Episode 220: Joshua Visits the ZOLTAR Factory!

have seen some version of this machine. But there are people who listen to this podcast all over the world. So just in case you're not sure what I'm talking about, Zoltar is the fortune telling automaton. Basically, it's a wooden cabinet with a glass top, and sitting in there is this automaton, a dummy if you will, but one that can move, wearing a gold turban and he has a goatee, and he wears usually a gold shirt with a vest.

And you put some money in this machine and he starts moving around and he will talk to you, and then in most cases he will spit out a little yellow ticket that has your fortune as well as some lucky numbers. And by the way, in researching this, I wasn't quite sure there actually is a difference between an

automaton and an animatronic. An automaton is basically programmed, if I understand this correctly, just sort of move the same way every time, whereas an animatronic has more options where you can go in and make it, switch it up and make it a little more unpredictable. So that's the difference. Also, I mentioned he has a go tea. Do you know that a go tea is be called the go tea? Because it looks like you have hair on your chin like a goat. So Zoltar machines are you know, there

are thousands of them all over the world. And of course I am such a fan of these Zoltar machines that I mean, I can't tell you how many Zultar products that I have in my house and my studio, in my office. I mean, I have all kinds of little miniature Zoltar toys. As a matter of fact, earlier this year, I did a giveaway where I bought one of the more advanced Zoltar that works with the tickets. I bought one for myself, and then I bought one and did a giveaway and sent it to one of

my listeners for free. As a prize, I've got, you know, a life size cutout of Zoltar. I've got bottles that have like soda bottles that have had Zoltar labels. I can't even remember all the Zoltar merch that I've got. And in fact, if you go to the casinos here in Vegas, you'll even find Zoltar slot machines. I don't know if that's just here in Vegas or if it's in other places. As well. Zoltar is all over the place.

And here here's what really surprised me. Of course, I moved here to Las Vegas about seven years ago, and it wasn't until after I moved here that I ended up finally going one day to this quaint little town about thirty minutes outside of Vegas called Boulder City, Nevada. Instantly I fell in love with the place. And that's because that well, right off the bat, when you start sort of pulling into town, there is a place called

Tom Devlin's Monster Museum. And Tom Devlin is this movie special effects artist who has created all of these elaborate statues of movie monsters, and you get to walk through and see all of his artwork and exhibits. And then also when I got into the historic downtown area, they had a whole shop devoted to nothing but UFOs and

the whole flying saucer phenomenon. I found out that the famous space pins that NASA developed for astronauts to use an outer space back in I guess the nineteen sixties, the Fisher space pins, they are made in this little town a Boulder City. I actually went to very factory one time, and I was able to buy one of

their latest space pins. What blew my mind most of all about going to little old Boulder City was that there is a workshop there called Characters Unlimited, and that is where every single Zoltar machine and similar machines, every single Zoltar machine in the world is made right there in that shop by hand. It's basically a family owned business. And I was like, what, couldn't believe it? And I thought I'd give anything to go in there and have

a look around. Well, of course, eventually I created a walking tour in Boulder City called the Haunted Boulder City Ghost and UFO Tour. Everybody loves it. We have rave reviews. If you're ever in the Vegas area, you have to go to Boulder City. Go to a Haunted Bouldercity dot com and take the tour. Well, one of my tour guides is a beloved man in town named Alan Goya.

Alan knows everybody. He's lived in Boulder City for decades, and at one point Alan decided to spice up his presentation sometimes when he was guiding a tour, so he went over to the Zoltar factory Characters Unlimited, and he talked to the owner there. The owner is a man named Oloff Stanton, and Oloff gave Alan permission to dress up as Zoltar when Alan was hosting the tour and kind of, you know, play up the whole Zoltar motif. What a really nice, cool thing for him to do.

So basically, Alan, you know, I don't know if he how long he's been friends with Oloff, the president and founder of Characters Unlimited, but I kept telling Alan, you got to introduce me to this guy. You know, one day I got to go over there. And you know how it is, I just kept getting behind on projects and I never was able to do it. And finally the other day I needed to go to Boulder City to get some work done, and I said, you know what, here it is it's Christmas time. What a fun like

idea to go to some kind of a workshop. And so I contacted Alan, and Alan blessed to be you. Alan Allen arranged for me and Lauren to go over and meet Alla Oloff and take a tour of the Character's Unlimited workshop where they produce again not just Zoltar, but similar things like you may have seen. There is the Old Pappy. Pappy, the old hillbilly. In some places, there's also a man in an outhouse, farmer, and a chicken. They also have things that don't even have the automaton.

They're like the love tester. They've just knocked this out of the ballpark. And one of the things that I learned early on was that, Okay, a lot of people first heard of Zoltar by watching the nineteen eighty eight movie called Big starring Tom Hanks. And in that movie, the main character, who is a little boy at that

time named Josh, he wants to be big. He doesn't like being a kid, and so he ends up going to some kind of affair or carnival, and at one point he looks off to the side and he sees one of these mysterious fortune tellers there, and he walks up to it and it says Zoltar speaks, and it looks very similar to the Zoltar that you've seen, not quite exactly the same, but anyway, he puts he drops a quarter in the machine, and then the machine says, you know, what is your wish and he says, I

want to be I wish I were big, And then a card comes out that says your wish is granted, and then after that the kid the machine wasn't even plugged in, and then the movie kicks off when he wakes up the next morning and now this kid overnight has transformed into a grown man played by Tom Hanks.

And so I always kind of figured that there was a company out there that made that made Zoltar machines, and that when the when the movie Big came out, they had provided a machine and this is like the best publicity in the world, and it must have been like a huge boon for their business. And then Zoltar

took off. It didn't happen that way. Turns out there have been similar kind of fortune telling machines and automatons kind of like this, going all the way back to at least the early nineteen hundreds, different kinds of characters. There was one, I think maybe the nineteen sixties called Zoltan, And what happened was when they decided to make the movie Big, that machine was just a unique one off

prop made for that movie. And I'm assuming that they came up with the name Zoltar because they were basing it off of the word zol ten. As a matter of fact, in a minute You're gonna hear me interview Oloff as I walk around the workshop, and I think he will clarify that. So some of the stuff that

I'm telling you may be a little bit redundant. But basically, the movie Big had been around for quite a while, and Characters Unlimited had been making these types of attractions since nineteen eighty seven, and they got gradually more and more into these automaton type figures, and then they finally got the rights to Zoltar in two thousand and six and they started making them. And that is where the

Zoltar you know and love comes from. Today, when we come back, I'll tell you a little bit more about the history of this. And then I actually brought a recorder with me. You're going to hear me excited as a kid on Christmas morning walking through the Zoltar factory and given a personal VIP tour by the owner. Huh, what a day.

Coast a M Paranormal Podcast Network. I am your host, the Wizard of Weird, Joshua P. Warren, beaming into your worm whole brain from my studio in Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada, where every day is golden and every night is silver.

Giatato zoom mate. And if you go to their website, Characters Unlimited dot com, it says, since nineteen eighty seven, Characters Unlimited, Incorporated has specialized in making your place and attraction by designing and building affordable, life sized, mechanically animated and talking characters. We have hundreds of characters available for you to choose from, including animatronic people, birds, animals, dinosaurs,

fortune telling machines, sign waivers, and much more. We own the trademark for Zoltar Speaks and are the only manufacturer of the fortune teller Zoltar Speaks since two thousand and six. Our story says Oloff Stanton, the president and founder of Characters Unlimited, Incorporated, grew up and worked during his adolescent life in the booming tourist town of Wisconsin Dell's, Wisconsin. He learned how to build non animated dummies or characters

from his stepfather back in the nineteen seventies. Surrounded by entrepreneurs his entire life, Oloff knew that he wanted to start a venture of his own, so after graduating college, he packed up and headed west to a small town outside of Las Vegas called Boulder City, Nevada, where he founded Characters Unlimited, Incorporated. And like I was saying, this is basically like a you know, family business now and everything. I mean, they mold all their parts right there and

paint them. There's a guy at the town right down the road, Henderson, who builds the wooden cabinets. I mean, it's not like they're sitting around waiting for some factory and China to build this and ship it to them. I mean they're making it right there, homegrown. I love that, and I mean talk about quality. You can get one of these Zultars starting at seven three hundred dollars, and then from there they can go up in complexity, going up to you know, ten to twelve, depending on various

things you want. Even Zach Began zach Began's at his haunted mansion here in Vegas commissioned the custom version of zach Began Zoltar. So if you go into his Haunted mansion, one of the first things you'll see is a Zoltar type machine with Zach Began's inside wearing a top hat. Yes, also looking over some of their literature, just to clarify it says our characters are electro mechanically animated and have a plug and play design. No pricey air compressors or

computers needed. By the way, that prop that was used for the movie Big that inspired Oloff to start making these has well, it seemed to sort of vanish for a while and nobody was sure where it was. And I started looking into it, and I'm not one hundred percent sure, but here's what I think. The movie Big was directed by Penny Marshall and her Let's see, I

guess I think Gary Marshall was her sibling. And there is a theater in Burbank, California called the Gary Marshall Theater, and the last I heard that original prop was on display in the Gary Marshall Theater in Burbank. I have not been able to confirm that. I tried getting in touch with him and have her back, but that's where that prop might be. How cool would it be to get a hold of that and put it somewhere in

the Zoltar factory in Boulder City. One last thing I want to tell you before I start playing this audio is interestingly, right before we were going to go visit the workshop, I found out that there had recently been a fire in the workshop, and I believe it was an electrical fire that started. And so because of that, they are temporarily working out of a different building that's down the street. So and that will come into play also a little bit later in the podcast, I'll explain.

So I wasn't actually able to go into the main workshop where they usually work, but I was able to go to their temporary workshop and they should be back into the main one maybe in a little over a month or so. But anyway, having said that, here we go. This is me walking through and talking with ole off Stanton as he's showing me all of these just fascinating and wondrous things that characters unlimited.

that we used to sell. And then I got into making you know, cowboys and sea captains and pirates and things like that. And my mom married my stepfather when I was fifteen years old, and I started helping him make make these, and through school and a little bit in college and then college I started making some characters and selling them for extra money. And I would do trade and stuff like that, and then get finished in college in nineteen eighty six, the business and marketing degree.

I could have took a job like everybody else was doing, but I wanted to try something on my own, and so we uh, I came out here. My brother happened

to be out here at the time. He had learned to do this as well, and we started the business together, and we were in business for ten years, and I bought him out, and then we started getting in tomorrow of the animated talking and moving and then putting him in a box and charging money to hear him talk and and then eventually we were making cowboys and pirates and sea captains and old miners, and then we developed what called Artiswami, and I didn't want to call him

Ultar because Zultar was in the movie and I didn't want to get in trouble. Well, anyway, in two thousand and six, I finally looked into the trademark status of Altar and we'll behold, nobody ever Trademark'sultar. So we so we got the trademark for Zultar too thousand and six, gosh. And then then we started developing our own version of Zultar, which she most people are familiar with today. You know, this is one to say.

like cars. He he didn't even have arms in the movie, you know. So we made a move his arm, move his head, move his eyes and talk and and give him a voice, you know, his ultar wish we have today. I wonder who came up with the names Altar any idea there Ultar was a cartoon back in the forties, and before it was a fortune power. And then there

was a Zoltan machine. There was on a pedestal and the head was on a pedestal and you put it in a quarter and you held the telephone receiver to your ear and you could hear your fortune by by way of this talking head. And I don't think they had to actually talk, but that that was called zold Tan. And then this movie came out, and I don't know if they changed it from Zoltan to Zultar because they didn't want to the old people who made the game.

I'm not sure what they call it the old Tar, but uh, yeah, it does have the name does have roots, and I think uh Greek origin.

or it could move its head, have some movement. So we started dabbling with made a torsol that would accommodate movements, and I found local guys that were that were handy with uh welding and stuff and motors, and they developed a mechanism that would turn the hat or make the arm move. So we started making the move for us while and then and then we were Then somebody saw me at one of the gift shows that we were doing and said, hey, I can make this same move

as mouth. And I said, well that that that'd be cool. You know, you make me a head that's hollow and I could take it with it out I can make. I show you what I can do. And and he came back with this I had had and he put a draw back in it and every time a sound came out, you have the jaw move. And it was basically what's called the colored organ circuit and the disco days, you'd have a sound and then the sound would make the light go on. Well instead of the lights go on,

the sound. Every time he had a sound, it would make the jaw pop open, right and uh so that the time we got the sound actively had a job. So once we have that, we could make it, make it, uh, make it talk with a microphone or any any recording. Back then we were using endless loop cassette tapes and then we started, you know using uh uh you could use any any audio for us. Then we started with flash cards and stuff like that.

Joshua pe Warren. You're listening to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network, and I'll be back after these important messages. Welcome back to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. I'm your host, Joshua Pee Warren, and this is the show where the unusual becomes usual. Now back to the audio from my personal tour with Oloff

of the Siltar Factory in Boulder City, Nevada. Character is unlimited me you handmaking each.

And then when I graduated, I had to go somewhere. But the people that worked in Wisconsin Dell's that drove the boat, they had to have coastcard licenses to do it. Well. Some of the guys that we knew from Wisconsin Dell's heard that they needed boat drivers on Lake Meat and to buy drive a boat on Lake Meat for the tours down that you needed a coastcard license. So after labor Day they would come out here and drive boat to Lake be So they happened to be out here.

And my brother was just traveling around selling characters, and he stopped and stayed with his buddies for a whole and me and he just was here for a couple of years. When I got here, he had never left. Meanwhile, they were leaving and he stayed. And when I graduated college, he happened to be here. So I came out with the car and trailer and whatever I had to add to the business, and we started it together. And my wife at the time, Kanta say at the time, came

out after she graduated semester later. And honestly, we don't know how we stayed. We didn't have nothing for working out of the backyard. We used to We used to pad the bodies with Bible class instillation. We're back there one hundred and twenty degrees in the dirt, in the garage with no air condition or anything, spray and lacquers all over the place, you know, and neighbors were really tolerant.

And he'd sort of tried to get together a load of characters to hit through over to make, you know, seventy eight thousand bucks and then come back and do it again.

as well. Any kind of convention you'd want to try would be in Vegas, so it's right over the hill. And traveling in Boulder City was away from the rat race. And when we start having kids, it was a nice place to raise kids. So we stayed and I told myself, I can make an money to get out of there when I want to, I can.

as they're walking through the show room talking about the boats. Well, he was using this voice talent company out of Tennessee called Premiere Companies, and he had them do the voices for the characters. But prior to that, we would just kind of do the best we could. Well, they're a professional voice talent and they were an answering machine on whole message on machine company. So he hired him to

do voices for the characters. We heard the voices like, well, this is great, you know coming to get our numbers, so we started using them and we have one guy in his company named Josh Harrison. He's the one who did the first Soultar voice and we've stuck with him two since two thousand and six. Whenever somebody wants to

do a Zoltar voice like the slot machine. Every gaming in Vegas has seven hundred and fifty slot machines around the coffee right now, and whenever they need to do new audio, we insist that they use his voice.

attract message that went off. This is a motion sensor down here and that goes off like every three minutes, and then we put your money and that drops out and.

played the Zoltar over there. Like the kitchen staff came out to look at what Zoltar had to say.

for the for the Halloween and Costume Show. And the Halloween Costume show used to be in Rosemont every year in Illinois, and then they split up the costumes from the Halloween Haunts stuff, so I had to go to New Orleans to do it. And and because they split it up. It was really dead that year, and it wasn't very many people and I wasn't ha at really good show. But this lady comes up to the booth and she starts looking at at my off and it's like, Zultar.

Do you how can you call that? Zultar? Wasn't that in the movement? I said, well, yeah, but I got the trademark And he said, She said, we ever thought of doing products and stuff like that? And I said, yeah, We're to do some t shirts and hats and things. He says, no, I'm just I'm talking about taking a nationwide and doing you know, the stuff that would be sold in Walmart all over the place. And I said, well, we got to be open for that. He said, well,

let me talk for my partner. I'll get back to you. So she she got back to me a week later and says, we'd love to take you on a contingency.

And we're we're licensing agents, and we're brand managers, Firefly Brand Management and uh and and they had the connections in place to go to people that that make toys and say, hey, would you like to do an the Ultar toy or would you like to do a Zultar coffee or his Ultar soda or his Ultar slot machine, you know, and they get a deal with them and they get a little They get a little bit and need a little bit. So the wine is, the wine is coming out. The love of them. The uh, the

slot machines was was a good thing. The uh the running press, uh, little mini Zoltar that's been, that's been a real hit.

say there is a Zultar wine coming out soon. He actually showed me that this wine is going to have a really special feature, but I'm not sure if he's ready to reveal that yet or if it's still a surprise. So I'm not going to say what that feature is. But so I was asking him, well, you know, what is it like? What is the process like to have this this famous trademark that you're you're licensing all over the place, so all you do is sign.

you know. And now we got uh, my my daughter Krena and my son Gunnar are working with us and and they're helping take this to the next level, especially with the ols old Tar brand popping and doing things. You know. Yeah, it's excited. Why did your parents thend you o Off? We came from Central Wisconsin, really heavy Scandinavian heritage back there. My mother's maiden name was Eric Simon. My dad's mother's made name was Gregorson Stanton. But my

dad dad loved the Norwegian heritage. I was named Oloff, had a brother named Bjorn, Eric and Grieg and tour Norwegian names, so that's why I named Gunner. Everybody calls him GONNERD, but it really would be Gunar to you. G and Nar.

Everybody was so warm and welcoming, and it's just it's amazing to see a homegrown business like this with such creativity, with such care, with such love, and it's just, you know, I admire that they're able to take such an unusual product and make it to such a success. But now,

of course this show is called Strange Things. You know, I investigate a lot of paranormal phenomena, so I did inquire as to whether or not there are any ghostly stories connected to the business, because of course, well we all know, we hear about halted dolls, haunted statues, the haunted figures at the wax Museum. When you're making these lifelike figures and you want them to appear as if they are interacting, well, are you creating some kind of a tulpa, a spirit that is inside them. It's a

good question. It wouldn't surprise me a bit. And what I was told was that indeed there is a ghostly history at the Character's Unlimited Workshop, but I'm gonna have to wait until I go there, because the one that I went to was the temporary one because, as I mentioned earlier, the main one, the original one, had a fire, so they are temporarily displaced. But I have been invited to go back, maybe in the next month or two too.

Into the original building where they've been for years and years and years, and that's where there is supposedly some some paranormal activity attached. And so I guess it'll almost be like a part too, because I want to go back there and maybe bring some equipment and just do a piece about anything that I may pick up, or any stories or any any kind of research I can

dig up about paranormal phenomena related to Zoltar. Now, at one point while I was there, uh, one of the Zoltar machines that was sitting right there next to us was sort of it had its cabinet open, some of the electronics were exposed, and at one point Oloff reached down, punched a button and a fortune popped out. Oloff took it from the machine and handed it to me, and I thought, wow, this will be a prize possession, because there's no telling how many of these Zultar tickets I've

gotten in my life. But to have one handed to me from a machine at the factory by the man who creates them, I mean, that's pretty special. This is going to be framed. Here is what it says.

Those who have tried to interfere with your happiness will soon find they have no influence on your loved one. You seem to be very impetuous and outspoken. This has caused your dear ones some moments of unhappiness. Curb your temper, and not only will you be happier, but healthier too. And I was like, that doesn't sound very positive, I thought, Lauren read that goes No, that doesn't sound like you impetuous. That means careless, thoughtless. You know this kind of I mean,

I'm not am I am I that way. I guess I'll hear about it now everybody will contact me. But well, actually, Joshua, but fortunately, I don't think that this is a particularly accurate fortune because it has here my lucky numbers, and I said, play again, lucky numbers fourteen, two, three, nineteen, twenty two and twenty three. So guess what I did. I went right to the casino. I played a number of Keno machines where you pick numbers and the balls

fall and you can win a lot of money. At kino, I usually do very well, but I didn't win on any of those numbers. So finally I even went to a live roulette table where you have the live dealer there. I can't remember what they call the person who spends the wheel at a roulette table, and I put money on each one of these numbers, and nope, I didn't win any So I have not one on these numbers.

So I'm going to say that I cannot vouch for the fact that a fortune that comes out of a Zultar machine is going to be the God's honest truth. So it's for fun, it's for entertainment purposes only. I don't think I would take this very much to heart, but it's a great it's a wonderful souvenir, and it's just it's something to make you think, and you know what, I will be continuing to get my fortunes and I will keep playing whatever numbers come out until till I

find the combo all right again. Their website is Characters Unlimited dot com and I will be following up with you soon on my next visit there. Real quick, I have an email I want to share with you. I was talking on a recent show about some people who believe in the conspiracy that we may not have landed on the Moon and say that Stanley Kubrick may have faked some of that footage. Got an email from a man named Tom. He said, many have said there is

something fake about the Moon landing. Let me clear this up. As I recall, the amount of battery life on the Moon. On the Moon mission craft was very limited. That is why most of the quote live footage that was seen during the mission was in fact live footage live from the studio set. This was to conserve battery life. Later there were recordings of footage that came back with the astronauts. This confused many people and now they say it was all a studio set. Others say it was all real.

I remember the why and that makes sense. Hope this clears it up. The Moon landing was real and due to nineteen sixty nine battery technology acted out simultaneously on a set so that our televisions could show the public views of what was happening up on the moon without broadcasting from the moon, saving much needed battery life. And then he wrote a second email just to clarify the

point further. He said, due to the nineteen sixty nine batteries, it was impractical to send footage from the moon, but we the public needed to see what was going on up there, so it was done on a set. Later, the actual tapes that came back made all of this more confusing. So yes, it was live footage, and yes it was a movie set. Thanks Tom. Well what do you think about that? That might explain it? Huh? All right, my friends, take a deep breath, if you can close

your eyes. Let's end with the good Fortune tone. That's it for this edition of the show. Follow me at Joshua P. Warren Plus, visit joshuapwarren dot com to sign up for my free e newsletter to receive a free instant gift, and check out the cool stuff in the Curiosity Shop. All at Joshuapwarren dot com. I have a fun one lined up for you next time, I promise, So please tell all your friends to subscribe to this show and to always remember the Golden Rule. Thank you

for listening, thank you for your interest and support. Thank you for staying curious, and I will talk to you again soon. You've been listening to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.