Chuck E. Cheese Pizza War (Encore)

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Hi, it's Willa.

Back in 2019, we aired an episode about Chuck E.

Cheese, the arcade and restaurant chain that's been the site of thousands upon thousands of children's birthday parties.

Anecdotally, I believe it to be one of our most popular episodes.

And we thought of it after hearing the news that after years of underemphasizing and decommissioning its infamous animatronics, Chuck E.

Cheese was finally doing away with them altogether.

The wild story of how Chuck E.

Cheese and its animatronics came to exist in the first place?

Well, that's the episode.

So please take a listen to the incredible story of an empire built around a pizzerat.

This podcast contains explicit language.

For Jared Sanchez's fifth birthday, he got to go to Chuck E.

Cheese for the very first time.

All you could see is neon lights, the lights from the arcade cabinets.

That was awesome.

It was the mid-1980s, and Chuck E.

Cheese's Pizza Time Theater, as it was then called, had three major selling points.

Pizza, video games, and an animatronic stage show.

The first two things are self-explanatory.

The animatronics are something else.

Animatronics are mechanical objects made of pneumatics, hydraulics, and other parts that can perform rudimentary movements all by themselves.

They exist to entertain people.

Every Chuck E.

Cheese in the country at the time, and there were hundreds of them, was home to a bantering, singing, five-piece animatronic set led by Chuck E.

Cheese, a pizza rat.

There were also characters in side rooms, spaces that could be reserved for birthday parties or parents could get away from the hubbub of the arcade.

It was in one of these rooms rooms that Jared saw the animatronic character that really would change his life.

I turned the corner and I saw this huge

thing.

It resembled like Elvis Presley in a way.

He has a huge head, a jacket that's golden, off-white with golden pants,

huge

paws that are fluffy like a teddy bear, and of course,

bright blue eyes.

Stares right into your soul.

And then, of course, the neon sign that says the king.

The king is about 10 feet tall.

And when I first saw him, I thought he looked like a monkey.

He is, in fact, a lion.

Naturally, the king performed Elvis songs.

When I heard that and I saw him, I was just like, oh my goodness,

this is where I want to come for every single birthday and every single birthday from 1986 on up until 1992 that's where i went in 1992 on jared's 11th birthday something happened I walk into Chuck E.

Cheese.

I always turn the corner.

I remember.

And I look where the king is, and I see like the neon sign's gone, the king's gone, the stage is still there.

And you can see where it said the king, where the neon had burned into the wall, like an image.

And I go to this lady and I said, you know, ma'am, where is the king?

Did they move him to another part of the restaurant?

And she just looks at me and she says, oh, sorry, darling.

They threw that thing out months ago.

Jared never went back to Chuck E.

Cheese, but he never forgot about the king.

This went on through high school and through college.

I would have dreams of walking into a Chuck E.

Cheese.

I'd say, Do you still have the king, like even if it's broken?

And the manager would turn around and say, Oh, yeah, it's down that hallway to the left.

So I'd run down the hallway in my dream, and I'd see the shadow, right?

And so then I'd turn and I wake up.

So, and that occurred literally all the way to the year 2006.

Why do you think?

For some reason, this animatronic, this specific animatronic, captivates you

and then goes into your dreams.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Every month we take on a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

From the perspective of 11-year-old Jared, the story of the king was sad but simple.

He was there, and then suddenly, he was not.

Behind this seemingly straightforward story is a much more complicated one.

The fate of the king is tied to the saga of the Chuck E.

Cheese animatronics.

A saga that involves big personalities, huge profits, bankruptcy, the kidification of the arcade and the pizza joint, the birth of the family entertainment center, a pizzerat, a towering Elvis robot, and dueling restaurant chains engaged in a conflict known as the Pizza Wars.

It's a saga about a fad, something cool and modern that outlived its novelty and its utility and was tossed literally in the garbage can, only to be saved and savored by the adults who loved it most.

So, today, I'm decodering what happened to the kingdom

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Chuck E.

Cheese has been around for 40 years now, but the idea at its very core that it makes sense to combine video games, bad pizza, and a bizarre stage show still seems to me to just be very strange.

It sounds like three okay tastes that would just taste okay together.

But for a while, it was hugely lucrative.

So why did it work?

To answer that, we have to start at the beginning with a man who founded Chuck E.

Cheese.

My name's Nolan Bushnell.

I founded Atari and Chuck E.

Cheese.

Nolan Bushnell is a storied Silicon Valley figure because he created not one, but two famous companies.

The first of those was Atari, the pioneering video game company that made its name in 1972 when it released Pong, the first hit video game.

Pong kick-started a video game craze, and by the late 1970s, Atari was selling both home video consoles and the big coin-operated video game cabinets.

Atari would sell those coin-op machines to arcades for about $2,000 each, but they would go on to make $30,000 to $50,000 for the arcade owners.

So I thought to myself, hey, I'm on the wrong side of this equation.

Bushnell started Chuck E.

Cheese from inside of Atari in order to go after that money.

A restaurant seemed like an obvious idea and pizza like the right food.

It's easy, cheap, and made for sharing.

Even when it's bad, it's edible, and it comes with a built-in wait time when customers could be playing games.

But a simple pizza arcade would have been a teenager magnet.

Video game arcades at the time were already full of adolescents, and they had a bad reputation.

Community leaders regularly tried to shut the places down.

Bushnell wanted to avoid all of that, so he decided to go after a new market.

There was a huge demand by kids to play games, but there was no really appropriate places.

They couldn't go to bars.

The only way to get kids that age to go anywhere, though, is to get their parents to take them.

And parents presented their own problems.

Even with food, our kids were thought to be expensive and sleazy, and they had a whole long association with juvenile delinquents.

How could you convince parents they were wholesome enough to bring their children there?

And then, once they were there, how could you occupy them, the parents?

So they'd let their kids pump quarters into the machines.

I want the kids to have as much unfettered time to play games as possible.

That meant that the parents were going to be bored.

The solution presented itself when Bushnell took his kids to Disneyland and walked into the enchanted tiki room.

I said to myself, hey,

this is fun.

I can do this.

Created in 1963, it was a Hawaiian-themed music show that featured over 150 talking, singing, animatronic tropical birds.

Disney at the time was way out ahead of everyone when it came to animatronics, and they guarded their methods zealously.

They were capable of doing things no one else could, and the Tiki Room was a perfect example of this.

The thing I want you to understand here is that Chuck E.

Cheese backed into its animatronics.

They were never the reason the chain existed.

They were just a solution to a bunch of other problems, including that they allowed Chuck E.

Cheese to sell alcohol, which in California at the time, arcades were not allowed to do, but Disney was.

The animatronics were a way to disguise a boozy pizza arcade as family entertainment, a loss leader that got people in the door to spend money on food, merchandise, and games.

In short, the animatronics existed to sell the adults in the room, not to please the kids, though that's what they ended up doing.

Bushnell asked his engineers to begin building some basic animatronics.

Soon after, he went to a trade show for the amusement park industry, the IAAPA, where he saw a guy in a coyote mascot costume.

The project at that point was codenamed Coyote Pizza, so he bought the costume and had it sent to his engineers, thinking they could turn it into the company's animatronic mascot.

They said, not a coyote, it's a rat.

So I said, okay,

I'm not going to slow the project down.

It's no longer coyote pizza, it's Rick Rat's pizza.

No one else on the team thought that naming a restaurant after a rat was a particularly good idea, so we asked if they could just de-emphasize the ratness of the whole enterprise.

Gene Landrum was Chuck E.

Cheese's first president and the guy who was in charge of executing the whole project.

He's the one who came up with the new name.

I actually finally came up with the name because of Mickey Mouse.

Chuck E.

Cheese is like Mickey Mouse because I wanted it to be

an adult Mickey Mouse, if you will.

The first Chuck E.

Cheese's Pizza Time Theater opened in May of 1977 in San Jose, California.

Chuck E.

Cheeses, Chuck E.

Cheeses, Pizza Theater!

Chuck E.

Cheese, Chuck E.

Cheese's, Pizza Theater!

The first one we did was 5,000 square feet.

And the day we opened, we knew we'd missized it, that it was too

small, we had lines out the door.

Soon after the first opening, Bushnell left Atari altogether, but not before buying the Chuck E.

Cheese concept from them outright.

He promptly opened seven stores and in 1979 began franchising.

By the early 1980s, there were over 100 Chuck E.

Cheeses operating around the country, and they were making four times what a regular pizza restaurant made, as well as out-earning Pizza Hut and McDonald's.

So the business was a huge huge success.

But I'm going to do my best to communicate exactly how strange the animatronics were, even in this success.

Scott Wilson started doing voices for various Chuck E.

Cheese characters in the late 1970s, eventually voicing Chucky himself.

Scott Wilson, reading down Chuck E.

Cheese.

Hey, hi, everybody.

Chuck E.

Cheese here.

You know, back when I lived in Joysey, I used to hang out with this guy named Bruce Springsteen.

You know, in the early days, you would have never had the phrase where a kid could be a kid.

Where a kid can be a kid became Chuck E.

Cheese's slogan in 1985.

And the entertainment

was never kid-friendly.

You know, the nuances of the jokes were very adult.

Would have been over the head of any 12-year-old or under, that's for sure.

Well, why did she leave you?

I don't know.

I took her out for a seven-course meal.

Oh, yeah.

What did you have?

One slice of pizza and a six-pack?

Another thing that would have been over the head of most 12-year-olds was the entire characterization of Chuck E.

Cheese himself.

In the beginning, he really looked like a rat and not a cute one.

Beady-eyed, sharp-toothed, with a long snout, he often appeared with a cigar and he was abrasive and rude.

Over the years, his personality and his look would soften, becoming cuter, more mouse-like, but he held on to elements of his Joey-Z rat persona for a long time.

As I was described to him, he was a New York Jewish rat.

Like when you came for the job, they were like, this is a New York Jewish rat.

That's who you're doing?

Yeah,

that's the way I was told he was.

In fact, there was a song or a slogan or something.

I can't remember how, you know, hey, with Chuck E.

Cheese, he's the rat where it's at.

Overall, there was a seat of the pants quality to the process of creating the animatronics, which were made by a group of engineers, programmers, writers, singers, and craftspeople.

The way we developed new characters was basically very organic, very fluid.

Ideas could come from everywhere.

In the late 1970s, Jewel Kamen was a recently graduated art major who answered an ad looking for a craftsperson.

She wound up working at Chuck E.

Cheese into the 1990s, eventually becoming the director of entertainment.

You know, we had a lot of parties

in the animation studio.

People would be drinking and say, Oh, I've got a friend who does a great wolf man voice.

And someone else would say, oh,

I could draw something up for that.

And we weren't doing focus groups.

We weren't doing surveys.

You know, it just basically came from the employees working there.

Some of the most distinctive characters they came up with were called cabaret characters.

They were modeled on actual lounge acts, and they performed in a side room called the lounge.

This is where Jared Sanchez first saw the king, who was based on that quintessential lounge act, Elvis in his Vegas residency days.

The lounge and the cabaret characters were initially supposed to be for adults.

I put a sign there,

for mom and dad only.

That's Gene Landrum, Chuck E.

Cheese's first president.

Again, mom and dad could go in there and sit at this piano bar and listen to music and relax while the kids are running and playing.

Guess what?

Oh, the kids love the goddamn thing.

The most famous cabaret character was probably Dolly Dimples, a hippopotamus who performed at a piano bar.

Lovely Dolly Dimples is at the piano.

Now that I'm here, Fancy Face, why don't you tell me about my future, since I know all about my past?

And while you're at it, why don't you sing along with my song, California?

Every time she hit a high note, her boobs went up and down.

Really?

Oh, he really did.

Her boobs went up when she hit a high note, and then the kids were enamored with this.

They're running up there, and

I said, oh my God.

what what have I done here

time has not been kind to any of this technology and sophisticated children's entertainment have both improved a lot and they make the stage shows seem even worse while making the characters with their methodically blinking eyes dumpy proportions and herky jerky movements look even more uncanny but in the late 1970s and 80s talking moving creatures you could be in the same room with just did not exist outside of a Disney resort.

And as janky as these animatronics were even then, an article from 1982 describes them as, quote, whirring and clicking like a plague of locusts.

They were also a novelty, new and mesmerizing.

Learning about Chuck E.

Cheese, I too became mesmerized.

Not by the animatronics, but by the whole wacky scene.

It's also deeply unfocus grouped.

I mean, a pizza rat.

It's a bit of corporate slapdash that birthed a bizarre adult kid space, the first family entertainment center.

It was a place designed for children to go wild, to binge on games and pizza and ball pits while their parents benignly neglected them as they had a drink and were serenaded by a hippo piano bar singer with a heaving bosom.

It's the kind of thing that feels like it could never ever exist now.

Prior to this episode, I had never in my life been to a Chuck E.

Cheese, but I can still get nostalgic for the loosey-goosey, carefree chaos of all of this.

But of course, none of it was to last.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

In order to understand how far Chuck E.

Cheese would fall, I have to back up back into the 1970s and introduce you to another major player in this tale, a man named Aaron Fector.

I always wanted to be an inventor, so even as a little boy, I called myself an inventor.

Aaron grew up in Orlando, Florida.

In 1974, when he was just 20, he started a company called Creative Engineering to build a car that got really high gas mileage.

The car didn't pan out, and Fector needed money to grow his company.

He started going door to door, trying to sell a pool cleaning device he had invented.

One day, he knocked on a random man's door.

And when I gave him my spiel and said, Hey, I'm an inventor, he said,

Oh, well, what can you invent?

And I said, Anything, you name it.

And he said, Can you invent electronic things?

I said, Sure.

He says, How about an electronic control system for a shooting gallery?

I said, Sure, no problem.

The man was a mechanical engineer who had started a company that was beginning to supply amusement parks who were desperate for the stuff with animatronics like Disney's.

Aaron learned the basics of this craft from the company before striking out on his own.

Throughout the 1970s, Aaron got better and better at it.

The first year he went to the IAAPA, the same amusement park conference where Nolan Bushnell had gotten the coyote suit for Chuck E.

Cheese.

He took an animatronic talking head.

The next year he went with a whole bear.

The year after that, he went with a band made up of three bears.

And that's when Aaron met Nolan Bushnell, the Chuck E.

Cheese founder you heard from earlier.

He says, gosh, I like your bear.

He says, I'm Nolan Bushnell.

I'm building all these restaurants and I need some great animation like yours in my restaurant.

I had heard of him and

I feared him.

So I said, no, I'm not going to sell you a piece of animation.

One,

he was a lot more wealthy than I was.

He was a lot more powerful than I was.

He was a lot smarter than I was.

And there's no way in the world he's going to buy a hundred pieces of animation from me.

He's going to buy one piece.

He's going to see what I did.

He's going to steal my secrets.

And he's going to build them himself.

I knew that going in.

You know, that's what happened to my whack-a-mole game.

So this is the part of the story where I tell you that yes, Aaron Fector did design the first whack-a-mole, the popular game where players use a soft mallet to whack moles on the head at the behest of a customer who then copied and marketed it.

It's an amazing detail, one Aaron is actually very good-natured about, but it's only relevant to this larger story because it taught Aaron to be protective of his work.

Nolan Bushnell, for his part, says he knew Aaron Fector, but that he never wanted his designs.

Had you tried to get Aaron Fector to build stuff for you?

No.

I didn't like his technology.

We felt that hydraulics were too high maintenance.

In the summer of 1979, Aaron read about a development with Chuck E.

Cheese.

A businessman named Robert Brock, a major holiday inn franchisee, had signed a deal with Nolan Bushnell to open 280 Chuck E.

Cheese's Pizza Time theater franchises.

I got furious and

I sent a message into the universe.

I want that contract.

Is it too late?

Has the ship sailed?

He decided to put on a huge and hopefully impressive show at that year's IAAPA.

He brought two animatronic bands, the Three Bears and a group called the Wolfpack Five, and had them play at the same time.

It worked.

They saw and they took the story back to Bob Brock.

And they told Bob Brock about this young guy that's got the most amazing animatronics.

And you're teamed up with this Nolan Bushnell, you know, who's claiming that he makes the only animatronics out there.

Bob Brock immediately decided that he was going to cancel his contract with Nolan Bushnell, which was music to my ears, and that he offered me

ownership in this restaurant show.

The background information here is that Nolan Bushnell had assured Bob Brock that Chuck E.

Cheese was the only company outside of Disney making animatronic characters.

But here was Aaron Fector making better animatronic characters.

It is the consensus that technically Aaron's animatronics were way more sophisticated than Chuck E.

Cheese's, more fluid and versatile.

But there is absolutely no consensus they were better as characters.

And there are passionate feelings on this issue on both sides.

Like, extremely passionate.

Anyway, Brock, despite still having a contract with Chuck E.

Cheese, offered Aaron a deal that included a 20% ownership stake in the company and let Aaron retain the rights to all of his characters, which would be licensed to Brock's new company, Royalty Free.

That new company was called Shoba's Pizza.

The Aaron Fector animatronics that would eventually be showcased there were called the Rock-Afire Explosion, a five-piece outfit led by a bear named Billy Bob Broccoli.

Let's give her a Beetle song, Looney Bird.

Close your eyes and I'll kiss you.

Tomorrow I'll miss you.

Remember our walk.

Nolan Bushnell and Chuck E.

Cheese did not find out that Shoba's Pizza even existed until the day in March of 1980 when the first Shobiz Pizza opened in Kansas City and refused to take delivery on the Chuck E.

Cheese animatronics that had been shipped there.

Chuck E.

Cheese sued Shoba's Pizza for breach of contract.

Shoba's Pizza sued back for misrepresentation.

The two companies would eventually settle in Chuck E.

Cheese's favor, but the conflict between the two of them became known as the Pizza Wars.

We had a map of the United States in the hallway where there were push pins of where Shobiz was opening.

That's Jewel Kamen again, who was working at costuming and designing characters for Chuck E.

Cheese at the time.

It was really a competition between the two,

Whether it made financial sense to open

a store, you know, half a mile from a showbiz, it didn't matter.

You know, we were doing it.

The competition, fueled more by ego than strategy, began to take its toll on both companies, who by 1982 were not doing well.

The 100th opening in Dallas was going to be the biggest party that you've ever seen.

There was a ribbon cutting.

There were dignitaries from the city, a marching band, and Billy Bob, the costumed character Billy Bob, was flown in in a helicopter.

I wore the suit.

But the next day, after the big party, we got the message.

We are losing money.

There will be a significant tightening of our belt after this 100th opening is over.

There will be no more wasted money.

We're going to start cutting back on everything.

We're going to fire useless people.

We are in financial trouble.

The flagging fortunes of Shobiz and Chuck E.

Cheese are often attributed to the video game crash of 1983, when for a host of reasons the video game market just bottomed out.

But no one directly involved thinks that that mattered very much.

The chains were already struggling by then, with mismanagement, overspending, fading novelty, and the simple fact that there were just way too many of them.

I mean, how many robot pizza arcades can one country support?

We pretty much figured out that we needed about a half a million of population per store.

Nolan Bushnell again.

And with Brock and us both in, there was too many stores

and they cannibalized each other.

In 1983, within the space of a few quarters, the Chuck E.

Cheese franchises became radically unprofitable.

And even Bushnell admits that he got cocky.

Arrogance is not a pretty thing.

And I'd just come off two major wins.

I thought I could do no wrong and I started sailboat racing.

Bushnell lost the confidence of the board and got pushed out.

Six months later, in March of 1984, Chuck E.

Cheese declared bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, Shoba's Pizza was barely holding on.

Robert Brock had also been sidelined, and Aaron Fecter, who still owned 20% of the company, was constantly arguing with the new executives about how to save the business.

And I was vetoing, and I had veto power, all of the stupid ideas they were coming up with.

They came up with their

last plan, and that was the plan to merge with Chuck E.

Cheese.

And that's what happened.

Shoba's Pizza took over what was left of Chuck E.

Cheese.

This was the end of the pizza war, and Shoba's Pizza was the winner.

It survived, and Chuck E.

Cheese did not.

Its victory seemed to promise a future in which the kids' birthday party place would be Shoba's Pizza's, not Chuck E.

Cheese's.

To promise a future in which no one even remembered what Chuck E.

Cheese was.

But that's not what happened.

And if we had just let them breathe their last gasp,

Chuck E.

Cheese would have closed and the name would have been relegated to history.

Instead, Shobiz Pizza decided to become Chuck E.

Cheese.

And it decided to do that in part because of its relationship to Aaron and the Rockefeller explosion.

Soon after the merger, the Shobiz executives approached Aaron.

At some point they said, Aaron, we own the intellectual property for Chuck E.

Cheese's characters, but we don't own the Rockefeller explosion.

Remember, this was the original deal.

Showbiz got to use the characters royalty-free forever, but Aaron retained ownership of them.

I said, yeah, that's right.

It's a good deal for all of us because

you can't manage the Rockefeller explosion.

You're not the artist that created it.

Yeah, but we want to own the

intellectual property.

I thought they were bluffing.

All they were offering me is that my characters would remain a part of society.

So they were giving me nothing and they were taking my Rocket Fire Explosion from me.

Nope, not going to do it.

He kept his characters and he sold his stock.

That left Shoba's Pizza with only the Chuck E.

Cheese characters, who they did eventually turn into their mascot.

My characters were clearly better than Chuck E.

Cheese characters.

It seemed to me that only the craziest idiot would ever choose the Chuck E.

Cheese characters over the Rocketfire Explosion.

However, I can't really say they're totally stupid because they're still in business.

I guess what they knew, you know what they knew that nobody else knew?

They knew that it didn't matter how crummy the animation was.

Just didn't matter.

After severing ties with Shobiz, Aaron went out and tried to sell the 80 sets of the Rockefeller Explosion that he still had.

Nobody wanted them.

Animatronics was over.

Video games were over.

The pizza restaurants with video games and pizza were over.

You know, it was just just the thing was over

with the merger of showbiz pizza and chuck e cheese in 1985 all of the rockifire explosion characters who had been poised to survive went extinct and all of the chuck e cheese characters who had been poised to go extinct survived but the chuck e cheese characters survived sudden extinction only to die out slowly Scott Wilson, who you heard from earlier, kept voicing Chuck E.

Cheese characters until the early 1990s.

The Shobiz people were restaurateurs.

They weren't entertainment guys.

They struggled with that.

They just really didn't understand.

Never the kind of

attention

or, you know, priority that in the early days where the shows were everything.

I mean,

it was all about the show.

It was all about the character.

This is at the heart of what happened to Jared Sanchez's favorite character, the King, both a soldier in and a victim of the Pizza Wars.

The king was introduced in 1982, during the height of the pizza wars, when both companies were spending way too much money.

He stopped being manufactured in 1984 when Chuck E.

Cheese went under, though before that there was a short-lived last-ditch attempt to turn him into King Cat, it's with a K, a Michael Jackson-themed character.

After Shobiz bought Chuck E.

Cheese, no new kings were ever manufactured.

But until around 1989 or 1990, the company continued recording music for him to perform.

That's around when Scott Wilson recorded 18 to 20 Elvis songs for the character.

That's the last set of songs that were programmed for the king.

The rumor among Chuck E.

Cheese fans about why the king was decommissioned has always been that Chuck E.

Cheese didn't have the rights to Elvis' catalog.

But Wilson had negotiated permission directly from the Elvis estate.

So the rights weren't the problem.

What really seems to have done the king in is a larger streamlining.

For a few years, the parent company had allowed both Chuck E.

Cheese's and Showbiz Pizzas to coexist.

But in 1990, they finally began to convert the remaining Shobiz Pizza stores into Chuck E.

Cheeses, part of a process called concept unification.

The stores were also remodeled so that they no longer had lounge rooms.

This is when the king starts to disappear, though it would kick around in some stores until 1995.

Over the following decades, the other animatronics became less and less central to the store as well.

In 2017, the company announced they would phase them out completely, stating, the kids stopped looking at the animatronics years and years ago.

It's easy to believe that the animatronics, remarkably eerie-looking creatures from the mechanical age, couldn't hold kids' attention in a digital one.

But I want to point out who that quote doesn't mention, parents.

The whole reason the animatronics existed in the first place was to get parents in the door, to convince them an arcade was appropriate for children, and then to give them something to do while they were there, or at least a place to hide out and have a drink.

But Chuck E.

Cheese was so successful at kiddifying the arcade, making it alone seem wholesome, that the place didn't need the animatronics anymore.

It had simultaneously become clear that it didn't matter if parents were entertained at a Chuck E.

Cheese.

In fact, they probably would never be, but they'd tolerate it on behalf of their children anyway.

The idea that at a family entertainment center, parents should be entertained too was central to the original concept.

But by 2017, that idea was so long gone, it wouldn't have occurred to anyone to mention it.

In a present-day Chuck E.

Cheese, the only sign of the place's animatronic history is one vestigial Chuck E, who in the store I went to was standing behind a barrier on an untrafficked part of the floor, mute, blinking, barely moving, an unimpressive oddity.

I pointed him out to my daughter, but she wasn't interested.

There was a TV screen right next to him, and he couldn't compete.

Chuck E.

Cheese's animatronics, to say nothing of Shoba's pizzas, would now be almost entirely forgotten if not for the passionate adults who still love them.

Adults like Jared Sanchez.

Jared went to military high school and then joined the Navy.

When he got out, he set up a search alert for the king on eBay, and eventually, in the mid-aughts, he got a hit.

A guy who was trying to sell the king for $25,000.

You'd think that would be like, oh, hell no, you know, but I'm like, how can I get $25,000?

He couldn't, but he called the guy who was selling it.

You know, I'm talking on the phone to this guy who doesn't know who I am.

And I'm like, this is just, I really, really would like this.

He's like, yeah, when you win the lottery, you come and call me again, okay?

The seller took the king on and off eBay for the next nine years, dropping the price significantly.

Jared stayed in communication with him the whole time, eventually sharing some childhood photos of himself with the king.

And so in 2015, in November, he calls me up and he's like, Jared, I have more pictures of you than I have of my grandchildren, okay?

I was talking to my wife.

We're going to make your dream come true.

We're going to, you know, we'll let you make payments, whatever.

So thanks to the internet, which has kept so many childhood obsessions alive, Jared's dream finally came true.

He got his king.

The only thing was, it was in terrible shape.

It hadn't been turned on since 1994 and had been sitting in storage ever since.

The fabric and the fur were torn, some of it had dry rot, and a squirrel had been living inside its eyes.

Whatever, I'll remake it.

When I want something, I will figure out and I will do it.

Jared had no background in engineering, but he taught himself to reverse engineer the whole thing, restoring and repairing the costume and the exterior features, figuring out how to retool the mechanics and get them working, and then learning how to program it with new movements.

I can't get it to move.

And so, the first video I ever did on YouTube was the neck.

The neck was working.

I'm like, oh, hell yeah.

The neck's working.

All right, looks like he's waking up.

Hey, King, you waking up?

You feeling better?

All right.

More to come.

Then later down the line, like two months later, the mouse started working.

And then I was able to program it.

And it is pretty painstaking painstaking to program.

As Jared was doing all of this, his work life was getting intense.

He lives in Florida, but he was commuting to another state and he was away from his family too much.

He had to lay off a lot of people and things became even more fraught after Trump's election.

He had a breakdown.

I was afraid of talking to anybody.

Something

there was a switch went off in my head and I became a totally different person.

I was very

quiet and I didn't talk much and I did not want to go go to any store.

Went to my doctor and she's like, yeah, you're taking some time off.

You're not going back there.

And I'm like, okay, so I'm here at my house.

I've already, you know, got the king up and working to a degree.

And then we started, I was like, well, I look up Weird Al.

I've always been a Weird Al fan.

And I'm like, well, parody.

I could change the lyrics and give give him a voice.

And his voice in the beginning was really bad.

Okay.

The singing was really bad.

Everything was really bad, but it didn't matter because I would make that up with my imagination.

Jared started making videos for the songs, some of which he appeared in, and putting them on YouTube.

There's this one country song,

and it's called People Are Crazy by Billy Currington, I believe it is.

And

I did a parody of it, and it really helped me.

Robots are good.

Beer is great.

And people are crazy.

Wow, great job, Jared.

You were only off a couple of times on cube.

It really helped bring back Jared.

By talking to a robot and becoming, like, I guess, a character.

helped me

break my shell that had been created.

Jared now owns multiple versions of the king.

It turns out, when you become known as the guy with the king, people tell you when they have kings to get rid of.

He acquired one from a roller skating rink and then got a message from someone who said he had one in storage and he'd give it to Jared for free.

It would help him clean out the storage space.

We open it up and there wasn't one king in there.

There was two.

Okay.

There was the neon, the original neon, the king sign.

There was two of those.

I mean, talk about a dream come true, like literally, like living a dream of a dream that I've had before, you know?

Everybody, we have just discovered something.

It's big.

Um,

I wonder what this is.

Another king head?

Another king?

King four!

He's given each of the robots their own personalities, and sometimes they all perform together.

Jarrett, who works as an optician, hopes that one day making content around the king will be his full-time job.

He thinks he and the king have something special to offer.

Nobody has

made like a show, an online show, a streaming show of animatronics interacting with humans.

So if a man can put on a purple dinosaur outfit, well, what the hell can a 10-foot animatronic do?

Jared's parody videos with the king look particularly good, but they're not the only videos to feature rehab Chuck E.

Cheese and Shoba's pizza characters.

In the mid to late aughts, a Rockefeller Explosion fan bought and refurbished a set of the band and started putting videos of them singing along to popular songs on YouTube, where they went viral.

There's another guy in rural Mississippi who has perfectly recreated a Shobiz Pizza Place there, which includes some Chuck E.

Cheese characters like the King.

And then there's Aaron Fector.

After cutting ties with Shobiz, his company has slowly dwindled from 370 full-time employees to just him.

In the years since, he's worked on an early email platform he titled the Anti-Gravity Freedom Machine.

He opened an animatronics pizza place himself for a few years.

And he worked on an experimental fuel called hydrillium that caused a serious explosion in his warehouse not too long ago.

But he is also still making songs and videos for the Rockefeller explosion.

Hey, we got the Rockefeller explosion up here for you tonight.

And that means no fighting.

And that includes tickle fighting.

Aaron gives tours of his warehouse warehouse to Rockefeller fans who communicate with him constantly and the Rockefeller do pop up in music videos from time to time.

But I asked him how he feels about the fact that the Rockefeller characters have largely been forgotten.

I actually, maybe I'm in denial.

Maybe it's because I'm around them all the time and I'm around the fans.

And as far as I'm concerned, the characters still exist and people still love them.

And they come to see them and I still write shows for them and I make videos of them and thousands of people see them and love them.

And if I can get it to grow enough, I can create a profitable business out of it again.

And my unprofitable business, which is really a lot of fun and I love doing, and that's an important element too, of any business you start, you need to love it like you love your podcasts.

I went to Chuck E.

Cheese for the first time for this story, and I was pleasantly surprised.

To be fair, my expectations were extremely low.

Like they could not have been lower.

I was prepared for something dingy and chaotic and loud, for full sensory overload.

Instead, it was just slightly worn down and friendly.

Most of the games had analog parts, there was skee-ball and a few simple rides, and you could redeem your tickets for cheap prizes.

Even the pizza wasn't as bad as I was expecting.

I mean, it wasn't good, but it really was edible.

I would never go without a child, but she had a good time, and I could imagine killing an hour or two there again.

Still, there was nothing, and I mean nothing magical about it.

And magical is a word that Jared uses.

Isn't that magical to see something that you know in reality is not real

and it's moving, talking, looking around?

I mean, that's the magic of animatronics in general.

Over and over as I was reporting this piece, I kept asking people if the animatronics had ever seemed like the future.

And no one could quite bring themselves to say yes.

Aaron Fector, the person who most views this kind of work as an art form, occasionally calls some of them primitive.

Jared was always totally unimpressed with all of the other characters at Chuck E.

Cheese.

All the people I spoke with who worked there talked of the animatronics with affection while also freely admitting that they were funky and limited and nowhere near as good as Disney's stuff.

The animatronics were never the future.

They were what people could do at the time, an intermediate step before whatever came next.

And what came next was a gargantuan leap in digital technology that helped completely outmode this kind of animatronics.

But in being so completely overtaken by time and technology, the animatronics have accrued a new kind of strangeness.

I don't know that they're magical, but they really are alien, and their former popularity makes the past seem kind of alien too.

So does the whole early history of Chuck E.

Cheese.

We used to like things that looked like that.

People could create businesses that worked like what?

The past isn't just a foreign country.

Maybe it's another planet.

The fact that the animatronics were always always so imperfect, though, does make them a fascinating obsession, one that's necessarily fueled by a deep personal nostalgia.

And that nostalgia has done something very neat.

Animatronics were originally created with adults in mind, even though it was kids who loved them.

And now, after all this time, it's finally adults who love them most.

I mean, yes, as a child, I loved the king, but I would never have imagined this.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This podcast was written by me and was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also did an illustration for the episode.

Cleo Levin was our research assistant.

Decodering is produced by Evan Chung, Katie Shepard, Max Friedman, and me.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

If you're curious about what these animatronics actually look like, and you should be, please go to our show page, slate.com/slash decodering, and click on the episode, and you'll see some great stuff.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

A very special thank you to Jared Sanchez for all of his help and candor and for the Decodering theme video he made for our live show.

Thank you also to Arielle Stevenson, Alexis Madrigal, Mike Scherpenberger, Kathy Hopp, Brett Whitcomb, Brad Thomason, Mike Viniello, Jeremy Saussier, Carol Heltoski, and Faith Smith, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you in two weeks.

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