Ten Years of Super Happy Fun
By: Rob McCarthy
Photo by Jet Liam
I remember the first time I walked into Super Happy Fun Land. I was about 17-years-old, and one of the bands I was in during high school was there to play a school-coordinated showcase. I wasn’t there long before I found myself asking, possibly out loud, “What the fuck is this?” Being young and wide-eyed, I looked upon my surroundings with both amusement and a sense of achievement. My band was a noise-oriented, garage-punk act, and Super Happy Fun Land felt like a good fit for us. It was just plain weird. Old toys, strange decorations, a film of stale dust covering practically everything, the odd smells, the aesthetic and fashion sense of the staff––all of it made SHFL seem like an appropriate location for us to bang out frantic, energetic covers of Black Sabbath and Stooges songs. The show was a mild success for us, and all 15 kids that bothered to show up were instant fans. We even got paid for the first time in our careers! That show also happened to be our first performance at a real venue. Super Happy Fun Land is perhaps one of the most welcoming venues in the Greater Houston area. They have and continue to host some of the most far-out shows imaginable.
Ten years ago, Super Happy Fun Land got its humble start when Olivia Dvorak and Brian Arthur began looking for a place where they could create art, music, puppet shows, films, and plays, mostly for themselves. They found the Ashland Street Theater, an old building in the Heights deep in the shadow of an abandoned factory that looked as if it could be a mafia hideout. The rent was manageable, and the duo decided that they could have a few shows here and there to offset the cost of their lease but to mainly use the space for their own projects.
Soon enough, however, show-hungry bands came calling. Within almost three months of opening, SHFL received an average of 100 show requests a month. By then, both Arthur and Dvorak decided that SHFL would have to be a music venue, primarily, therefore putting showcasing art, movie screenings, and plays on the back burner.
They kept the Ashland location for roughly five years before being ejected by the landlord. “That was OK by us because we had wanted a bigger space with more than one toilet,” said Arthur. Super Happy Fun Land found that bigger space when they moved to the Polk St. location and right away began booking and hosting shows. However, the city had other plans for Super Happy Fun Land and upon figuring out that the venue did not have an occupancy permit, shut SHFL down. “We figured they never cared before when we were in the residential Heights, why would they care in the warehouse district? Well, they did. We were shut down for a few months after we opened the new location, and it took us a year and a ton of money to reopen,” said Arthur. In the space between reopening, Super Happy Fun Land obtained around 160 AMC theater seats and a full-sized AMC movie theater screen, filling out their enormous warehouse quite nicely.
You might say that both Dvorak and Arthur had a “compulsion” for collecting some of the weirdest stuff to ever grace the space of a venue, and you’d be right. Not only do they have an immense (and proportionate to the amount of space in the warehouse) collection of Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, which can be both terrifying and mesmerizing, but they also happen to have giant statues of cartoon characters from an ‘80s Super Bowl parade. They received the statues from a man they lovingly dubbed “the crazy statue guy.”
“When most people think of Super Happy Fun Land, they think of ‘that weird house that looks like a Cabbage Patch Doll factory exploded, where I saw my friend’s ambient-instrumental- progressive rock band play at a couple of years ago,’” said Arthur, adding, “I hear something along those lines almost as often as I get the question ‘Do you guys have a bathroom in here?’”
Because of the diversity of events hosted at Super Happy Fun Land, one wouldn’t exactly say that they have a “regular” crowd. They have so many different types of events that it would be unlikely that anyone could or would appreciate every single thing that comes through but consider that a challenge.
Bands from all over the nation come to SHFL, and even the bands from cities such as Portland, Austin, and Seattle have sung the praises of Houston’s weirdest little big venue. “Performers come here all the time from the ‘cool’ cities . . . and tell me how ‘this is the coolest place [they] have ever played at,’” said Arthur. “They tell me that if it was in one of those cities, Super Happy Fun Land would be jam-packed with the cool kids every night.” Naturally, neither Brian Arthur nor Olivia Dvorak, who once insisted that she be awarded the “Worst Bartender in Houston Award” and also prefers to be referred to as Puppetrina, wants to hear something like that. It’s a testament of their loyalty to our beloved city that they haven’t packed up their vast collection of knick-knacks and oddities and jumped ship for Austin or Portland or something. There was a Super Happy Fun Land in Little Rock, Arkansas for a while, though. Arthur and Dvorak franchised the Little Rock location but the venue was eventually shut down for, you guessed it, no occupancy permit. It never reopened.
Super Happy Fun Land, in its 10 years of existence, has been host to thousands of bands, maybe even roughly 8,000, but the shows that stick out to the proprietors of this venue aren’t your friends’ bands that sound like Explosions in the Sky. Instead, bands like Ooga Booga, who dress as cavemen and sing songs about killing woolly mammoths around a campfire onstage, are the bands that leave a lasting impression. “You didn’t see that show? Not surprised. We have a saying around here: ‘Of course there are a ton of people here tonight, the band sounds awful,’” said Arthur. “After seeing thousands of bands perform in what basically is our living room, it is almost always by the spectacle that we are really impressed (or horrified).”
A horrifying spectacle would be something similar to the “remarkably grotesque” Deadly Orifice, who would sometimes sodomize himself with his own mic, put it in his mouth, and scream. Then there is Jean-Louis Costes from Paris, whose act could be compared to that of GG Allin, except with humorous operatic songs to accompany the antics. Apparently, the French performer would waddle about naked onstage with a carrot lodged in his anus and a frying pan tied to his genitalia while a nude French woman covered in pudding (your guess at the flavor) would vomit cans of soup into a center stage toilet––and that’s only a segment of the performance.
Fear not, though, because for every terrifying performance, there is an equally amazing, cute, sweet, or just plain wonderful act to balance things out. There is the inspiring Captured! By Robots, who performs in chains while his band (made of actual animatronic robots) taunts him and forces him to perform cheesy cover songs. Then you have Monster Dudes, who performed with a 4-year-old drummer wearing industrial ear protection while metal clad “monsters” rigged with contact mics battled in from of him with mighty clashes and clangs.
SHFL has seen countless costumed performers, one-man shows, and exceptionally creative acts, but they have also entertained a considerable number of “normal” bands who perform great music across all genres without the gimmicks, weird instruments, or crazy costumes. It’s not uncommon to have a lineup consisting of electro-pop, punk, country, and jazz on the same night. Plenty of famous bands, ancient acts, national and international, and foreign groups have graced the Super Happy Fun Land stage. Both Dvorak and Arthur say that the biggest show they ever held was for The Rock-Cats, which is, essentially, a band made up of real cats. “They had four sold out shows in a row,” said Arthur.
“We still get teen bands but not as many shows where whole high schools would come out to our place twice a month. I kind of miss those because I have always seen running SHFL as a form of political activism. We certainly aren’t doing it for the money because, although it almost always breaks even, it still takes rather than makes money, and showing young people that a place like Super Happy Fun Land can exist kind of makes it all worth it,” Arthur concludes.
Besides bands, Super Happy Fun Land also hosts art shows, private parties, plays, and film festivals. They even hold benefits for animal shelters and other causes. They have participated in multiple venue-events such as Artcrawl, Fotofest, and CounterCrawl. They also host the annual World Naked Bike Ride as well as a nudist film screening. Needless to say, Houston has a jewel in Super Happy Fun Land and we hope that, in time, our “cool” city packs the venue with the “cool” kids every night. They celebrated their 10-year anniversary March 30, 2024 and are looking forward to 10 more years.
