In the late 1970s, a new and unusual concept for a restaurant chain emerged in California—video games plus bad pizza plus animatronic characters. The result was Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre, an immensely popular chain with a pizza rat for a mascot. But the strangeness only starts there. Decoder Ring dives into the formation of Chuck E. Cheese’s and its rival, ShowBiz Pizza Place; the conflict between the two; and the odd personalities of the mechanical animatronics that inhabited both stores and are still beloved by a select group of adults to this very day. This podcast was written by Willa Paskin and was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also did illustrations for this episode. Cleo Levin was our research assistant. Decoder Ring is produced by Katie Shepherd, Max Freedman, and Evan Chung, with help from Sofie Kodner. Derek John is executive producer. Merritt Jacob is our senior technical director. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. If you’re a fan of the show, we’d love for you to sign up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get to listen to Decoder Ring and every other Slate podcast without any ads. You also get unlimited access to Slate’s website. Member support is crucial to our work. So please go to slate.com/decoderplus to join Slate Plus today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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 pizza rat.
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 pizza, video games, and an animatronic stage show.
The first two things are self explanatory.
The animatronics are something else.
Welcome to my place.
I'm Chuck E.