For $3,500, museum Director Brian Grams bought the item – a former amusement park amenity that features life-size animatronic pirates, a piano and a talking, squawking parrot all on an elevated, red velvet-curtain-enveloped stage.

“We went and picked it up in Indiana. As it turned out, making it functional was not as inexpensive and easy as we thought it would be,” he said. In fact, the project became quite a puzzle, and it brought about a happy reunion decades in the making.

Terry Younce, an electrician who frequently works on the museum’s many moving attractions, began looking it over late last year. He and Grams searched for clues as to the pirate show’s builder.

“There was a Pizza Time sticker on it. That turned out to be a dead-end,” Grams said. “On the reel-to-reel part, there was a sticker that said ‘Enchanted Forest.’ Eventually we found the production company, Creative Presentations. It was out of Schaumburg, but had been gone from the area for years.”

Grams continued to Internet search and found a name linked to the production company: John Banach.

“He’s from California, and he still does robotics and animatronics for Disney and Universal,” Grams said. “I sent him a message, and he replied. He said he kind of remembered the parrot, but nothing else.”

Originally from the Schaumburg area, 51-year-old Banach happened to be in northeastern Illinois for an extended family visit.

Soon he found himself on the museum grounds, flushing air hoses, replacing valves and piecing the robotics back together. He reconnected not only with machinery he originally built, but with Frank Gaughan, a former co-worker who also was in on the show’s original construction in the early 1980s.

“It’s fun to work on this stuff again,” the animatronics designer said. “The kids will love it. This guy’s got 12 motions. The parrot has seven, and this other pirate’s got 10 or 11.”

The whole thing is synched to music. And that’s where Gaughan’s expertise came in.

“Terry was struggling,” Banach said. “I said, ‘Let me see if Frank’s still in the area.’ I looked him up on LinkedIn … what are the chances of me being in town and Frank’s still here? Volo bought an old show that we built. It’s all pretty rare. I hadn’t seen Frank since 1999.”

Gaughan, who now owns and operates FMG Productions of Crystal Lake, set to work on the audio portion of the show. It was challenging work, as the old reel-to-reel tapes were deteriorating.

“It’s amazing what these guys were able to do,” Grams said. “To build one of these from scratch would take several hundred thousand dollars.”

The pirate show is the sort of quirky, throwback exhibit that delights visitors to the Volo Auto Museum at 27582 Volo Village Road. Grams said he remembers seeing shows like it in places like ShowBiz Pizza when he was a child.

“No ifs, ands or buts about it, these were a huge draw and a huge pull for the places that had them,” he said. “But they were too expensive to keep and maintain. So they started disappearing from the landscape.”

The staged, animatronic pirate show that started out its stardom at the Enchanted Forest in Porter, Indiana, now entertains at Volo Auto Museum. It’s positioned in the Pizza Place, near the museum entrance, with shows set to start several times daily.