Chuck E. Cheese: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of My Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We are your two alarming yet avuncular animatronic animals of anodyne apocryphile. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan Runt in the arms race of alliterative intros, fired another volley and Jordan's. Today we're doing a rare for us return to the end More corner of the t m I universe for a discussion of the uniquely American phenomenon that merged the culinary, video game and plastic ballpit industries and briefly revolutionized childcare as we knew it. That's right, We're talking about Charles Entertainment Cheese, or as he's better known, Chuck E. Cheese, the pizza rat and animatronic nightmare on Canny Valley Horror Show. You know, he's called Charlie in Australia because Chuck is so synonymous with vomit there. I didn't know that. I did not know that, but you know what I feel like, I always see maybe I'm just imagining this, but the animatronic and cartoon versions of Chuck e Chees giving the thumbs up, and in Australia the thumbs up is basically the middle finger. So well, Charles is what a little stinker he is in Australia, he's got a little rat bastard. Um. You know, I have such fond memories of attending birthday parties at the Charles Central Pennsylvania abode and forming my lifelong attachments to music and pizza and rats. I don't have any traumatic memories from this. I but do you? I have very little memories at all of this because I, um, my hometown in Central my Stitusetts was very spoiled for wholesome activities. Um against tiny, tiny New England town right come from. I think we just got our second stoplight like a few years ago. We didn't even have a grocery store for a lot of my very early years. But we had a full scale, hundred year old amusement park called Whaleham Park, complete with water slow yes you've talked about this before here. We had a drive in movie theater. We had not one, but two bowling alleys. We had a video arcade, and then a mall nearby that also wasn't in town, but I had another video arcade too, mini golf places, and a roller rink. All of these were ten minutes from my house. Basically, um, exactly. None of these are open anymore. The last of them, the Bowling Alley, closed last year, which is you know, this is where we punched in Joni Mitchell's laugh. Um paved Big Gel Taxi corner. Yes, paved paradise, which in my case was a combination bowling alley and mini golf and put up I don't know what they put up, but anyway, So yeah, whenever I tell my friends about the they're always like, oh wow, and the one do you love the fifties and sixties because that's basically when you grew up And it's true. Um, so I really wasn't exposed to the original pizza rat. The big corporate kid's birthday emporium in my area at the time was called Discovery Zone. You have Discovery zones, okay, well, no Chucky Cheese beat Discovery Zone. Discovery Zone was a big everybody came at Charles Man everyone there, you know, and and he killed he crushed them all yeah, God, I mean rats, dude. Yeah, no, Discovery Zone actually flowed has failed, and Charles hung on I'm gonna call him Charles. Yeah, I mean it was funny. Once all the mom and pop amusements in town started shutting down. When I was in like high school, a Chuck E Cheese did open in our local mall, but I really only went in there when I was working on like a babysitter and brought kids that I was watching in there, and uh, yeah, I don't know. My main thought, after years of going to all these kind of rinky dink um places, was that Chuck E Cheese has kind of seemed sort of souls soulless. Yeah, I thought it was a little soulas. And the pizzas real bad, feel bad. And there's the whole rumor that they like recycled pizza, yes, which has been debunked, thank you. But if you look at the pizzas, like none of the slices fit together, yeah, it looks like they're taken from I sure. I mean, yes, there's a horrifying Uncanny Valley aspect to any animatronic stuff, But you know, I hope to disprove that assessment. With this episode, which shows how much blood, sweat, and tears went into pizza. Wasn't animatronic, High pizza was real, and none was all together. It's not a circle. They're from different pies. Well. From the company's roots in one of the most iconic video game brands of all time, to the semi obscure Animatronics whiz kid responsible for the famous robotic band who later blew up a unk of his inventory trying to invent an alternative cooking fuel, to the horrifying Lea dickenziean official backstory of the rat. Here's everything you didn't know about Chuck E Cheese. I never thought I would hear you could say that it's never gonna get old. Uh. Any discussion of Charles must begin with the man who birthed him, Nolan K. Bushnell. Bushnell was born in Clearfield, Utah, to a middle class family who are predictably members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints a k. The Mormons, and he bounced around Utah universities in the early to mid sixties, eventually graduating with a bachelor's in electrical engineering. As a young Mormon, Bushnell's dream is to become an imagineer, Disney's catch all term for its theme park designers and architects, and he worked at Lagoon Amusement Park, about eighteen miles north of Salt Lake City to put himself through college. He was made manager of the game's department there and familiarized himself with the ins and outs of both the earliest forms of arcade games and the theme park business in general. But Bushnell up sticks from Utah, moved with his first wife, Paula, and their two daughters to California in nine to follow his bliss. This is when we punch in uh fortunate song, or if you're going as if well, we always punch in credence. That just works for everything. Unable to get hired at Disney, Bushnell took a job at a division of Ampex called Video File in Santa Clara. He explained to Medium in eighteen, I became infatuated with a game of Go, and we drive to San Francisco every other weekend and spend basically most of Sunday morning playing Go at the old Buddhist church by Bush Street. Did you know Go? I don't explain to me about Go. It's an old game from Chinese antiquity, incredibly hard to play it. It almost looks like checkers. Um you have black and white little um. Oh, I've seen this and I think I've tried to play it before. But it was very smart, smart, very hard. But it had like a resurgence in the sixties as part of you know, anything that was from Eastern cultures was examined in California around that time, and it was like a real like hippie thing. Yeah, yeah, that's scans. And while at one of these Sunday morning go marathons, Bushnell met a guy who worked at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and he said to medium. One day we got to talking and he said, have you ever heard of Space War? I was like space War. The first time I played Space War was at the University of Utah in n Or nineteen sixty six. We left and drove up to the Artificial Intelligence Lab and played until all hours of the night. Space War to the Unfamiliar is a space combat video game developed in two and written for the newly installed d E C P d P one computer at m I T. It was a huge hit in the tight knit early programming community of the nineteen sixties, and since its code was in the public domain, was widely recreated on other systems, and so bush now seeking to recreate the thrill of playing Space War on a smaller and therefore more monetize herble scale, in October nine enlisted a guy named Ted Dadby because he was really really good at analog circuitry in Bushnell's words, and roped in a company called Nutting Associates the only which phrasing guys come on, which was the only corn operated machine manufacturer west of the Rockies, and by nineteen seventy nine the first coin operated arcade video game, Computer Space made this nascent partnership three point five million dollars and empowered them to start a Torii, which is named for a Japanese term borrowed from the game of Go, which is it basically equivalent of saying check in chess. My sister's college dorm was on Nutting Street, and they kept having to replaced the sign because the guys from the frat houses would keep going up and stealing it. Yeah, which tracks by recruiting their first engineer, Alan alcorn Atari set out to develop a workable arcade game that would be the springboard for a more commercial concept. The game they developed, though as a means to a later end, became one of the most iconic video games of all time upon its release in two. That was a little game called Pong. It is nuts how old Pong is? Like, it's just crazy to me to think that they had screen based video games. Yeah, that's so crazy to me. What's Bushnell's law? Jordan's This law is uh. It's an aphorism generally attributed to the Atari founder Nolan Bushnell says, all the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth quarter. Oh it's like life. Really. Yeah, But in the back of Bushnell's mind, it all came back to the roar of the grease paint and the smell of the crowd. I think that's backwards, but that's it's not. I googled it. I googled it. Roar the crowd and the smell of the grease paint. That's the correct phrase. But the this is a joke, Yes it is. It's a that's the musical. The musical is called come On, You're a theater dork. It's musical that has the it's the spoonerism. It has it flipped. It's called the roar of grease paint. The smell of the crowd. Huh, come on, come on, that's the that's the musical. That feeling good. They need a Simon song. I okay, and it comes from Wow. Come on, damn it, run dog. Bushnell's associate, Daphne, He said, no one had this brilliant idea. He's a Carney guy, Back Mountains Carney, and he thought a pizza part are carnival type pizza parlor would be a great thing to do. He liked that kind of atmosphere and he always wanted to build a restaurant that had that in it. And Dad they added a Fast Company in seventeen. His whole thing was a pizza parlor with talking beer barrels. You imagine calling anyone a back Mountain carny mountain. Can I forget how that relationship ended. I'm guessing not well. Bush Now rather loftily explained his pet project to Fast Company said, throughout history, there was a celebration, and the celebration had food, drink, and games without exception, whether you were talking about the summer Solstice with primitive Man to the circuses in Rome. There was always an entertainment element. I always felt there was something that was lacking in restaurants. I wanted to add a dimension of fun to the act of having a meal and a rat. Well, okay, well we we we can't really have people killed like we could in gladiatorial times, so so what about a robot rats the next best thing? Bushnell told Mel magazine. Atari was selling coin operated games for one thousand, five hundred dollars to two thousand dollars, and during their lifetime they were in fifty dollars. I felt that I wanted to be on that side of the equation as well, but I didn't want to compete with the people I was selling games to who are already in the existing locations. I had two goals to create a big, freestanding arcade and to have a place that was kid friendly. We knew kids wanted to play the games, but they had no place to do that, as bars weren't possible and arcades were teenage hangouts, and Bushnell I supposedly at one point towards with the idea banning teenagers altogether from what would become Chuck E Cheese, and I sort of had that sense myself as an eighteen year old bringing the kids, like baby sat at the Chuck E Cheese. I got the sense that I wasn't supposed to be there, But I was eighteen and in the suburbs, and maybe I just didn't feel like I belonged anywhere. Now poetic, No, I mean, the whole the whole history of arcades is really interesting. And you know, they evolved from like the car They did evolved from the carny atmosphere and sort of the midway and boardwalk style stuff. But you know they did become um basically training grounds for kids to who couldn't yet drink. So there is an interesting liminal age zone there. As far as the American cultural conception of teenagers now with rats, you know, pinball was illegal in New York City from like the forties to the seventies, right because they were just like, we can't give teenagers a reason to congregate. Well that and also it's a training crown for bars and gambling. Really good, good, I say. But back to Bushnell, He's quoted as saying, I decided pizza was the right food because it had a delay time that would allow for gameplay. Every food has delay time. I mean, it's like pizza. I don't know, cheap any idiot can make it. It's hard to screw up. I'm gonna go with that instead, Bushnell continued. Back then, the most successful pizza parlor in the Bay Area was Pizza and Pipes, which had a deconstructed Wurlitzer theater organ It was extremely successful when they had an organist, but it was quiet when there was no organist. Kids love organs. Everyone knows this. Kids love pipe or kids. So sorry, Yeah, I wanted entertainment that didn't involve labor. When I took my kids at Disneyland and I saw the Tiki Room, I felt that could be the solution, a mechanical, computer operated entertainment system. All this seems way more complicated than it has to be. Well in a way, I mean it's really the r text of every tech streaming middleman. Now. They're like, I want the money from art to come to me without the trouble of artists. I want people to come to my place and spend money because they're interested in live music. I don't want to deal with musicians. You know who does well fair uh. Funnily enough, though other than pizza and pipes, musical pizza parlors had an extensive history in the Bay Area. Shakey's Pizza. Do you know about Shakey's. I don't know about shake He's, No, let me tell you about. Shakey's Pizza was founded in Sacramento in nineteen fifty four by Sherwood Shakey Johnson and Ed Plumber. Johnson was World War Two veteran whose nickname came from the nerve damage he sustained after abount with malaria front of the pod. Nerve damage. Uh. Johnson played traditional jazz piano in Shakey's to entertain patrons, and this evolved into him hiring musicians to play for them. And this is actually funny that it turns into that Shakey's launched a renaissance in traditional like Dixieland jazz in the Bay Area. They had a radio program that popularized the music as well. And Shakey's Pizza is named in the American Banjo Museum in oak Lahoma for hoping to popularize banjo's throughout the mid century. Ah yeah, and they they. The other thing that they did was they would have the repertoire, the lyrics to the repertoire that the band is playing printed on their menus. So the whole idea is that you would go there and there will be a band playing, and then everybody could kind of join in and sing along. Dinner theater. Yeah, it reminds me of that Italian joint where the Wonders play and that thing you do. Yeah, like the classic red sauce joint. Yea, all that stuff, all these dinner clothes, all that stuff was so popular back before, like CBGBs made combining food service and music disreputable, but like, yeah, bring that back, bring back the copa man. Oh, I know I can still some bum that closed. Although I would imagine during our fifteen twenty years in New York City it was not a fun place to be. Yeah, the bad kind of rat um. By the end of nineteen seventy three, Dabney had left the company that they had found it together. He told NPR that Has Bushnell took over more and more of the company's operation and direction. Quote that was the end of our relationship. But in six bush now then the sole owner of the company, sold Atari to Warner Compation billion. He wanted to continue funding and developing what would become the Atari, but he also wanted to establish his rat based pizza empire. Dabney continued to the Computer History Museum and his interview. Bushnell finally got the money from Warner Communications, and he decided to do that pizza time theater thing. And so he'd asked me if I wanted to go in with him. I said no, no, no, no, I'd rather be your friend than your partner. So he says, okay, well, at least go take a look at my pizza parlor and tell me what you think. So I did, and it was crappy. It was dirty, it was noisy, the pizza wasn't very good, and this was a brand new place. So I came back and I told him it was dirty. He said, I'll take care of that. I'll fix that. I said, also, it was so damn noisy, I couldn't tell when my pizza was ready. And the pizza is not very good. He says, oh, mediocre pizza is good enough. That's true, as every pizza parlor located in any amount of square pakreage near a bar will tell you, yes, it is. According to article and s f Gate, Bushnell spent two point five million on R and D for his pizza, his rat pizza idea with a company that made animatronics. You know, I'm being a bit disous, being a bit disingenuous here because actually, as of nineteen seventy four, he wanted to call this Coyote Pizza because he wanted these costumed characters and he thought that Coyote would work. And so this is a very funny for what for the bit? For the bid for the bit? Jordan, he did this all for the bit? No, he was I think there's I mean, yes, he's like a tech doric loser, but there's something very sweet to me about being like about like working at a theme park as a kid and wanting to be like a Disney imagineer and everything else, but everything else in your life just getting going back to this dream, Like, yeah, I made a tari. I made like one of the most successful video game companies of all time. I've made scads of money, But what I really want to do he's the animatronic pizza parlor. I had no idea well, first of all, that Atari was an American based company. I assumed it was Japanese. And I also had no idea that the guy who created a tari had anything to do with let alone founded well passionate about chuck cheese, about pizza rat. Now we're putting the we're putting the horse ahead of the car, the cart ahead of the horse. Here. But what people of our generation no is Chucky Cheese is actually derived from the Chucky cheese competitor that sprung up, So let me finish. He was at the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions convention when he saw what he thought was a coyote costume. He ordered one, and when it arrived in the mail and he started displaying it to ATARI employees, was shocked to find out that what he had ordered was a rat costume. Coyotes, rats, I don't know animals, so funny to me. He was like that, guys, it's a coyote. And apparently they pulled the bottom half of this costume out and saw the long, slithery naked rat tail and we're like, Nolan, it's a rat costume. But he kept on, he kept he kept it, kept into his office, named it Rick Rat because he was not an ideas man, and this was This costume was occasionally donned by Atari employees at various company functions, so Coyote Pizza had to go away. Uh Dabney, who was still developing the concept at this point, brought in a guy named Gene Landrum to help. Uh jeem is this electronics gaming veteran who had done the rollout planned for the attar And he told Mail Magazine, I went to Disneyland to do some research. They had hundreds of games, and you could go to the park and see all these animatronics, like the Country Bear Jamboree, and of course they had Mickey Mouse. So I said to myself, I got it. They have Mickey Mouse, I can do Chucky Cheese. It sounds the same. So that's where I got it from. And Nolan had a rat costume in his office, so it worked out. They also say there's something in that. The repeated line is when you say Chucky cheese, you smile three times. Yeah, that's some corporate speak. Another factor in changing the name, Landrum explained Fast Company, was we're making this a kid's place. We can't have a rat. A rat is too predatory and too lethal. Bushell did this oral history for the Smithsonian and he said, so, I said, Rick Rat's pizza went into the marketing department. They said, no way, They said, rats are dirty. This is a restaurant. You can't even say rat and food. At the same time, I said, well, okay, can it be a rat, but we'll just de emphasize his rat nous. They said, well, maybe that'll work. How much of your life has been de emphasizing your rat tycle none. Um. We could say in some ways that Gene was the founder of Chuck E Cheese, pushing all told fast Company because he was the guy I hired to bring Chucky Cheese into fruition. He was the guy that found the pizza recipes, He rented the facility, hired the first pizza. He was very, very instrumental. Lander also wrote the menu, designed the floor plan of the first restaurants, did all the stuff like revenue streams and gross margins. Well, Bushnell was sitting around playing with the rat costume. Well, I have I have a question, and that the term spirit animal gets thrown around way too much these days. But rats for you. Having known you as long as I have, it really seems to be Yes, it seems to have a special place for you. Wrote a song several in the band that we were playing. Yes through several I love you rat that. I want to ask you more about what rats mean to you. Well, they're survivors first of all. Uh, you know, and I don't know. They were just well represented in media that I consumed growing up. I often think of Templeton, Templeton, Yes from Charlotte's Web, Ratigan, Ratigan from The Great Mouse Detective, voiced by Vincent Price, Christopher Lee some horror icon did that? Uh no, you know, I don't know. I'll say they're cute. They're cute guys. I like them. And like I said, tenacious, do you relate to rats? Oh? Very much, so, very much so. So Yeah, well well represented, diverse range of of rats in children's media. Um, that's the big three, Templeton, Ratigan and Chuck E Cheese. Yeah. What about is the father sounded Holy Spirit? Which is which media rats you've mentioned? Oh gosh, Um, Templeton's probably the first, right, So he's the father? Okay, rat Agan the Holy Ghost because it sounds cool. Yeah, wow, Yeah, that's your new band name, Holy Rat Ghost Rat, Holy Go Rat Rat Agan the Holy Ghost Rat again the Holy Ghost verbal contract. That's a trademarked We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Anyway, Yeah, let's get this back on the track. Well. Guided by a current copy of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions Directory, Landrum also started sus sing out who would build the animatronics at this restaurant would be anchored around by virtue of being the only company that responded to his request, Harold gold Branson's Fantasy Forest Manufacturing was tapped, despite their primary expertise being mascot costumes rather than animatronics. So they just had all these mascot costumes. Just almost stick some pistons in. There'll be fine. Yeah, okay uh. After bringing the gold Branson Corporation on board to create the costumes and animated puppets, Landroom hired Bob Allen Black, who was an artist who worked previously with Atari. Bush No essentially handed him to Rick the rat costume and said, yeah, make everything look like this. Ah. Starry artists Bob Flammate designed Chucky Cheese and other characters. Why engineers such as Larry Emmons and Ron Miller of Atari's Grass Valley California, think take. Scian Engineering provided the mechanical designs for them. Mike Hatcher programmed many of the robots movements, which were powered bynumatic pistons and triggered by computer controls from signals on a prerecorded reel to real tape that could be shipped to each store. At first, the characters were essentially animatronic portraits that spoke and moved out of frames mounted on the wall, but then animated torsos were seen from the waist up, and finally the full body robotic band, which didn't debut until many years after Chuck E. Cheese first opened. The first voice of Charles was John Woodlocke, who modeled the rast demeanor after a nineteen forties film character named Mugs McGuinness played by Leo Gorsey in the East Side Kids. I might have a fact about this guy? Is that where we get the classic like, oh a wise guy, A like that kind of like joysy accent? I think so? Uh. Leo Gorsey was um somebody who was initially included in the Sergeant Pepper montage, but he refused to allow his license to be included unless they paid him for under Bucks and the Beatles didn't want to start a precedent, so they airbrushed him out, and I believe he's on the back row. You can just see like a little bit of blue where clearly a head should be, and that was where he was. I believe there are a few other people that they cut out. Yeah, they cut out Gandhi because they were worried that it was just so soon after the bigger than Jesus um controversy that they thought having Gondhi on an album cover would be a bad idea because Chuckie Cheese later got in trouble for saying he was bigger than Jesus. They had a Brian Wilson mannequin that they didn't add, and uh, I think they had a cut up made of Hitler from John And for the same reason that they didn't put Gandhi in, they decided it's probably not the best idea anyway, as the ark of the universe must turn to my beloved Beatles. Anyway, the original voice of Chuckie Cheese based his voice on that character from you Know. On old forties gangster movie East Side Kids, originally Charles Entertainment, Cheese was pictured holding a cane and a cigar with a cigar incorporated into both a walk around costume and the animatronic version of the character, but it was officially discontinued in nineteen eighty when Chuck E. Cheese gave up smoking during the Great American Smokeout campaign. You know that giant rat we have walking around cracking wise in a Jersey accent. Lose the cigar. That's the most off putting thing about him anyway. The original voice of Chuck E. Cheese, John Woodluck, voiced him from ninety seven through four and on the original demo Real I Guess. He performed the voices for all of the characters at Chuck E. Cheese, but production decided to go with different voice actors to decrease the amount of post production work required, and Woodluck was allowed to choose which character who wanted to keep working on, and perhaps wisely, he chose the titular rat. Mike Hatcher was the man behind the original portrait style animatronics, but chl told The Atlantic Mike was a really good programmer, a puppeteer, and a screenwriter. He wrote and designed the authoring system that programmed the units. He'd sit back with the Impressario and programmed the movements one at a time, basically to coordinate with the tape. San Jose Mercury News ran a short story about hatch In that revealed it took him three hours of programming for every one minute of animation. There were often two movements going on at once during the shows. And also Hatchard worked the graveyard shift because he had to troubleshoot all this stuff after it closed. You have to see what have you seen? Like the original reginal original post one. Oh yeah, they're amazing. They're so beautiful. I love them. I want this in my homewman. I just said to yeah, it looks like a drag queen. It looks like a rat drag queen like with the lidded the heavy lidded eyes. M beautiful. Uh. All the characters were built on neumatics, i e. Pushing compressed air through a series of tubes. Factories are run on pneumatic Bushnell told the Atlantic components are cheap and they never wear out. They just run and run and run. It's probably the most robust motion technology in the world. You start, who called the Internet a series of tubes? God it was I don't remember. Ted Stevens, Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska. You start with the armature and then you dress it, he continued, And if you want some fun nightmare, if you you should google Chucky Cheese armature. Uh, pretty much. They were the same. Inside. There were two different jaws if you're a dog versus Mr Bunch. If you were a snout animal, you had a different jaw. We also had one for beaks. They just look like like furbies if you take the skin off. I did google Chucky Cheese armature, and I wish I hadn't good Uh fun. Fact in Insider reached out to Chucky Cheese Is corporate office for the official backstory of the name Charles Entertainment Cheese and was told, Unfortunately, we don't believe that Charles has ever been on any official literature or documentation we can provide to you by public relations manager Christal DuPont I googled this woman to make sure this wasn't a hoax. She has quoted in all of these articles about people getting in fights at Chuck e Cheeses. She's just like, we do not get Charles does not condone violence. Um, yeah, yeah, he clearly does. But she pointed the writer to an official online biography of Mr. Cheese reportedly written in two thousand four to aid in a rebrand of the character, when he was redesigned more mouse like, thus betraying his roots. The rough outlines of it are as follows, and I'm paraphrasing Chuck E. Cheese grew up in an orphanage called St. Marin Era's where It's pretty good right. Where As an orphan, he was unaware of his own birthday but loved celebrating others. When he became of age, he moved to New York City, where he was homeless and sought shelter in a pizzeria where the owner attempted to kill him before hearing his beautiful singing voice, and subsequently decided to keep the rat employed to sing to customers sounded like Tony Clifton Bennett all right whoa. But during his first ever performance, Charles got stage fright and he was booed by the crowd until he saw a child wearing a birthday crown and was moved to sing beautifully. The crowd cheered, and the pizzeria became the most popular spot in town. The last line of the story is Chuck E Cheese hasn't stopped singing or smiling since it's like a star was born. Oh that's like as bad as the Sonic Bible. Wow, well it was Chuck E Cheese is time to shine. The first Chuck E Cheese Pizza Time Theater opened on May seventy seven in San Jose, attended by Mayor Chanet Grave. It was a big thing. Like he was he They were like the guy from Monopoly, from Monopoly, the guy from a Torii is opening a like essentially like an amusement park in San Jose. It's a big deal. Come on. It operated of a five thousand score foot former brokerage building, was loaded with a hundred and twenty thousand dollars worth of arcade games and what is referred to as quote a huge toy Swiss cheese for kids to bounce around on. And of course Charles himself. Early newspaper stories couldn't decide on his exact background there, perhaps baffled by his accent as West Coasters. Uh. The U p I story reads, there's also a character costumes. There's a there's also a character costumes as a giant rat called Chuck E Cheese who escorts customers to the table with a Brooklyn accent. The Sacramento b whoever referred to him as Chuck, a street wise Jersey rat. All right, you can't be both. Pushnell, no doubt, thrilled that his long held most impossible dreams finally become a reality, told The Atlantic, I chose pizza. He's explaining the method to his madness. I chose pizza because of the light time and the build schedule, very few components and not too many ways to screw it up. I didn't have any preconceived idea that I knew how to run a restaurant, but I knew simple was better. Again, it's it's Bushnell's law for video games translated into restaurants. Kind of the reason for doing the animals, believe it or not, was not for the kids, he continued. It was meant to be a head fake for the parents. Kids are really smarter at knowing how to play their parents, and the kids knew if they said I'm gonna go to Chuck E Cheese and play the games, the parents would just see themselves as spending money. But if they said I want to go see Chucky Cheese Entertainment and it's free, they'd be good to go. The other thing was that we want of the parents that have something to amuse themselves while the kids were in the game room. If you listen to the dialogue by these animatronic figures, it was fun, edgy stuff, kind of like toy story written as much for the parents as the kids. Yeah, there was actually quite a divide between Um. Like he talks about some of the earliest scripts were like a little bit more risque like they had like like more vaudeville humor, like Chucky Cheese was kind of a dick to some of his like band like other guys in the band, everybody would like he would like crack like like rip On, I think like the hill Billy Dog. Um And they actually at one point and had a separate room for adults. They had like a separate lounge. They had. The separate room had a performances by Dolly Dimples, who is a hippopotamus keyboardist, singer with breasts who sang torch songs and bantered with people cigar cigarettes, Yes, yes, exactly. Despite the apparent success of the Pilot Store, it caused friction between Warner Brothers in Bushnell. They didn't like him, as they saw it shirking his Atari duties to focus on his pizza rat John ellis Atari's VP of consumer engineering at the time, told Fast Company that Bushnell had told him around ninety six to investigate creating a robot that can mix drinks and bring them to you, which I love um Bushnell told Fast Company, I had spent a lot of money and a lot of engineering time on a lot of projects that I thought were the future, and Warner didn't want to have anything to do with them. So in June of Bushnell bought the first Pizza Time Theater as it was called them in San Jose and all of its intellectual property rights from Warners for a mere five hundred thousand dollars and opened a second location, nearly four times the size of the flagship that was at the time the country's largest pizza parlor. They thought he was a sucker, Bushnell's friend and fellow Atari pioneer Alan Alcorn told Fast Company. But Bushnell quickly incorporated the business into Pizza Time Theater, Inc. And began expanding his empire. In fact, by nove Ber, he'd left a Tory completely to focus on Pizza Time Theater, which he did by pursuing franchising deals across the country, one massive one in particular with Bob Brock, president of Topeka in Management, who had made his fortune as the largest franchise ee of Holiday Inn hotels in the United States. Remember that name, folks. During nine and nineteen seventy nine, Bushnell invested one and a half million dollars of his own money into Pizza Time Theater for two additional locations. But Trouble, But Casey, case and Boys. But Trouble was on the horizon for Bushnell, Charles and the Nesson Empire. They were building together well. Eighties saw the advent of arcade classics like Missile Command, Berserk Centerpede, and perhaps the most famous of all, pac Man. In the next year of its pixelated life, pac Man would earn over one billion dollars in quarters in the United States, much of that at You Guessed at Pizza parlors. Video game designer Washington University professor Dr Anne Bogost wrote at The Atlantic in as tavern culture gave way to the video arcade of the late seventies and early eighties, secondary pursuits like ordering food gave way to the primary pursuit of additional game play. Chuck E. Cheese was an arcade. It's games encouraged continual play and cross cabinet play. It was a restaurant. Food and drink drew players to the locale and kept them there longer. And it was a mid lay. Players collected tickets from games of skill and chance like ski ball, in hopes of exchanging them for prizes. Again, this is just so fascinating me. I mean, the guy created video games and then jumped head first into like the arcade culture of the time. It's it's just so culturally, it's so interesting. Anyway, I'm doing all this, this, all this throat clearing is to explain why Charles quickly had a target on his disgusting rat. Back in the early eighties, the hip off of pizza time theater proliferated. You could visit Bullwinkle's Family Restaurant, Major Magic's All Star Pizza Celebration, Station fair Play, Pizza Theater, and Razmatazz, all of these that have like theater or pizza or celebration in the name. And some dude was like, we'll call it Razmatazz. I mean, that's that's very theatrical. I'm more interested in the fair Play Pizza theater because I just think about Lee Harvey Oswald's fair Player for Cubic Committee, not the reference I would have gone with. But yes, and of course among many others. There were many of these um but the most famous one is Showbiz Pizza Palace. Show Biz opened their first location on March third, and they are the true villain of this story. Remember remember from a few paragraphs ago, Bob Brock, the holiday inn magnate who signed a deal with Bushnelt franchise Chucky Cheeses. Well while visiting the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions Convention in New Orleans in Rock met a guy named Aaron Fect Factor is the Nicola Tesla, insane misunderstood, got his timing all wrong, genius of the animatronics industry. And also this story. This kid founded a TV repair company at the age of eleven, which subsequently failed because he couldn't lift the TVs he was repairing. And then in nineteen seventy three, at the height of the oil crisis, when he was nineteen, had this pie in the sky idea to design a car that would get ninety miles to the gallon. He called it the Jutta, and it was essentially a glorified golf cart. It had three wheels and it was a ridiculous, ridiculous thing. You have to look up the concept arc for the Jutta. But he was also like a very sweet utopian idealist, and while trying to fund the Jutta uh, he turned to a variety of ideas to finance this, one of which led him to discover his true talent, which was design and manufacturing of animatronics. Factor also claims to have invented the Whack a Mole the arcade game. His story was that he was at the nineteen six i A a p A Convention and someone pointed him at this Japanese gaming company's booth where they had a whack a Mole like machine, and they were like, that thing is a piece of crap. We could make some real money if we designed a better version of that. So Factor builds a better whack a Mole machine using nomadics, and then claimed that the credit was stolen out from under him by the guy who contracted him to do that work. But that's kind of contested, and also neither here nor there um, but yeah, he basically created a company called Creative Engineering, Inc. Which took off, was doing millions of dollars of business out of Orlando selling animatronic characters to theme parks. And he's such a sweet boy. A bit of an egomaniac, but a sweet boy. There's two Orlando Sentinel article where he waxed about ending four were in fuel dependency with solar power, using industrial automation and robots to create a three day, six hour a day work week for the working class, and then basically pitches the modern Internet as we know it, And this quote is wild. He said, we would like to pioneer and invest in large amounts of money in pioneering a central organized network in tying home computers together. What we want is for you to be able to type in water heater and get up a list of people who can sell you one or repair one, along with a better Business Bureau report or consumers report. Then, after he got out of the pizza animatronics game, he invented a secure email device called the Anti Gravity Machine, which is basically a way to send a lockdown, ultra scure emails. The guy was just this kind of like, I said Nicola. Tesla like wild eyed tech innovator who just never made a lot of money. I mean, he did at one point, but has never really kind of you never got his Tesla coil is what I'm trying to say here. Anyway, at the ninety eight i p A convention, he debuted his real triumph, the wolf Pack five, a group of animatronics singing animals inspired by the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I met Bob Brock at the end of nineteen seventy nine, and at that time he'd already signed a deal with Nolan Bushnell to build two D and eight Pizza Time theaters. Factor told mel magazine. I'd previously met Nolan Bushnell in ninety seven and ninety eight, and he'd wanted to sell him my animatronics for his Pizza Time theaters, but I didn't trust him. I figured he'd just buy one character from me, get it to California, and then reverse engineered and start copying me, so he'd never buy another character from me. So I refused to make a long story short. Fector says that when Brock saw that there was someone out there making better singing animatronic animals than Bushnell, he decided to back out of his deal with Bushnell and joined forces with Fector to launch a Chucky Cheese competitor. At the crux of his argument was essentially the fact that he claimed that Bushnell downplayed Aaron Fector to him. He said, Hey, I heard about this guy, Aaron Fector, who builds these animatronics. And Bushnell told Brock that's just a kid making junk in his garage. And then he went and saw the wolf Pack five along with the other thing that he created, the Hard Luck Bears, which were indeed a rip off of the Country Bear Jam Bream, and saw that they operated more smoothly, had a wider range of motion than the existing stuff at the Pizza Time Theater chain, and so he decided, I'm going into business with this kid. And at the crux of this deal was the Rocket Fire Explosion Band, which is, if you are of roughly of our demographic age, the band that you saw at Chucky Cheeses. And that man was a combination of the wolf Pack five and the Hard Luck Bears, featuring the characters Rolf and Earl Duke, LaRue, keyboard playing gorilla named Fats Geronimo, Beach Bear, Mitzi, Mozzarella, Billy Bob Broccoli and the Loony Bird. So that's the combination. So it's basically like guns and Roses with the two bands sell a guns and Yes, okay very much so. Aside from the fact that the Rockefeller presentation utilized three stages, which gave them more flexibility and how they could stage these shows, vectors animatronics work was pun intended head and shoulders above what existed at the current Pizza Time theaters. A Willington's Morning Star article about show biz broke down the numbers behind the Rock of Fire Explosion from It cost two million dollars to develop and it was sold to franchise Ease for a hundred and twenty five grand. The characters were built in groups of twenty five. It took a week to build a group of twenty five, took a week and a half to build a group of twenty five over Orlando. Took twenty four hours to program all of them to perform one song. Each character had sixteen valves as part of its pneumatic system and about a hundred and fifty gallons of compressed air necessary to run it. Wow Factor himself also wrote all of the songs for this, which took about three fifty hours to record and produce the songs that they were playing, which were all these like fifties and sixties do wop. They also he did all the voices to not all some of them, but he wrote these songs. Uh just just really as jack of all trades, this guy and they would do like beach Boys Medley's and like Beatles Medley's. And at one point there was also one of them doing a There was Michael Katson, who is an animatronic large cat who did Michael Jackson songs. Oh that's good. It was serious. You've been this whole episode? Oh yeah, Michael cats, that's good. Ah with with dollar signs flash up in your eyes with a share in the Showbiz Pizza chain, Brock held the other factor. At long last, had the financial and creative freedom to pursue his animal animatronic singing Animal Animatronic streams, handed the financial management of his company over to his dad to focus on programming, choreographing, and voicing these characters. Michael Jackson visited the show Bizz Company headquarters between tour stops on the Thriller tour. You can see pictures of imposing with these things, and he was supposedly, I have been unable to verify this. I choose to believe it's true. Was supposedly moved to purchase the Beatles catalogs. After seeing the Beatles Medley, the Showbiz Pizza Factor told Fortune magazine that Brock is benefiting financially from this deal. He's making money. But I'm going to change the world if I can find it. I want to punch in the show is pizza Beatles Medley right here. I think you should well. I played you the I played you, the one that made you so angry eat a little pizza with some help from our friends, probably rendered you speechless. I guess I gotta punch of that is right here. As you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information. After these messages, well predictively, Bushnell's Pizza Time and showbizz Pizza immediately took him at each other in the market and expanded too fast, too soon. A Showbiz Pizza super fan named Travis Shaefer who runs what you describe as an incredible fan site called showbiz Pizza dot Com. It's insane magazine. It has all of these scans of these original newspaper articles. This man is, he's like he's on our level. Well we should have had him on damn it well, he told Mail Magazine. Since Brock dropped out, they were hurrying to add franchises all over. They only had a handful by about six to ten restaurants, so suddenly expand like that was a big undertaking. Original animatronic designer Harold Goldbrandson told me that they wouldn't even consider a mom and pop organization that only wanted to open one franchise. They only wanted big money people who could open several stores. Do you know the linear So the Beatles stand there was called the Beagles because they were dogs. Only four of them are known to um exist, uh fittingly, one is in a museum, another is at a museum, is exactly, one is at a gas station, and two others have been retrofitted into, respectively, The Biscuits, a parody band of iconic Glen Danzig starring punk band The Misfits, and then Yes and then again retrofitted into rough, a dog animatronic themed rush parody No No, and the last one is owned by a collector and YouTuber. When the Beagles were phased out. They were replaced by the Beach Bowsers, which were a Beach Boys parody, Wow and Factor. The animatronics design I later told Mel magazine, we had to beat Chuck E Cheese to the best locations. So the executives of Showbiz Pizza, We're growing so fast. Their heads were spinning and spending money way too fast. They're out of money before they even knew it. In by nine three, they decided not to build any more restaurants, but it was already too late. Bush, now obviously infuriated by Brock's betrayal, sued Showbi's Pizza pretty much immediately, and uh Brock shot back with the countersuit. This battle dragon on the courts for years, but Showbiz settled in agreeing to pay percentage of their profits to Chuck E Cheese for the next fourteen years, something like millions of dollars over almost a decade and a half. So next time you think you he was big in a court. But there was an even bigger problem for both musical animatronic pizza chains. The free market became known as the video game crash Spectacular, bottoming out for both the home video game market and arcades. Home consoles like the Atari and personal computers dented the appeal of the arcade wall. Once the novelty war off, the limited experience of home video games ended up cratering their profits. This was largely and ironically due to Tutari Games, the glitchy buggy version of Pac Man for the home market, and its rushed adaptation of et the extraterrestrial legend in video game circles. It's failed so spectacularly that Atari was famously forced to bury the extra copies in a landfield in New Mexico. As a whole documentary about it on Netflix, It's Great All told in Night three. The arcade industry's profits dropped between September and December. It's the Time lost over seventy five million dollars and over twelve dollars per share, and Bushnell resigned as CEO and the company filed for bankruptcy in Goodbye Sweet Rats, Yes do not get gentle into that good bulpit. Fascinatingly, one of the ways in which Push Now lost money was experimenting with a company called Cadabroscope, which sought to reinvent traditional animation by using a computer to fill in hand drawn frames of animation with computer generated frames. Uh In three he bought a one and a half million dollar computer to aid him in this quest, and hired a team headed by a renound ex Disney animator named Jack Nichols. The fruits of these labors were to be special called The Christmas That Almost Wasn't starring Charles and the Rest of His Gang, which was supposed to be aired on NBC. It was never aired, but does exist online. And here's the crazy part. Bushnell sold Cadabroscope, which he had hoped to launch an animated Charles media empire. He sold that company to Lucasfilm, who would develop that technology into Pixar. So you got your Atari, you got your Chuck e Cheese, you got your Pisar. This guy, there are promotional photos from the time of bush now standing next to this bank of computers with Bob Pauli, who's the Pixar guy who designed buzz Lightyear. He was like the Forrest Gump of Bay Area tech stuff. He also employed Steve Jobs at one point and sadly missed out on the opportunity to get on the ground floor of Apple. What is this guy's net worth? Only fifty mill Well, he fumbled a lot of bags. Showbiz Pizza had to do whatever we could to say afloat, So we had to bring in money, people, vultures, and they wanted to control Showbiz Pizza, control me, and control Bob Brock. So I began using my percentage to veto bad idea after bad idea, of fact, are told Mail Magazine, then they will never control Showbiz Pizza. Yea. Then they had the worst idea of all to merge with Chuck E Cheese. We were fighting Chucky Cheese for five years, and we knew we were better than Chuck E Cheese. They were crapped and we were great. That's what we believed. We were rivals. We don't want to buy them out. We want to kill them. If they're going to go out of business, let them go out of business, don't prop them up. Kill the rat. Let me plunge the sword through Chucky Cheese his heart. I love Aaron Factor. Perhaps because of this stance of his, though, the relationship between he and Showbiz sour to the point where they were only communicating through lawyers. Showbiz one of the rights to the Rocket Fire Explosion characters, but fector refused to sell, believing that his characters were on the verge of making lucrative deals via film and television record deals narrator voice. They were not, so he pulled out and the companies and and actually Chowbiz made a smart move because they were able to restructure all of their debt and this court settlement by buying Chuck E Cheese. And then they embarked on something called concept reunification. Sounds of the German Mountain. I was gonna say it sounds like the great leap forward concept unification where they skinned all of the old characters they didn't have the rights to anymore and dances something Chairman mount at a time and put new fur and clothes on them. And you can see all of these training videos on YouTube where they they're like, first removed Geronimo Guerilla's face, then his clothes. It's it's truly incredible. Well, by two thousand five, Chucky Cheese had grown to five hundred locations and its design had morphed from an adult with a tuxedo and scarred game to eighteen with a baseball cap, which is how I knew him, and even more towards Moustum when bowling for Soups, Jarrett Reddick became the character's new voice. I did not know that. In twenty fourteen, Apollo Global Management bought the chain's parent company for one point three billion dollars, while in June, the chain filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection after it was battered both by competition from other quote active play companies like trampoline Parks, Laser Tag Facilities, and David Busters, as well as pandemic related store closures. But a little over six months later, according to the nation's restaurant news c e C. Chuck E Cheese Entertainment announced that it had pulled itself out of bankruptcy. The rap Rap truly is a survivor. It's really great that was the that was the animal for it pull itself out of bankruptcy, newly financially healthy and afloat after a restructure, did away with seven hundred five million dollars in debt. Wow. But when where the rat lost the financial war, he won the hearts and minds of the world. For example, Dave Ferguson, a showbiz pizza enthusiasts who grew up to be a defense Contractor teamed up with Chris Thrash, a roller rink DJ and Alabama. Sounds like a romantic comedy. He's a defense contractor, she's a roller rink DJ and Alabama. Together, they're just saving animatonic rap together. They're rinking around. I don't know that's there's no bad ideas in bransforming um. The two of them purchased a number of decommissioned Rockefire animatronics and using software that Ferguson developed to program all of them, began uploading videos to YouTube of these zombie Rockefire bands performing contemporary songs, among them Bubba Sparks Is Miss New Booty and I Think Usher's Love in the Club. Amassing thousands of hits, viral hits. Um and this increased visibility actually had material rewards for Factor. Thrash opened his own restaurant in Alabama with all of these characters that he bought. Celo Green booked the Rockefier explosion to back him in a Vegas performance. Ryan Gosling put them in his directorial debut, Lost River, but Fector was horrified. She told Popular Mechanics inten I hated it. That was my first reaction absolutely hated it. Those were adult songs. That's not the rock a Fire audience. He sued Ferguson, saying, David's my whack a mole. If he pops up again, I'm going to bring that hammer down. The trash talk between these guys, it's really great. Well funnily enough, Chucky Cheese had an actual corporate policy in place of discourage an aftermarket industry. Employees were told to either destroy old costumes, as seen in two thousand and seventeen them in a video surface of some employees that recently shutted Illinois locations smashing a costume head with a sledge hammer, or to break them down into their constituent parts and ship them back to a hub for repurposing. I believe his actual verbiage that he used was even if the head has past its useful life, our practice is to take all of the parts off the head, so we salvaged the nose and ears and some of the other parts, much like Jeffrey Dahmer um ed geen, I don't know punch of better serial killer reference into that. Meanwhile, in the animatronic Pizza animal industry was dealt another blow by Five Nights at Freddie's, a massively popular horror survival video game series in which players attempted to live through the overnight shift at a Chucky Cheese esque children's pizza parlor, battling off evil animatronic characters. While online chatter said that the game was supposedly inspired by a real life shooting at an Aurora, Colorado Chucky Cheeses, the creator said it was actually just the poor reaction to his previous game that inspired it. They said his lead character looked like a nightmare animatronic character, so he said, I'll show you um Aurora, Colorado, of course, being famous less than ten years later for another mass shooting. There's also a low budget Nicolas Cage horror movie called Willie's Wonderland that came out in which features Cage battling in a array of demonically possessed children's animatronics, and they set up surprisingly similar to Five Nights at Freddy's, and Factor capitalized on Five Nights at Freddie's by hosting themed birthday parties at the near abandoned Creative Engineering Headquarters in Florida, where the rock a fire explosion performs before shutting off the lights to emulate the haunted after hours feel of the game that sounds horrified. I'm gonna send to a non refundable one way ticket to that and make them do the all the Beatles songs. Can you imagine You're in a dark, abandoned warehouse in Orlando and a bunch of animatronic dogs are singing Beatles songs at you. Oh, I want that for you, I want I want your fear. You know. Honestly, they don't really need to fictionalize the violence. Uh just google Chuck E Cheese Fight or Chuck E Cheese Violence for an alarming lengthy list of brawls and shootings at the restaurant. The chain has served alcohol at some of its locations for a long time, But I don't think you can really chalk all of it up to it. Uh, just all of that people have speculated this, the fact that it's a bunch of kids having kind of co mingled largely unsupervised birthday parties, and then a bunch of parents drinking and getting territorial in a very high stimulus environment. Um One Chucky Cheeses in Brookfield, Wisconsin triggered more calls to the police in two thousand eight than any other restaurant in the city, including a biker bar down the street, which is just the news story I love the most these days. Nolan Bushnell is based in l A, working in a bunch of video game and tex sphere adjacent kind of stuff. Um Aside from the recent fiftieth anniversary of Pong, the last time he was in the news was for releasing an n f T which was bought by Brock Pierce, the Mighty Ducks actor turned crypto evangelist. Factor has continued to invent, including an experimental cooking fuel called carbo hydrillium, which caused an explosion at a creative engineering warehouse in Orlando that scattered old rocket fire animatronic parts everywhere, which was a horrifying scene. Thankfully there were no human injuries, but police and fire talked about showing up and seeing all of these old animatronic animal heads scattered everywhere. Chuck E. Cheese sadly began phasing out its animatronics in two thousand seventeen, to the consternation of nineties kids everywhere, but Bushnell was sanguine about it. He told Gizmoto animatronics were cutting it. When Chucky Cheese started. I try very hard not to live my life in the review beer. I like change, I like progress, and I like new things, and I like pizza and I like rats. Sorry, what were we talking about? Yeah? What he just stared off into. It's like those those click hold quotes. I like rats, Nolan Bushnell, unprompted, one of the voices of Chucky Cheese, Duncan Brandon told Mel Magazine Olan Bushnell, those guys back then, it was just genius, pure genius. It was so cool because we had watched cartoons for years. But to be able to go somewhere, sit down and have a meal and a game room over there, that already was cool, but then you could go over here and watch these robots to a show. It was outrageous and it's created such a magical experience for so many families. I have nothing else to add to that. Uh. May all of you have both the joy and the tear that only a giant pizza rat can impart in life. You can't have the pizza without the rat. That's the kicker. Folks. Thank you for taking this journey down memory lane with Jordan Charles and I I have Alex Tagel. This has been too Much Information. Thank you for listening, and I'm Jordan run Tog. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows