California called Mollie Stone’s Markets. The one in Palo Alto has this setup where a singing grocer and as vegetable friends warn you not to do drugs.

Billy: Bad news. If a corn stalk sings to you that you need to not do drugs and alcohol, it’s already too late. Also, what is that on the swing? Is that a bagel?

John: It’s a bagel, yeah.

Billy: Yeah, probably has poppy seeds like that, thing’s going to throw your drug test off anyways. You might as well do the drugs.

John: But Billy, I have good news for you, because it does seem like Stew Leonard’s is the granddaddy of all animatronic grocery franchises. 

Billy: Yes!

John: You look around for animatronics and grocery stores and Stew Leonard’s is by far the biggest, most famous one around. So let’s look at one of these stores. This is a stew Leonard’s in Paramus, New Jersey. This was taken in October.

Adrianne: The Avocado Girls.

Billy: Oh my god. Their faces are so grotesque. 

John: This is the premier band inside a Stew Leonard’s. It’s Stew’s Farm Fresh Five. We’re looking at a bunch of milk cartons playing instruments. Since this is happening during Covid they’re wearing face masks.

Billy: I want to go, I want to go back.

Adrianne: I want to go too. It seems like we’re looking at two classes of animatronics, the bare minimum and the Stew Leonard’s go all out level. Where do you think Homelands animatronics fit in on that spectrum?

John: Based on what Matt described, it sounds more like a Stew Leonard’s experience. 

Regina: They seem pretty premium. 

John: They seem premium and they seem pervasive. The way he was describing the sheer number of characters in that store that he would walk up to and hit the button on. 

It seemed to me like Stew Leonard’s and grocery stores and animatronics seem synonymous with each other, so I thought it would be a good idea to ask Stew Leonard’s, how this happened. So I reached out and a spokesperson told me that they like to think of themselves as “The Disneyland of dairy stores.”

Billy: Okay, so that’s how I always pitch it. So maybe they got that in my head without me realizing. 

John: And they got that from the New York Times, presumably. The Disneyland of dairy stores and they ran with it. She told me that the first Stew Leonard’s locations in Connecticut had petting zoos and areas where you could see the actual cows being milked live and Stew Leonard senior thought of the whole thing as this like an interactive experience.

Some time around the 70s or the 80s, she told me that Stew Leonard visited Las Vegas and Disney World, and that’s when he kind of got it in his head that he could lean into things like animatronics and costume characters. And take the experience thing to the next level.

Billy: He had like the two most basic American vacation experiences and that transformed his whole idea of his business.

Adrianne: I never knew it could be like this.

Billy: Right.

John: So, this has grown to the point where today Stew Leonard’s has an in-house animatronics person, whose job is to just build and animate these characters for the stores. This is a real thing for them. 

Now. I thought it made sense to look into Homeland stores, themselves, to see if I could get anything there.

Homeland started out as the Oklahoma division of Safeway. It spun off into its own company in 1987 and that’s when the name was adopted. 

In 2002, they filed for bankruptcy and they were bought by associated wholesale grocers. Then in 2012, Homeland was sold to its own employees and today, it’s still an employee owned company called HAC Inc. Now they operate a number of chains like Piggly Wiggly Food World, Country Mart and now there are more than 30 locations in Oklahoma that go by the name Homeland. That means Homeland has been through lots of change since the late 80s when Matt would have seen these characters in a grocery store.

I emailed homelands press email address to see if someone there could connect me up with somebody who might’ve been around at the time. And this is what I got back from a spokesperson for Homeland.

“I asked around among some people that have been at Homeland for a while, while not everyone was aware of it as you can see from the attached photos, there was once a display that featured singing vegetables.”

Adrianne: Ooh.

Regina: Attached photos.

John: One of them was called Rocky Broccoli.

Billy: Rocky Broccoli.

Adrianne: I thought it was Rockin’ Broccoli. 

Billy: Well, this answers your question, you were like, “Why is it Rockin’ Broccoli if it raps? It’s Rocky.

Adrianne: Okay.

Billy: Like ASAP.

John: So now I’m going to drop this photo in Slack.

Adrianne: It’s black and white.

John: So does someone want to describe what we’re looking at here?

Adrianne: Well, it’s adorable.

Billy: Homeland Barnyard Jamboree, it’s the barn set with the vegetables, with fruit and with this super cool broccoli. He’s so cool.

John: There’s a chicken up there. 

Regina: Where’s the chicken?

Adrianne: Where’s the chicken?

John: The top right, Henrietta.

Regina: Oh, I did not see Henrietta. 

Billy: These eggs being like pneumatic tubes out of it.

Regina: Yeah, that’s not how chickens work. It just lays eggs all day long. 

Adrianne: Who’s this front person?

John: Well, I’m glad you asked, I’m going to drop a second photo in Slack.

Adrianne: I hope it’s in color.

John: So this is the second photo. It’s not in color, unfortunately, but check this out.

Billy: Oh, wow. Okay. It’s the same photo, but now we have some, some captions.

Adrianne: Come enjoy and meet all your favorite characters. Come meet Homelands’s new mascot, HAP! HAP stands for Homeland Adores People.

John: HAP is shown In the middle of the photo, it says in small type, in case you couldn’t figure out who HAP was.

Adrianne: Well, it’s not totally clear. And then the bottom says all their names. The barnyard jamboree will entertain folks of all ages, HAP, Rocky Broccoli, Lucy and Mr. Pineapple will sing your favorite tunes.

John: So this means we have an answer to our first question, which was, were these characters actually in Homeland? Yeah! Now we know they were.

Adrianne: These characters are all inside one stage, but in Matt’s description, they were throughout the store.

John: This isn’t an inconsistency. You’re absolutely right. But do you all remember the traveling state fair show? Which was called Melody Farm Follies?

Billy: Yes.

John: Just to jog your memory, here’s a video of Melody Farm Follies.

Adrianne: Okay. The middle guy looks the same.

Billy: The characters appear to be the same.

Regina: The hat is slightly different. Yeah.

Adrianne: It’s very similar. It’s a cow on the left, chicken on the right.

John: Rocky Broccoli. It looks exactly the same.

Billy: Yeah, Rocky Broccoli has such an iconic look.

Adrianne: Oh yeah, definitely and the sunglasses.

Billy: Rocky Broccoli is so cool. He’s like, can I just describe him a little more? He’s a broccoli, but he’s got his face. He’s got sort of like a Squidward nose, there’s a big, like teardrop droopy nose, but he’s dressed like flavor flav, he’s so cool.

John: He’s in sunglasses. 

Adrianne: And his gold shoes. 

John: Sounds great too. 

They are all arranged a little bit differently, but these are the same characters. And did you catch it at the beginning? 

The Goodtime Jamboree and what’s written on the Homeland photo is the Homeland Barnyard Jamboree. So this is like, Melody Farm Follies looks like a bizarro world version of the Homeland animatronics. 

Adrianne: It must be the same vendor.

John: It seems like it. Yeah. So I’m totally perplexed that I don’t know what the connection between these two things is. So I went back and I asked the Homeland marketing rep of where the photo came from and she told me that it was from their “print guy” who held on to it because he thought it was funny, but he wasn’t around when the campaign actually happened and he didn’t know anything else about it.  So she asked all around all the employees that she knew who had been with Homeland for a long time. And no one could tell her anything about these characters.

Adrianne: This is very mysterious. It’s not that long ago.

Regina: Right!

John: When I was looking into the animatronics at Stew Leonard’s, I found a company called VP animations in Vermont. That seems to be a small company and they manufacture the characters for Stew Leonard’s in Connecticut. So I found the contact information for the company on their website, and I emailed them the video that you just saw featuring Melody Farm Follies and asked, “Do you know anything about these?” and this is what I got back.  This is the Melody Farm Follies traveling show. 

The YouTube show was produced by Advanced Animations of Stockbridge, Vermont. The soundtrack was written and produced by Bobby Gosh of Brookfield, Vermont.

Billy: Wow. 

Adrianne: A lead, a real lead.

Billy: But they’re giving you a real, IMDB style breakdown of all of this stuff.

John: Yeah, it was like the information you’re seeking is this and that’s it.

Adrianne: But now you have the company connected to this band that had some of the same characters that were in Matt’s memory of Homeland.

John: Yeah, exactly. So now I’ve got a connection, right? I’ve got advanced animations of Stockbridge Vermont is the company that made Melody Farm Follies, the traveling show that involves some of the same characters from Homeland. Okay?

Billy: Wow, okay. 

John: I hit up around 15 former and current employees of Advanced Animations on LinkedIn.

I emailed whoever I could find on the internet who was associated with this company and for good measure, I reached out to Bobby Gosh, the person that I was told wrote the Melody Farm Follies’ music. And for a long time, I heard back from basically none of them.

Adrianne: Dammit. Don’t they realize we have a prestigious podcast?

Billy: Well, it’s also like how many times does someone reach out to you about a mystery regarding animatronics you’ve worked on? You would think there would be some inherent intrigue there.

John: This is also the kind of thing where like now I feel like I’m kind of in Matt’s head where I’m like, I know these things exist. I see the photo. I know they were out there. Why won’t anyone answer? Am I the only one who sees the connections here? And the connections go even farther because I went back onto YouTube looking for anything else that I could find. If we go back to the Mollie Stones, California grocery chain video, the one about the drugs.

Adrianne: Be smart, don’t start. 

John: Yeah. Look at these characters.

Billy: Yeah. Oh yeah. They’re very similar.

John: They’re not just very similar. They’re identical, Billy!

Adrianne: That corn is exactly the same.

Regina: I mean the old man is the only difference, right?

John: Yeah. So instead of HAP, there’s an old man. 

Billy: Well, in the bagel, there’s no bagel.

John: The bagel is added. You’re right about the bagel that wasn’t there in the original, but like the corn, the tomatoes, the cow, I think the chick- yeah, the chicken is up there, the peas.

Adrianne: No Rocky.

John: I don’t think there’s a Rocky Broccoli.

Adrianne: And no pineapple.

John: Right and no pineapple, but there’s more overlap. These are the identical characters that show up in a different grocery store,singing about drugs.

Adrianne: So we have these characters in three different grocery stores at this point.

John: Well, not all grocery stores, but we have them in three different places. We’ve got them in Mollie Stone’s grocery in California, singing about drugs. We’ve got them in Melody Farm Follies, which is a touring show that goes around to state fairs. And we’ve got a photo of them in Homeland, in Oklahoma.

Adrianne: Melody and Homeland have the same front person, front man, guy, orange, whatever this thing is.

Billy: Oh, look at his hat though.

John: Billy you found the clue that broke the whole thing open.

Billy: On his hat is an H that appears to be the same age from the Homeland logo.

Adrianne: The Homeland H.

John: So check this out. 

Adrianne: Can we get a little side by side?

Regina: Oh.

John: This is the Homeland grocery logo from the past. It is an orange H with a slight italic, right?

Adrianne: And then the “O” in Homeland looks like an ambiguous orange, which looks like what this character is.

Regina: Right, exactly. 

John: Yeah. It looks like HAP who has the same name in both shows.

Adrianne: Homeland Adores People. 

John: Right. So this suggests that Homeland came first, right? That these characters were made for Homeland and then reused elsewhere. But I still don’t know who made the Homeland version. I don’t know what happened to these animatronics. And I certainly don’t have a recording of Rocky Broccoli telling kids to eat their vegetables. 

We’re here recording this on a Saturday night. And listeners, you are probably hearing this on Tuesday as of this past Thursday night, I was convinced that there would not be an episode today because none of this was making sense at all. But then I got a phone call.

Bobby Gosh: How you doing?

John: That phone call was from Bobby Gosh.

Adrianne: Oh, the songwriter.

John: He got my email and he called me back directly. And when I picked up, he was like, “Oh, so you want to know about Mollie Stones?” And I had not mentioned Mollie Stones at all in my email.

Bobby Gosh: Did you say at one point something to buy Homeland?

John: I did. Yeah.

Bobby Gosh: Okay. That’s what it was. It wasn’t Mollie Stones, I even forgot about that one. I mean, I did so many projects. I went through the files. I got a good four inch file on all the shows I did for Homeland and the characters are what you said, like Rocky Broccoli, HAP, whatever, the cowboy and all that stuff. That’s the show.

Regina: That’s the show.

John: That’s it! That’s the show! Bobby Gosh turns out is a really accomplished songwriter and musician.

Adrianne: Hell yeah!

Bobby Gosh: I wrote for Billy Joel at the Troubadour back in the 70s. I opened for Streisand in Central Park with 240,000 people on. I got songs in the movie Big and Mighty Aphrodite and did 200 network TV commercials and so forth.

John: He’s also written a bunch of songs for Paul Anka and a lot of other stars, but he’s also written, it turns out, tons of animatronic shows.

Bobby Gosh: Did you know Stew Leonard’s? I did almost every show in that store, about 90% of them. They went from one supermarket to four and as we went along, road shows and characters and all for that.

Adrianne: Wow.

John: Bobby got into this business in the early 80s when another Bobby, I’m sorry, there are two Bobbies in this story.

Adrianne: Nope, change the name.

John: The second Bobby is Bobby Marquis who moved his company, Advanced Animations to Vermont, which was not far away from where Bobby Gosh lived. Bobby Gosh found an article in the newspaper about Bobby Marquis, met up with him and wound up writing all of Advanced Animation’s shows for like 15 years.

Bobby Gosh: Well, the first thing we ever did was the FAO Schwartz clock for New York City. It was a 30 foot singing clock tower and I wrote the song. 

John: This was 1986.

Bobby Gosh: [singing] Let the clock tick tock while the children play on the phone and left the chase, okay and so forth. So that became like a big, big hit in the store.

John: It turns out this thing was in like 42 or 43 FAO Schwartz locations and it was a hundred hour recording session.

Regina: Oh, my God. 

Billy: Oh, my God.

Adrianne: He brought joy to so many children.

John: Bobby tells me that in the 80s, Advanced Animations was one of the best animatronics companies around, like, he kept saying that in animatronics, it was Advanced and it was Disney. Like it was at that level. 

Adrianne: Okay.

John: As we know, Stew Leonard himself wanted characters in the store and he went out and hired Advanced Animations to do them.

Bobby Gosh: Advanced Animation was next to Disney, the biggest in the country so everybody wanted, a lot of grocery stores wanted to do it. And most of them knew about Stew Leonard’s and wanted the people that did Stew Leonard’s. So they’d come to Advanced Animations and I did all their music.

John: So Billy, you had this theory about grocery owners going around to state fairs and stuff and buying some animatronics?

Billy: Yeah.

John: I think you weren’t that far off. I think you were just a little bit often, like where they were going to find these animatronics.

Bobby Gosh: There’s a speech show called IAAPA. I forgot what it stood for, but it’s like an international animatronic show. It was at the Javits Center. I mean, it’s a huge show like 500,000 displays, I don’t know. And they take shows down there and have a huge booth grocery stores would come into the shows, be familiar with Stew Leonard’s and say, “Hey, we’re going to do this. If it’s working for Stew Leonard’s, it’s got to work for us, you know? And that’s how it started.

John: Okay. So this was driven by the grocery stores and not by like Advanced going to a grocery store and saying, “Hey, you need this.”

Bobby Gosh: No, they never went to anybody.

John: I was kind of shocked it’s worth it for a grocery company to go to one of these animatronic shows, contract a fabricator, pay for the robots, train up on them, all of that.

Bobby Gosh: Advanced Animations would go in and train an employee to repair the shows cause things would break down. 

John: It’s crazy that a grocery store had the budget for that.

Bobby Gosh: Oh yeah, but do you know that we’re talking back then in the, I’d say mid 80s, Stew Leonard’s had us, just a salad bar, they were doing $150,000 a week on the salad bar in one store. That’s the kind of money. 

John: So after I talked to Bobby Gosh, I actually got a chance to speak very briefly to Bobby Marquis and his wife, Nancy. They weren’t available for a taped interview. But when I mentioned Homeland, he immediately said, “Oh, Broken Arrow.” It turns out Advanced only made one of these shows for Homeland and it was for the Broken Arrow location.

And that is the one that Matt knows that was his local Homeland. He lived in Broken Arrow.

Billy: Okay.

John: This kind of makes sense. This is why nobody really remembers Homeland grocery. Having these things, there was only one location that had the Jamboree in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

Regina: Oh.

John: They confirmed that in addition to the main band that we have, the photo of, there were other animatronics around the store, including a human butcher, hit a button and they would spring to life and do a little show for you, so Matt was totally right about that. I read them the lyrics of Rocky Broccoli that Matt remembered. It went I’m Rocky Broccoli, I’m here to say, you gotta eat your vegetables every day. Bobby Marquis heard that and he said that was not in any of the songs that he remembers. 

Adrianne: Oh no. 

Billy: He was like, “No, I did not write that.”

Adrianne: 100% made up.

Billy: Please strike from the record.

John: Matt was right about almost everything with a few exceptions. Bobby Marquis also told me that the name HAP was a contest in the Broken Arrow store to name the main character for their new campaign. And apparently a kid won the contest by coming up with HAP, Homeland Adores People. 

Adrianne: Make sense now. 

John: Yeah and Bobby Gosh actually came up with the rest of the characters themselves.

Bobby Gosh: I got a couple of scripts in front of me. HAP was the cowboy, Rocky Broccoli, Mr. Pineapple, Benita, I guess she was a banana, Henrietta Hen was a chicken, Lucy, I don’t know what she was. I’m looking at the scripts, four tomatoes, the sweet corn sisters. It was a really big show. 

John: This listener who wrote in, he said that he remembered and thought it was Rocky Broccoli and he remembered the broccoli rapping. That was like the big thing that he remembered. 

Bobby Gosh: Right. He was, yeah. And that guy, the guy who did that was a well known local entertainer in Vermont, but he’s also been a Senator for the last 30, 40 years. 

John: No way.

Adrianne: I’m sorry?

Bobby Gosh: Vermont, in the Vermont house. He’s a Senator now.

John: What’s his name?

Bobby Gosh: Dick McCormick. Yeah. He was Rocky Broccoli and he did a great voice. It was all about the voices. You got to kind of get people showing me like vegetables when they sing.

John: This turns out to be true. You go back to the Melody from Follie is Rocky Broccoli who’s rapping in that is actually performed by Vermont state Senator Dick McCormick.

Billy: This is incredible!

Regina: Oh, my God.

Billy: Going through his Wikipedia page and it is not mentioned here.

John: I actually reached out to Dick McCormick and believe it or not, he got on the phone with me this weekend.

Dick McCormick: Hi, this is, Dick  McCormick.

John: Senator McCormick is a democratic Senator for the Vermont general assembly. But separate from that, he’s also a college professor. He’s a long time musician and a voice actor. Although in an email, he told me that Rocky Broccoli is “the least of my achievements,” he said he did sessions for Bobby Gosh all the time in the 80s and 90s. 

How many of these did you do for him?

Dick McCormick: Countless. Every now and then the phone would ring and Bobby Gosh would say, and he had read this look kind of aggressive New York, so “Hey man! This is Bobby Gosh, man! Can you be in here tomorrow at two o’clock?” and I’d say, “Well, yeah, I guess so.” and “Okay. I got a piece for you.” I’d go in and he’d hand me the script, he’d coach what he wanted and I was out of there in an hour with 150 bucks in my pocket. 

It was a gig and it was not an artistic statement. So I basically just did what Bobby wanted me to do. And Bobby Gosh’s coaching would actually be a long bullet. There were things like, “No, man, no, no, no! Give me broccoli, man! You don’t sound like him, having broccoli.”

John: In addition to Rocky Broccoli, Senator McCormick also performed as Mr. Cabbage in the Mollie Stones’ show.

Dick McCormick: Mr. Cabbage is my, is my finest hour. As he gives me a picture of Mr. Cabbage, and he gives me the script and he says, “All right, I’m thinking Richie Cunningham.” If you remember the television show Happy Days?

John: Yeah.

Dick McCormick: And he’s just a sweet, nice suburban guy. And I said, “Bobby, that’s just, that’s not cabbage.” And, I improvised and I said, “Cabbage is a very good proletarian food, you buy it cheap, it’s very nourishing, and it stinks up your house but it’s good for you.” 

And Bobby’s son, Eric would often intervene for me in these things. He says “Daddy, I think he’s right” and the client loved it.

John: It sounds like Bobby had very strong ideas about how these characters should sound and act and Rocky Broccoli was no exception.

Dick McCormick: What I saw were artists’ renderings. And initially Rocky Broccoli sort of looked like Elvis. And I remember doing it like Elvis and Bobby saying “no, no”. And he never said Bob Dylan, but the voice he did it in. Was like a Bob Dylan invitation, but the script was like rap. So if you listen to the video you sent me, it really is Bob Dylan doing rap.

John: So there’s our answers to number two, who made these characters? It was the two Bobbys, it was Bobby Marquis from Advanced Animations and Bobby Gosh, who wrote the music and the characters. 

An interesting thing about this Homeland deal is that Advanced Animations wind up owning the characters and Bobby Gosh himself owns the music. So Homeland didn’t own that stuff that was property of Advanced Animations and Bobby Gosh. So that’s why we see the same characters and songs pop up in other installations like in Mollie Stones and in Melody Farm Follies.

Adrianne: Sometimes together and sometimes not together.

John: Right, becauseit was IP that advanced and Bobby were able to use in any configuration they wanted.

Dick McCormick: I know the exact way that went down, but you, we did do the cases of characters. It’s obvious, that’s how you make money. So you make it a copy of the one you just made, you know, and then do a whole new production.

John: So to the chain here is that the show was designed originally for Homeland. Around 1989, that is the original. And then Advanced Animations built a partial copy with a blend of old and new characters, including the grocer for Mollie Stones, somewhere like the early 90s, and then Bobby Marquis sold Advanced Animations in the 90s, but he held onto the rights to the show.

He and his wife, Nancy maintained a permanent copy as Melody Farm Follies and there’s this traveling version, which is what I think I saw on YouTube and that goes to state fairs all over the place. It comes to New Jersey. It hangs out in Vermont. It does all these things. And those are operated by Bobby and Nancy Marquis, who were the former owners of Advanced Animations who retained the rights to those characters specifically.

Adrianne: Great.

John: So there’s one other question. And that’s, where are the Homeland characters now? And the sad news is that nobody knows. The Homeland store in Broken Arrow closed around 2001. And that’s when I think it’s likely that these animatronics were thrown out sold or given away to someone. Bobby Marquis reached out a few years ago because he was just curious what happened and very much like what happened when I reached out, no one at Homeland knew anything about the animatronics.

So even Bobby Marquis, the person who made these things doesn’t know what ultimately happened to them after the store shut down. 

I called Matt to tell him about what I’d found. I let them know that these characters were really real. Even if he didn’t quite remember Rocky Broccoli’s real name.

Dick McCormick: Rocky Broccoli.

John: Yeah. It’s not Rockin’ Broccoli.

Dick McCormick: Yeah. Rocky like Rocky Balboa. That’s cool. No wonder we couldn’t find him. The truth be told he was on top of a display rapping at me when I was six years old.

John: I told him about the two Bobbys who made the animatronics, how a state Senator was the voice of Rocky. Rocky Broccoli was voiced by now a Vermont state Senator named Dick McCormick.

Matt: Do his constituents know?

John: And I told him that no one at Homeland even knows about them existing, much less where the original characters are today.

Matt: I guess if this was the only one, it must not have been too successful.

John: So I think we got to an answer.

Matt: Yeah, this is, you know, buckets loads of more information that I had when I, before I spoke to you, this is fantastic.

John: But we had this last thing I couldn’t get for Matt, the recording of Rocky singing, the song he remembered, it just doesn’t exist. What was the song? It was, I’m Rocky Broccoli..

Matt: Yeah. I’m Rocky Broccoli, I’m here to say, you have to eat your vegetables every day.

John: Okay. So I sang that to both Bobbys and especially Bobby Marquis was like, “No, that was never in the show. That’s not a real song.”

Matt: All right.

John: So I feel really bad. There is no recording to play you of Rocky singing that because it just never existed.

Matt: That’s entirely possible too. Sometimes I think about this and like it could have just kind of spilled over from another memory or shoot, maybe I’m onto here original rap in broccoli signed here. Better hit the studio, record my own version.

John: Well, I didn’t, I didn’t want to disappoint you. So I do have something to play for you. Um, let me know if you can hear this.

Bobby Gosh: Hello Matt. It’s been a few years but this is Rocky Broccoli. I’m an older man now but I still got my chops man. Here we go. I always thought I sounded like Bob Dylan rapping. I’m Rocky Broccoli and I’m here to say, eat your vegetables every day. Eat your vegetables, that’s the way. Always do what Rocky say. OK?

Matt: So wait, is this, so is that the Senator?

John: That is Vermont state Senator, Dick McCormick rapping his role, Rocky Broccoli.

Matt: That’s awesome! This is hilarious and wonderful. This is great!

Adrianne: Underunderstood is John Largomarsino, Regina Dellea, Billy Disney and me, Adrianne Jeffries.

John: If you know what happened to the Homeland animatronics after the Broken Arrow store closed, please, let me know. I really want to know.

Billy: This is technically the end of our third season, but we will be right back with season four in January. In the meantime, though, we are still going to be putting out new episodes of our bonus podcast Overunderstood, which comes out every week for Patreon subscribers. So you can check that out. We’ve done about 10 of them so far, I think. You can find out about that and what you can do to support the show at patreon.com/underunderstood.

Regina: This story came from a listener. So please, if you have a mystery that the internet can’t solve, send us an email at hello@underunderstood.com. If it’s about animatronics, just save us all some time and write “for John” in the subject line so that way the rest of us don’t even read it.

Adrianne: Thanks for listening this season, we’ll catch you in the new year!