The Doors hit Fremont Street canopy’s light show

By Steve Kanigher

Saturday, March 27, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

In a city of visual sensory overload, the challenge is to take everything higher, and nowhere is that more important than on Fremont Street, Las Vegas’ stepchild to the Strip.

Enter Mr. Mojo Risin’, aka The Lizard King — all 180 feet of him.

The new show on the Fremont Street Experience canopy over the foyer to downtown’s 10 aging casinos uses fractal geometry to make images appear to be double the height of the 90-foot screen, with more vivid colors and detail.

The show’s stars and their music are larger than life, too: Jim Morrison and his psychedelic 1960s rock band. “The Doors — Strange Days in Vegas,” a 7 1/2-minute blast of video and audio, debuted with no fanfare last week. The official hoopla about the show will roll out next month when a documentary about the band is released in select U.S. cities.

The Fremont Street Experience’s latest rock-themed show is expected to run nightly for the next three years. Mammoth Sound & Vision of Burbank, Calif., previously delivered the likes of Kiss, George Thorogood and Queen to the 12.5 million computer-controlled light-emitting diodes on the experience’s 1,500-foot-long screen. But with the Doors, the company is pushing the visual envelope.

Using complex math formulas, the company discovered a way to make images on the canopy appear to stretch into the sky above the screen.

“This is a version of forced perspective,” says George Johnsen, Mammoth’s co-founder and managing director. “To make a curved screen appear to be other than curved, you have to trust the math a lot. Everything I learned in high school I finally got to use.”

He also got to use some of the music a lot of people listened to in high school.

“We used ‘People Are Strange’ because everyone who sees Fremont Street is a little strange,” Johnsen says with a wink. “ ‘Roadhouse Blues’ is the Doors’ take on travel and the wonders of the world, and ‘Break on Through’ is what the band is all about.”

As the straight-ahead rocker “Roadhouse Blues” cranks up through Fremont Street’s full-bodied sound system, viewers are treated to brief introductions by band members and a montage of still and video clips taken from the documentary. The inclusion of signs that read “War Is Hell” and “Make Love Not War” provide a reminder of the Vietnam War protests. The psychedelic bursts offer a hint of what is to come.

When the presentation begins to play tricks on the eye is with “People Are Strange,” taken from the album “Strange Days,” which features an assortment of circus performers on its cover. Viewers are treated to a swinging trapeze that appears to be far higher off the ground than it is. There is also dazzling detail in a juggler on a unicycle, a dancing jester and an assortment of other creatures prancing about the screen.

But it isn’t until “Break on Through” that the psychedelic colors come at the audience full throttle, similar to fireworks shows’ typical shoot-everything-into-the-sky finales.

The Fremont Street Experience, which has used billboards to advertise its Queen show and last year celebrated the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, clearly is banking on visitors who appreciate classic rock ’n’ roll.

“We’re trying to look for songs that are rock anthems and have broad appeal,” says Jeff Victor, Fremont Street Experience president.

With the Doors show, though, Viva Vision is “dancing around in ways that it hasn’t danced before,” he adds.

Employing 30 animators, illustrators and computer programmers, Mammoth spent five months fine-tuning a visual experiment that marries math with science and art. The idea was to capture the spirit of musicians who were schooled in classical jazz and world music and led by a wildly unpredictable frontman with who drove fans — and police — crazy.

In January 1968, three years before he died, Morrison brought his disdain for the establishment to Las Vegas. He was arrested for vagrancy outside the Pussycat A Go Go nightclub on the Strip after “pretending” to smoke a joint. His “performance” drew the attention of a bouncer who struck him in the head with a billy club and drew blood.

Forty-two years later, Wynn Las Vegas sits on the site of the Pussycat, and Morrison and his band mates are bigger than ever on Fremont Street.