In 2015, a muralist walked into the permitting process with a simple, beautiful dream: giant flying hamburgers attacking the city of Waco.
The city said no.
What happened next is the best argument we know for why you should never fully trust a "no" — because the mural that resulted is now one of the most gloriously unhinged walls in Texas, and the burgers are still in it. They're just hiding.
Every side of the building is a B-movie
The old Texas Playhouse building — now home to Twisted Root Burger Co. — is painted on every side as one continuous 1950s creature-feature. Waco's own checker-domed water towers pull their legs out of the ground and march on the city like tripod invaders, striding across a boiling orange sky toward everything this town holds dear. McLane Stadium cowers on one wall. The Dr Pepper bottling plant braces on another. A red-headed woman screams in flawless movie-poster form. A black cat bolts across a bridge.
And Elvis — collar up, mid-flee — is thinking, urgently, of hamburgers.
The permit-office plot twist
Here's the origin story, and it's a Waco classic. When muralist Dan Holzschoh — working with Isaac Brown — pitched the concept in 2015, his invading spaceships were going to be flying burgers — a perfect gag for a burger joint. The city didn't approve that design. So the ships became water towers — Waco's actual, beloved, checker-domed water towers, which honestly made the joke better, because now the invasion is coming from inside the house.
And the burgers? Painters are patient people. Every burger on this wall now arrives as a thought bubble — floating serenely above the panicked heads of Elvis and company. The city said no to burger spaceships. No permit office on earth can deny a character the right to think about lunch. Technically legal at last.
Why this wall matters more than it lets on
It's easy to file this one under "fun and games," but look at what it actually pulls off. It's a complete piece of world-building wrapped around an entire building — four walls telling one continuous story, with local landmarks cast as characters. McLane Stadium, the Dr Pepper plant, the water towers, the bridges: the mural only works if you know Waco, which means it's secretly a love letter with a scream queen on it.
And it's a masterclass in creative problem-solving. Most artists treat a rejection as a wall. Holzschoh treated it as a writing prompt. The compromised version is funnier, more local, and more re-lookable than the original pitch — ten years on, people are still finding new details, which is the only performance metric a mural has.
Go stand in the invasion
You'll find it at 801 S 2nd Street near the river, a couple of minutes from downtown — it's Stop 121 on our Waco's Walls trail, "When the Water Towers Attacked." Circle the whole building; the story doesn't repeat, and the marquee side rides the sunset better than most actual movies.
While you're on that side of the river, you're minutes from the Sculpture Zoo trail along the Brazos — 28 bronze and concrete animals with stories of their own, plus the true story of how they got there. Everything's free, everything's on The Whole Map, and nothing on it will try to invade you. Probably.