The Amazeing

The Neon Gang's Lair
The Amazeing was an idea I came up with after watching Batman Forever. There was a scene where Robin goes into an alleyway and gets into a fight with the Neon Gang. I remember it being something pretty spectacular at the time, but viewing it since has proved that I clearly remembered it better than it was. (Not much else in that movie is worth mentioning, so I won't mention it further.)

In 1995, we were celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Wyandotte Jaycees haunted houses, so I wanted to do something sort of spectacular. We had a very small house,
The Neon Gang's Lair
which meant there wasn't going to be a lot of space for mazes (a haunted house staple), so I decided it would be cool to do a short maze with insane black-lit images on the walls.

I got in touch with all the artists I knew from the previous haunted house and explained my idea. These included Randy Robertson, Garret Memring, Betti Grab and Sean Bergman. They were all on board, so we got the walls constructed as quickly as possible and everyone started doing glow paint art.

Glow paint is a bit tricky to work with because there are only a limited number of colors and it is really, really gooey and hard to blend. I recall using a lot of white to outline my concepts - particularly bodies and skeletons and so forth. The white tended to appear like purplish shadows, so it actually created an interesting effect. I was so pleased with the end result that I enlisted the aid of a photographer friend Steve Beier, we captured the "magnificence" of the maze. Digital photography was still in its infancy, so this required Steve to set up slow film in a camera on a tripod with a shutter open for 20 to 30 seconds. (You may want more detail on how he captured the images. You may be out of luck because photography isn't one of my hobbies and Steve has moved on to bigger and better things.)

I had a lot of favorite images in there and I couldn't possibly choose the best ones, but below are some I particularly liked.

Photo: Steve Beier My Amazeing Glow Maze Mermaid in a Tank

Photo: Steve Beier Randy's WB Dodo Among Other Stuff

Photo: Steve Beier Skeleton Driver adn the Scream

The Wyandotte Jaycee haunted houses are all put in buildings that are demolished by the city after we use them, so this fantastic bit of glow art was going to be lost once it was all over. I couldn't bear to just let it disappear forever, so I actually went in and removed some of my favorite walls. I then built a room in the upstairs of my parent's garage and used some of the walls from the room for that.

I had also been learning some new (for 1996) web page tricks, so I put together a fancy javascript map that allowed the online user to take a virtual 'tour' of the amazeing using Steve's photos. You will find that below, working pretty much as it was originally designed.

The Amazeing Room Map

 

 

 

 

 

 

   To see what was on the wall sections, click
    your mouse on the numbered sections.
      The arrows represent your POV.