Life-Size Mousetrap Makes Bay Area Homecoming

The 25-ton Rube Goldberg-esque contraption of 20 different kinetic sculptures, based on the Hasbro board game “Mousetrap,” is the result of a lifetime of interest in building and over 13 years of dedication to creating a larger-than-life spectacle.
Life-Size Mousetrap Makes Bay Area Homecoming
The Life-Size Mousetrap is making its Bay Area homecoming with two new kinetic sculptures at Peralta Junction on Nov. 10-11. (Courtesy of Mark Perez)
Catherine Yang
11/8/2012
Updated:
9/29/2015
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With a simple turn of hand, a kinetic event is born. First, a bowling ball travels down a series of zig-zag stairs, is flung back up into a bathtub at 16 feet in the air, and then dropped again, setting off another series of reactions that drops a 2-ton bank safe from 30 feet in the air.

The 25-ton Rube Goldberg-esque contraption of 20 different kinetic sculptures, based on the Hasbro board game “Mousetrap,” is the result of a lifetime of interest in building and over 13 years of dedication to creating a larger-than-life spectacle.

The board game requires the pieces to be assembled in an exact way to “work,” but that didn’t cut it for Mark Perez when he picked it up as a child.

“I used to try to put a couple of games together and see if I could make it work—and hopefully I wouldn’t poke my sister’s eye out,” Perez said. And he turned the plastic crank handle and it worked. Now the crank is “life-sized,” at eye-level, and sets a bowling ball traveling through a series of simple machines, building enough potential energy to crush a car.

This year they’ve built two new structures—a tetherball-like piece where a bowling ball wraps around a pole to set off the bank safe-drop and a new gutter piece—both of which will be making their Bay Area debut this weekend at the Peralta Junction, a popup festival in West Oakland.

“There’s a great art scene in San Francisco,” Perez said on Monday, during the first of the four days that it would take to put together the entire Life-Size Mousetrap.

Perez was a medic in the army and was eventually stationed and discharged in San Francisco, where he met his wife Rose Harden and many of the other regular troupe members. Harden, who also tours the world as a dancer, brings the performance to life with the choreography and costuming. She also runs the forklift for Life-Size Mousetrap.

Perez built the full, Life-Size Mousetrap in 1995, initially immobile. He then decided it was something to be shared—he recycled some of the parts and restarted in 1998. “We started touring in 2005, and we’ve been showing it ever since,” Perez said. “I was in it for a lot of the spectacle of it. No one else had done it.”

The Life-Size Mousetrap has been displayed in events from music festivals to the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburg, Pa. During the Maker Faire, a DIY Festival, the performance really highlighted the handmade aspects—one of them being a crane that drops a bank safe from 30 feet in the air to crush something big—a car, 1200-pound pumpkin, or even a giant snowman filled with 100 pounds of pastry cream. It took Perez two years to hand build.

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