March 28, 2023 • 37 mins
For many Americans, Chuck E. Cheese is an immediate hit of pure nostalgia -- the pizza! The birthdays! The games! And, of course, the characters. In this week's special two-part episode, Ben, Noel and Max dive deep into the strange history of Chuck E. Cheese, from its founding days in the shadow of Atari, all the way to the modern day.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Let's hear it for the Man, the Myth,
the Legend. Superproducer, Max Entertainment Williams. Yeah, everyone, if you
were wondering what the E stands for, because we've all
in the Ridiculous History Lore, We're always going on about
Max's mysterious E middle name, because that's definitely a thing,
(00:49):
right Max, Yeah, definitely, it's definitely that. Jay, I don't
know what you're talking about. Equals Entertainment because Max is
nothing if not entertaining. Today's topic, I think is something
we've all been looking forward to, in addition to our
research associates, the amazing Doctor Z and Doctor Zach, Doctor Z.
(01:09):
If you're a Canadian, I think it hits a little
different from me and Ben. Max. I think you probably
probably grew up going to some iteration of the Chuck
E Cheese franchise, you know scenario when you were a kid.
But Ben and I or at a certain age, pretty
sure we went to the OG or at least what
we thought was the O G until we researched the
(01:30):
story Showbiz Pizza featuring the terrifying performances of the animatronic
Rock a Fire Explosion Band. Yeah, it's aka every child's
first introduction to a casino because the idea is like,
if you're a kid, this is a miraculous thing, right,
you get to show up. They have pizza, which is
(01:53):
still very very hot in many demographics, including podcasters and nol.
Then you get all the games and the entire time
there's this magical animatronic band, and if you're young enough,
I think it looks like they're actually playing. That's a
question for you when you saw those bands as a
wee tyke, were you old enough to realize they were
(02:14):
kind of just sort of pretending to play. I don't remember, honestly,
Like it does feel sort of the way as a
as an idiot child, you might interpret like someone in
a suit, you know, like like wearing like a like
a mouse suit or like you know, at Disney or whatever,
the movements from Mega Uncanny Valley. Looking at them now
(02:35):
at pretty much nightmare fuel. But I remember as a
kid being really charmed by them and really feeling like
they did have like life within them. And that's a
testament to the creators and then the whole thinking behind
these types of these types of experiences. It really did
all start, you know, in a way, I think with
Disney and the imagineers. I just was lucky enough to
(02:56):
go to Disney World in Florida with my family, and
I think my favorite part were some of the older
rise that incorporated that early kind of imagineer animatronics, stuff
like The Country Bears Jamboree, which I would argue, I
don't know the timeline exactly, but pretty sure that this
hold Chucky Cheese, rocket fire explosion animatronic band an utter
(03:18):
rip off of The Country Bears Jamboree, because that is
a stage situation with guests that pop in and you're
in a little theater and there's you know, posters on
the wall as if the stars of the show are
actual real life you know, celebrities and stuff. Pretty sure
that's where it came from. I could I could see
that too, And you know what, I was abroad most
(03:39):
recently in Japan, there are a ton of venues and
restaurants that have stuff like this going on. It's just
really really cool. And today we're going to talk about
what our pal doctors g calls the many lives of
Charles Entertainment cheese. I'm with you on the timeline because
it might be surprising for a lot of us to
(04:00):
know that this story dates back to the nineteen seventies.
In May of nineteen seventy seven, San Jose, California, the
one of the Atari co founders, Nolan Bushnell, said, Hey,
let's let's jus up your average pizza place, you know
what I mean. Let's let's make it. Let's make it
(04:22):
not just pizza, not just a caricature of an Italian
chef on the boxes. Let's get some robots in there.
And then you know, we can't really can't really put
boundaries on art, right, So these robots are real characters.
One of them who might not have aged well is
a rat who has a Jersey accent for some reason
(04:45):
and is chained smoking yeah, like giant cigars. He's like
clearly mob connected. And I just I do just want
to add, we don't have to jump back to this,
but this is seventy seven. Country Bear Jamboree was debuted
in Florida in Orlando in nineteen seventy one um at
the at the Magic Kingdom there's a great documentary about
(05:07):
this m and again, like in the Rocket Fire Explosion
documentary that I think you're referencing, they don't really exactly
cop to ripping that off, but it's it's it's eerily simple.
It's like if anyone it's pretty much the same. Yeah, man,
It's kind of like that behind the music interview with
Vanilla Ice about the beat for under d. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
(05:33):
So Nolan Bushnell grew up in Utah. He said he
had an engineering degree. He had a background and kind
of you know in amusement parks and kind of like
carnival type atmospheres. He learned that there was a business
side to these types of shows and these types of
traveling you know, scenarios and um. He started to pay
(05:55):
really close attention to consumers and the kinds of things
that they liked and their their patterns and their habits,
right sort of the way you know, you think about
the way like a grocery store is organized in order
to kind of capitalize on people's you know, what attracts
them and like to put things in a certain order
so that they the maximum yield out of your customer.
(06:16):
I mean, you know, it's just part of it. It's
all about making money, and that's what he was doing. Um.
He graduated the University of Utah, and then he moved
to California and he wanted to be an engineer for
ding Ding Ding Disney. And they don't call him engineers there,
do they They call them imagineers. They do, they do.
And this was already he's still he's an early adopter
(06:39):
of this kind of stuff. And it's a dream job,
right obviously, And in many ways it's still a dream
job today. A good friend of ours, friends of the show,
Andrew Howard, he might recognize from our sister podcast Saver.
He has he has imagineers in his family. So cool, right,
so um, so let's go to Ted Dapney. Ted Dapney
(07:02):
is a friend of Nolan Bushnell's and together they co
found Atari and Ted is always Ted is always very
very forthright about this. He says, the idea that became
Pizza Time was Nolan Bushnell's dream. It was the beginning
of everything. He didn't even think about a video game
(07:25):
until later. Apparently, according to Ted, his pal Nolan would
take them around to different restaurants and they would go
look at the restaurants, and they would say, like, Okay,
what's working here? How can we get robots involved? You know,
how can we make this a base, Like how can
we make this Disneyland at home? I love that this
(07:47):
was like this was truly the dream. And then kind of,
you know, the video game industry they kind of invented
by accident. I mean, that wasn't my accident. You know.
It put that whole pizza dream on the back burner
because yeah, Dabney and Bushnell started working on something called
computer Space, so the world's very first commercial arcade machine
(08:10):
in nineteen seventy. He never quite let the pizza dream die,
you know, he sort of like had it in reserve.
But they went on in nineteen seventy two to found
a little company he might have heard of, called Atari
and created a little game he might have heard of
that seems really crazily dated now, but at the time
was absolutely just you know, a craze palm woopo, you know,
(08:36):
the one the two paddles on each side, and like,
you know, you could play against somebody in the same room.
I guess if everything was in the same room at
the time, because there was no online gaming yet. By
the way, all of this stuff makes me think of
an incredible show that I've been sleeping on for years,
was recommended to me called Halt and Catch Fire. That
is about sort of the PC like race of the
(08:57):
nineteen seventies and eighties and all of this kind of
Atari stuff and all of this sort of like nascent
computer tech that again by today's center, when you look
at the products, seems so data. It shows you kind
of the behind the scenes of how scrappy all these
folks were and how forward thinking. Highly recommend Halt and
Catch Fire and that as an amazing like post punk
kind of soundtrack. Yeah, and there's there's a lot of
(09:19):
good or fantastic documentary work about the early days of
video games. I used to write a series many years
ago now called Stuff of Genius, which I mentioned before. Yeah,
when we talk about we talk about Bushnell, we also
talk about the success of early Atari and Pong. It's
(09:42):
it's pretty crazy, right, because you never know what the
lightning in the bottle will be. That's why for almost
every story of an inventor or a great luminary, you
will see that they had a cavalcade of other stuff
that they were interested in you know what I mean,
Like Newton is really into alchemy. He was hoping it'd
(10:03):
be pizza, but it just so happened that it was
video game, so pizza had to kind of take a
back seat, right right, But David Busters figured out yes, yes,
just so David Busters picked up the mantel there, I
would argue, right, well, I don't know exactly We're not
here to talk about the history of David but we
will leave that for another day. Again, Palm Massive credited
(10:23):
as being the first like commercial, huge blockbuster success, So
when you go back and look at it now or
any of the games from that era, it's like, what
is that? And the thing about Palm though, was that
it was fast, like the feedback you know of moving
those paddles like you, it felt fair. There was a
certain amount of skill that was involved, unlike games like
(10:44):
et most of which ended up in a landfill. That's
also a story for another day. Story. It is a
very true story. But the industry that essentially Bushnell and
Dabney founded is today worth you know, close to one
hundred billion dollars and just more advanced than any of
these folks at the time. Never could have dreamed of. Yeah,
(11:12):
and they said, look, the profits that Attari are magnificent.
We're doing gangbusters. We're doing we're doing busters numbers here,
and there's not really a way for us to stay
competitive because so many other forces are entering this market
and innovating in their own way. So eventually Nolan sells
(11:37):
Atari to Warner Communications in nineteen seventy six for twenty
eight million dollars. And what do you say, guys? Should
we do an inflation calculation? There? Can we have a
boot candidate and a booth and a boo what do
we got? What do we got? What do we got?
(11:57):
And we're talking twenty eight million dollars in nineteen seventy
six dollars today would be a whopping a boob. Oh,
we have to skip it. It It won't let us do ten.
Oh yeah, okay, here's how we'll do it. Yeah. I
(12:18):
don't know how much of this we want to leave in.
Uh spoiler alert. Folks were not great at math. Apparently
neither is the internet. So this is so much money
that hang on. Okay, oh wow, just this alone is
making this a two part episode. Okay, this is so
(12:41):
much money that we had to go to our trusty
inflation calculator and put it in in a couple of
different blocks. So twenty eight million dollars nineteen seventy six,
like you said, Noel today, that is one hundred and
fifty one million dollars, one hundred fifty one million, five
(13:01):
hundred two thousand, one hundred and fifty eight dollars and
twenty eight cents. That's crazy, that's crazy. What we're saying
is he didn't need the money after that. He didn't.
He didn't need the money obviously. But you know what,
a lot of times these types of creators, the true creators,
they're not the business guys. And again you'll see that
(13:22):
if you watch Hold and Catch Fire. They really do
a good job of showing those types and like the
true creative innovators versus like the ones that are just
in it to make to turn a profit. So yeah,
he also though, did, in order to get that payout,
have to sign a five year non compete agreement, which
is the killer of creatives, right if you're if you
(13:42):
can't compete in that space anymore. He did remain on
as head of Atari, but because of now being part
of this giant corporate structure, he wasn't able to innovate
like he used to be able to. That's another price
of you know, I wouldn't call this seven. I don't
know selling out at such a loaded term, but that
is one of the prices of of you know, selling
(14:03):
your company as you unless you have it very specifically
outline in the terms, you know, you're gonna have a
new corporate overlord. But there was one project that he
got the green light on and it involved yea of
all his ideas, these suits are saying, well, like of
all his ideas, the suits are saying, go back, Nolan,
(14:27):
and go back to that restaurant thing you had my
attention and now you have my interest. You know, only
at this stage it was called Coyote Pizza Um and
he I guess he talks about an amusing anecdote of
kind of selling the story, you know, selling the branding
(14:47):
behind it. He ordered what he thought was a full
sized coyote costume, and instead of a coyote, they screwed
up or he maybe miss you know, identified it in
the catalog. It was a giant gray rat. The rat
costume you have became very popular around the Atari HQ.
(15:08):
So so there you might have clocked at the beginning
of the show, folks where we said that there was
this mascot that was a chain smoking rat with a
Jersey accent. That was their Bob Ross happy accident of
Coyote pizza. They said, Okay, for a while, Rick Rat
(15:28):
was so popular around the office that he became the
unofficial mascot for Atari. Basically, I mean, you know, they're
similar enough. They're both scavengers, you know, they're both have
kind of matted fur and eat carry on and smoke
cigars and were bowler hats. You know, what you can
do with the coyote, you can also do with the rat.
(15:48):
So the suits at now Atari Corporate or like go
with God, and they essentially they gave him, didn't they
give him someone to help him out, the Gene Landrum
I believe his name. Yeah, yeah, So okay, here's here's
their idea. And we've got quotes from Gene on this.
(16:11):
So Coyote Pizza is taken off. People love Rick Rat,
and Jean says I did the complete business plan for
the rollout of the Atari twenty six hundred. It was
going to take him another year to get it designed
and put in at emotion, and Nolan said, hey, Geen,
you got all this time, go go to a business
plan just like you did before. I loved it, but
(16:33):
go do it for this uh family entertainment concept. And
then Gene takes to it like a fish to water
or a rat to smoke in cigars. Apparently, he says,
he comes up with all the ideas and you know,
and Nolan, one thing that's really stand up about Nolan
Bushnell is that he gives credit where he's where it's duing.
(16:54):
He says, in a real way to him, Gene is
the founder of Chuck E Cheese because Jean took this
idea and made it reality, like renting the facility, hiring people,
getting recipes, everything right. Jeene was on the ground floor
for it. Yeah, exactly, And I mean it really was
(17:15):
a concept that outside of like you know, the Country
Bears Jamboree, which doesn't a restaurant experience, it's just you know,
a old honkytoonk kind of show, wasn't really out there.
So that even this was in the same way that
Atari was really the first you know, home console to market,
it didn't ultimately end up being the one that was
the most impactful that would have been the nes you know,
(17:36):
that came a little later because the twenty six hundred
that we were talking about too, was plagued with all
kinds of problems, or they like pored it over things
like pac Man and made all these investments in you know,
high level intellectual property like et. But the ports didn't
look very good, and then some of those bets on
intellectual property really failed. Like I mentioned at the top
of the show, et it was such a poor seller
(17:57):
that ended up in a landfill. But this whole rush
Shrunk concept thing really seemed to have legs. So they
do a little bit of shuffling around. Landrum's kind of
he's a bit not in charge. He definitely has a say,
and Landrum is developing this idea Rick Rats Pizza up
starts to transform Rick Rats gotta go, he says, Nolan,
(18:20):
we're making this the kids place. We can't have a rat.
It's too predatory and too lethal. Now that's interesting because
we know kind of where things landed eventually with Charles
Entertainment Cheese. Yeah, so they had to they had to compromise.
Just like William Faulkner said, kill your darlings, you know,
you have to make tough decisions when it comes to
(18:41):
effective creativity. And I'm sure they quoted Faulkner a lot
in the early days of Chucky Cheese. Sure. So originally
what they did is they tried to find something that
was less maybe predatory or lethal, because Jean was concerned
a rat would be kind of scared. So Rick Rat
(19:01):
became Big Cheese. Doesn't sound gangster ish at all, yeah, right,
it sounds like he got a promotion in the mob one.
He's the Big Cheese now. Yeah, but he This was
before the age of widespread internet, right, so they couldn't
(19:21):
just google the name, and it took them a second
to learn that the name had already been taken somebody,
some other company had trademarked Big Cheese. So they went
to the next best thing, Chuck E Cheese, which Nolan
called a three smile name. That's really cute and as
we mentioned before, just like coincidentally with Max's mysterious e
(19:45):
middle name, the eastood for entertainment. But an important part again,
they don't speak about, you know, we know how litigious
the mouse is, so you don't see a lot of
people saying, you know, how long. Yeah, that's definitely where
we got are what we were trying to do. But
chuck each cheese does that ring a bell? Mick e mouse?
Chuck e cheese? I mean, you know, I guess when
(20:06):
you steal, you steal from the best. We are going
to get into a bit of how some of these
things were lifted from the imagineers in just a second. Yeah, yeah,
because there is definitely there's definitely a vanilla ice, you know,
queen situation going on here. So Landrum, despite his initial reservations,
(20:28):
he actually was in the boardroom when after he had
made this first pitch, everybody went nuts. They loved it,
and he said, I wouldn't hire me. Jean said, don't,
I wouldn't hire me. I'm an electronics guy. But he
got really into this and he started thinking about it
very seriously, and he said, look, we want a family
friendly atmosphere. We don't want any of those rowdy hooligans
(20:51):
that you see at other pizza places. So our solution
is that all miners will have to be accompanied by adults.
And this is something that occurs today right like it Also,
if you think about it, and they don't say this,
but if you think about it, it's a great way
(21:13):
to make sure that every table has more customers. Yeah,
not to mention that they also sell beer to this day.
That's you know, for the adults. And my kid is
not a chucky cheese birthday party age anymore. But when
she was a little younger, I remember taking her to
the one and I've obviously not been as a parent
ever before, and they do a thing I don't know
(21:33):
if they've always done this, where they give you an
invisible ink stamp on the back of your hand and
on the back of your kid's hand, and they have
to match so that when you leave, they shine a
line on it and see if they match, to make
sure that no one's snatched somebody else's kid, which I mean,
it's a good safety measure to agree, you know. Also,
(21:55):
here's the thing, why would you have your kid's birthday here? Well,
you would have it there because technology comes together in
a very cool way that is also a little bit
cheaper than Disney just being brass tacks. Here. If you
go to this pizza place, then you are guaranteed to
see animatronic like live cartoon characters that sing songs and
(22:18):
they do comedy bits like vaudeville style every eight minutes
on the dot as you and your family and your
kids friends eat your pizza. The pizza is just sort
of a smaller part of the experience or part of
the gestalt here. People aren't going because they're rave Michelin
(22:40):
star reviews of the pizza. And I'm bummed that when
I was at Disney World, I didn't got to get
a chance to go to another one of the inspirations
for this outside of pizza, which was the Enchanted teaking Room.
And also, by the way, if anyone's interested in Disney
history and the history of the imagineers, there's a museum
that's not affiliated with the Walt Disney Company. It's called
the Walt Disney Family Museum, and it's in the Presidio
(23:04):
in San Francisco, and they have a lot of the
prototypes for those things, and a lot of like the
technology that like eye Works invented, you know, who was
one of the original kind of right hand tech people
at Disney, like the optical printer and the multiplane camera
and all of that stuff. And they have like some
of the you know, the animatronic prototypes for what would
(23:25):
end up being the Tiki Room and the Country Bear Jamboree.
But yeah, surprise, the Country Bear Jamboree did predate all
of this Pizza time business. So and as we know,
Bushnell originally wanted to go to work as an imagineer
at Disney, so it makes sense. I would say, probably
goes a bit beyond inspiration and a little more straight
(23:46):
out theft. I don't know, but I haven't heard anything
about a knee lawsuits because we know that Disney is
very litigious, and nothing in our research points of any serious,
you know, legal cases between the two. Yeah. Yeah, it's
a good point. It's a good point. Maybe they gave
them a pass because if you think about it, the
(24:06):
existence of a Chuck e Cheese at this point in
time is also helpful for Disney, right true, so it
makes them look good as well. There may have been
a calculation there also. I gotta just say, you know,
plagiarism aside whether or not we want to consider this stealing,
and it does cleave pretty closely to Disney. Just for
(24:30):
the record, if you put all that to one side,
the technology behind it is so impressive. They automated these
with real to real tape. That's how they like program them.
That's nuts, I mean. And there's anybody that's you know,
even a sort of audio nerd out there, understands that.
Like you know, with computers, you have so much precision
(24:53):
as to like when audio connects or synchronizes with picture
and stuff like that. But real to real tape is
literally magnet netic tape. You can you can automate a
start and stop of something like that, but it has
to all be a program that runs in sync with
these other devices that you know, the movement of the
animatronics and stuff, and then it just stops and it's
(25:14):
all kind of sync up together. It's another thing that
at the Family Museum you can really see how they
did sound sync in the early days of like you know,
Fantasia for example, where every little audio queue syncs up
with a visual you know, to the on the dime,
and it's so difficult to do. We take it for granted,
you know how analog and hands on and really just
(25:35):
required so much thought, you know, to to do all
that stuff. So you're right, even this kind of kind
of poor man's version of that still quite impressive, oh
very much so. And also if you if you want
to get a sense of how impressive it is. Just
go over to YouTube and watch watch these lovely characters.
When something goes wrong, it's terrifying. Uh, And it's worth
(25:58):
it's worth your time if you're like I don't have
enough nightmares on a on a daily basis. And it
left a mark pop culturally in that respect too, because
of things like five Nights at Freddie's, you know, where
you have these like animatronic things jump scaring you, you
know at all of Yeah, because it is nightmare fuel
when the skins are off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so
with that, let's give some shout outs some credit where
(26:21):
it's due to the other people associated with the design
of Chucky Cheese and other characters Bob Flemates or Fleamates,
and then engineers like Larry Eamons and Rob Milner, these
are all Atari guys. And then Harold gold Branson is
the one who said let's put some skin on these,
(26:43):
let's make them not look like Westworld minus masks. So
Harold Goldbrandson is the reason they look cute rather than sinister. Yeah,
if you watch that Rocke Fire explosion documentary, there is
a really good point that I think it's bushnell I
can't remember one of one of the one of the
(27:04):
main players points out is that, you know, this is
a combination of many disciplines. It requires computer programming, it
requires engineering by building the skeletons, and it requires things
like special effects, makeup experience, you know, to make these
these stretched kind of you know, posable, articulatable faces. And
so it was all kind of coming together in this
(27:25):
final presentation that really combined all of these completely you know,
different backgrounds one hundred percent. And this is where we
shout out the real to real tape wizard Mike Hatcher,
who programmed a lot of these movements. So all these
(27:47):
folks kind of voltrod up they assemble their avengers as
a result. The first Chucky Cheese Pizza Time Theater opens
May seventeen, nineteen seventy seven, San Jose, and this was
an old brokerage building. It was pretty big, five thousand
square feet. They had an indoor arcade. Of course, the
(28:09):
marquee event. The big tent here is the animatronics show
and Null people really liked it, and they started adding
different guest characters too, right yeah, and again started to
keep harping on this, but like a the same with
the Country Bears Jamboree. They have several different stages and
different kind of guest performers pop in. And I also
(28:29):
just wanted to point out that originally, I think it
was just like animated torsos. They didn't even have like
bottom halfs and they just appeared in these kind of
fake picture frames a zone call. Yeah, just yeah, just
like that. But no, you're right. They definitely started to
bring in other characters like Dolly Dimples, who's a piano
(28:50):
playing hippo, and the Fantasy Forest Game Preserve, which I
guess that's her band, and that was named after gold
Brandson had a company called Fantasy Forest, so we named
it after that. And then we also had let's see
the there was. They made some changes there were there
(29:11):
was a group of backup singers called the Warbletts, and
they changed them to the Mopsie Sisters. Uh. And then
they had a character called Krusty the Cat, which isn't
particularly appealing, and they switched that one out for a
little purple fella named mister Munch. Yeah, they had a
lot of folks in there. It's kind of like how
(29:32):
McDonald's had its pantheon, you know, in the seventies and eighties.
Oh yeah, the Grimace, which Max pointed out to us,
is apparently meant to represent a giant taste bud. Is
it true, Max? Yeah, according to Wait Wait don't tell me,
so you know, yeah, it could be just comedy, but
that's what they said on Wait Wait, don't tell me?
It's one Oh Max forgot to tell you. This is
(29:55):
totally off the rails here too. But we you know,
we're huge fans public Radio and Noel and I got
to meet and hang out with Ophia Eisenberg from asking
me another. You may know her as her Ripe Bagonias
if you listen to the show, So we might actually
be able to talk a genuine a radio expert onto
(30:18):
the show. Maybe, right. I guess we got to do
a good job with this episode. We'll do our best, Yes,
we'll see. We'll do our best to do our duty
to God in our country and Charles Entertainment cheese. Uh
so ya. Sari was kind of getting fed up with
the whole restaurant idea. It was no longer particularly aligned
(30:40):
with their goals because they had, after all, bought a
video game company right right, and they like this, So
the thing is you can do these fun, experimental projects
when times are good, but when when times get a
little bit leaner, the fun stuff goes out the window
when you got to focus on your core mission. And
(31:02):
as har A's having a hard time getting into the
home video market and really establishing a good steak, so
their parent company, Warner sells the restaurant and concept to
Nolan Bushnell. They sell him his own dream back to
him in nineteen seventy eight for five hundred thousand dollars.
Bushnell doesn't waste any time, he doesn't give up. He
(31:24):
incorporates the business. It's gonna be Pizza Time Theater Incorporated.
We're going to open more of them. I'm going to
appoint myself chairman, and Gene, I need you on this.
Forget Atari, forget the suits where Rick rap people through
and through. Yeah, and they really start to try to,
you know, launch a seriously intense marketing campaign. They need franchisees,
(31:50):
you know, they need swag, They need to get people
aligned with this brand. And they had like a PR
firm that they were working with called Easily Public Relations,
and they were making some kind of outlandish claims that
also seemed to me that might have attracted some legal proceedings,
(32:10):
but I again, we didn't read much about that or anything.
But they claimed that the Pizza Time Theater had the
only computer controlled three D animation outside Disneyland. A bold claim. Yeah, which,
well it's bold because what's interesting about it is that
it's not true, right, It's that's the interesting part, that
(32:32):
it's very much on purpose wrong. I don't know if
we can lay this at the feet of Nolan and
Gene because they cracked a deal with a Well, no,
they know, you're right, they did. They were the ones
who propagated some of the embellished marketing, but they also
(32:52):
were successful. Yeah. They got the interest of a guy
named Robert L. Brock. Yeah, Bob to his friends, Brock
to his friends. Yeah, bah bah bah bah bab Barrock. Yeah,
and Bob Bob Brock is the president of TIM. Yeah.
That that's that, That Tim, the one you're thinking of. No,
(33:13):
not that, not that Tim. That's the Topeka in management,
Topeka and his old I'm sorry not to rag on
the guy, but his claim to fame was he was
incredibly rich because he owned the largest franchise of holiday
in hotels, the most innocuous and boring of hotels in
all of the world. But they've sure been around for
(33:35):
a long time and they did probably, as far as
I know, originate the Continental Breakfast, but maybe not. That's
just what I associate it with. Well, every every day
is a holiday at the end, You're welcome, Bob. Yeah,
that hotel Motele holiday. And uh, these guys are trying
to get into the tech sector now, Uh, to a
(33:56):
to a degree, I think he just something he understood restaurants,
you know. I mean, after all, hotel, you know, management
is part of the hospitality sector. So this is like,
you know, it's a restaurant, I know what that is.
The other stuff is a sort of extra, but also
seems to be, you know, aligning with kind of cutting
as transo Brock invested. In June of nineteen seventy nine,
(34:17):
he signed a two hundred million dollar co development deal
with Bushnell, which gave Brock exclusive franchising rights to Pizza
Time theaters in sixteen states across the southern and Midwestern
United States. The contract also included some language around some goals. Right. Yeah,
(34:38):
and this is where it gets a little bit tricky.
So this is also a turning point, and this is
going to be a two part episode of Folks. The
contract they sign with the president of TIM is, Yeah,
they're going to give them two hundred or two hundred
and eighty five stores, that's what they wan want to
(35:00):
grow too. And of those two hundred and eighty five,
the majority two hundred stores are going to be operated
directly by TIM. The other eighty five are going to
be kind of sublet subfranchised out. And this turns out
to be a bit of a Faustian bargain, I can
see that. And then, just so I'm getting the terms straight,
would the completely owned and operated ones would those be
(35:22):
what you might consider like the flagship stores and then
the franchised ones or like maybe in smaller markets or
something like that, or I don't know, I'm trying to
understand experientially what would be the difference or is it
just a logistical thing, like why do it this way? Yeah,
well we're going to have to find out in Part
two Entertainment. Cheese done. I'm sorry, I didn't mean. I
(35:49):
didn't mean to leave it with such a cliffhanger. All
let's hang on the cliff together, because we'll be back
this Thursday with the rest of the story. But in
the meantime too, we want to say thank you to
everybody's been tuning in while we are on the road.
You might have noticed sometimes our mics sound a little weird.
We've been recording in different hotel rooms thanks to Max
(36:10):
Ver's patients. Noel, you and I have been playing Russian
Roulette basically with Wi Fi connections. I think you had
a slow one last time. I get a slow one
this time. But we're not gonna let that stop us
from telling mister Cheese's story. Nah, we wouldn't. It's just
too important. It's just too damn important. You know, you
owe it to yourself to a full understanding of the
(36:33):
cultural experience that is the United States and Charles's entertainment.
Cheese is gonna get you there. And seriously, you might
think you've heard the best bits, I assure you there
is much more to come. So thanks to our research
associate extraordinaire doctor Z for this one and more to
come from this incredible story in the next episode. Who
(36:54):
else we got to think? There's others. There's others, Oh
so many, Chuck e Cheese. Let's think also, of course,
our pal mister Matt Frederick, who is hanging out with
us here as we were on the road. Let's thank
Eve's JEFFU Christopher hastiotis here in spirit. And then, of
course the our own field correspondent, let's call him Alex Williams,
(37:19):
who composed this track. He showed did. We'll see you
next time, folks. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Let's hear it for the Man, the Myth,
the Legend. Superproducer, Max Entertainment Williams. Yeah, everyone, if you
were wondering what the E stands for, because we've all
in the Ridiculous History Lore, We're always going on about
Max's mysterious E middle name, because that's definitely a thing,
(00:49):
right Max, Yeah, definitely, it's definitely that. Jay, I don't
know what you're talking about. Equals Entertainment because Max is
nothing if not entertaining. Today's topic, I think is something
we've all been looking forward to, in addition to our
research associates, the amazing Doctor Z and Doctor Zach, Doctor Z.
(01:09):
If you're a Canadian, I think it hits a little
different from me and Ben. Max. I think you probably
probably grew up going to some iteration of the Chuck
E Cheese franchise, you know scenario when you were a kid.
But Ben and I or at a certain age, pretty
sure we went to the OG or at least what
we thought was the O G until we researched the
(01:30):
story Showbiz Pizza featuring the terrifying performances of the animatronic
Rock a Fire Explosion Band. Yeah, it's aka every child's
first introduction to a casino because the idea is like,
if you're a kid, this is a miraculous thing, right,
you get to show up. They have pizza, which is
(01:53):
still very very hot in many demographics, including podcasters and nol.
Then you get all the games and the entire time
there's this magical animatronic band, and if you're young enough,
I think it looks like they're actually playing. That's a
question for you when you saw those bands as a
wee tyke, were you old enough to realize they were
(02:14):
kind of just sort of pretending to play. I don't remember, honestly,
Like it does feel sort of the way as a
as an idiot child, you might interpret like someone in
a suit, you know, like like wearing like a like
a mouse suit or like you know, at Disney or whatever,
the movements from Mega Uncanny Valley. Looking at them now
(02:35):
at pretty much nightmare fuel. But I remember as a
kid being really charmed by them and really feeling like
they did have like life within them. And that's a
testament to the creators and then the whole thinking behind
these types of these types of experiences. It really did
all start, you know, in a way, I think with
Disney and the imagineers. I just was lucky enough to
(02:56):
go to Disney World in Florida with my family, and
I think my favorite part were some of the older
rise that incorporated that early kind of imagineer animatronics, stuff
like The Country Bears Jamboree, which I would argue, I
don't know the timeline exactly, but pretty sure that this
hold Chucky Cheese, rocket fire explosion animatronic band an utter
(03:18):
rip off of The Country Bears Jamboree, because that is
a stage situation with guests that pop in and you're
in a little theater and there's you know, posters on
the wall as if the stars of the show are
actual real life you know, celebrities and stuff. Pretty sure
that's where it came from. I could I could see
that too, And you know what, I was abroad most
(03:39):
recently in Japan, there are a ton of venues and
restaurants that have stuff like this going on. It's just
really really cool. And today we're going to talk about
what our pal doctors g calls the many lives of
Charles Entertainment cheese. I'm with you on the timeline because
it might be surprising for a lot of us to
(04:00):
know that this story dates back to the nineteen seventies.
In May of nineteen seventy seven, San Jose, California, the
one of the Atari co founders, Nolan Bushnell, said, Hey,
let's let's jus up your average pizza place, you know
what I mean. Let's let's make it. Let's make it
(04:22):
not just pizza, not just a caricature of an Italian
chef on the boxes. Let's get some robots in there.
And then you know, we can't really can't really put
boundaries on art, right, So these robots are real characters.
One of them who might not have aged well is
a rat who has a Jersey accent for some reason
(04:45):
and is chained smoking yeah, like giant cigars. He's like
clearly mob connected. And I just I do just want
to add, we don't have to jump back to this,
but this is seventy seven. Country Bear Jamboree was debuted
in Florida in Orlando in nineteen seventy one um at
the at the Magic Kingdom there's a great documentary about
(05:07):
this m and again, like in the Rocket Fire Explosion
documentary that I think you're referencing, they don't really exactly
cop to ripping that off, but it's it's it's eerily simple.
It's like if anyone it's pretty much the same. Yeah, man,
It's kind of like that behind the music interview with
Vanilla Ice about the beat for under d. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
(05:33):
So Nolan Bushnell grew up in Utah. He said he
had an engineering degree. He had a background and kind
of you know in amusement parks and kind of like
carnival type atmospheres. He learned that there was a business
side to these types of shows and these types of
traveling you know, scenarios and um. He started to pay
(05:55):
really close attention to consumers and the kinds of things
that they liked and their their patterns and their habits,
right sort of the way you know, you think about
the way like a grocery store is organized in order
to kind of capitalize on people's you know, what attracts
them and like to put things in a certain order
so that they the maximum yield out of your customer.
(06:16):
I mean, you know, it's just part of it. It's
all about making money, and that's what he was doing. Um.
He graduated the University of Utah, and then he moved
to California and he wanted to be an engineer for
ding Ding Ding Disney. And they don't call him engineers there,
do they They call them imagineers. They do, they do.
And this was already he's still he's an early adopter
(06:39):
of this kind of stuff. And it's a dream job,
right obviously, And in many ways it's still a dream
job today. A good friend of ours, friends of the show,
Andrew Howard, he might recognize from our sister podcast Saver.
He has he has imagineers in his family. So cool, right,
so um, so let's go to Ted Dapney. Ted Dapney
(07:02):
is a friend of Nolan Bushnell's and together they co
found Atari and Ted is always Ted is always very
very forthright about this. He says, the idea that became
Pizza Time was Nolan Bushnell's dream. It was the beginning
of everything. He didn't even think about a video game
(07:25):
until later. Apparently, according to Ted, his pal Nolan would
take them around to different restaurants and they would go
look at the restaurants, and they would say, like, Okay,
what's working here? How can we get robots involved? You know,
how can we make this a base, Like how can
we make this Disneyland at home? I love that this
(07:47):
was like this was truly the dream. And then kind of,
you know, the video game industry they kind of invented
by accident. I mean, that wasn't my accident. You know.
It put that whole pizza dream on the back burner
because yeah, Dabney and Bushnell started working on something called
computer Space, so the world's very first commercial arcade machine
(08:10):
in nineteen seventy. He never quite let the pizza dream die,
you know, he sort of like had it in reserve.
But they went on in nineteen seventy two to found
a little company he might have heard of, called Atari
and created a little game he might have heard of
that seems really crazily dated now, but at the time
was absolutely just you know, a craze palm woopo, you know,
(08:36):
the one the two paddles on each side, and like,
you know, you could play against somebody in the same room.
I guess if everything was in the same room at
the time, because there was no online gaming yet. By
the way, all of this stuff makes me think of
an incredible show that I've been sleeping on for years,
was recommended to me called Halt and Catch Fire. That
is about sort of the PC like race of the
(08:57):
nineteen seventies and eighties and all of this kind of
Atari stuff and all of this sort of like nascent
computer tech that again by today's center, when you look
at the products, seems so data. It shows you kind
of the behind the scenes of how scrappy all these
folks were and how forward thinking. Highly recommend Halt and
Catch Fire and that as an amazing like post punk
kind of soundtrack. Yeah, and there's there's a lot of
(09:19):
good or fantastic documentary work about the early days of
video games. I used to write a series many years
ago now called Stuff of Genius, which I mentioned before. Yeah,
when we talk about we talk about Bushnell, we also
talk about the success of early Atari and Pong. It's
(09:42):
it's pretty crazy, right, because you never know what the
lightning in the bottle will be. That's why for almost
every story of an inventor or a great luminary, you
will see that they had a cavalcade of other stuff
that they were interested in you know what I mean,
Like Newton is really into alchemy. He was hoping it'd
(10:03):
be pizza, but it just so happened that it was
video game, so pizza had to kind of take a
back seat, right right, But David Busters figured out yes, yes,
just so David Busters picked up the mantel there, I
would argue, right, well, I don't know exactly We're not
here to talk about the history of David but we
will leave that for another day. Again, Palm Massive credited
(10:23):
as being the first like commercial, huge blockbuster success, So
when you go back and look at it now or
any of the games from that era, it's like, what
is that? And the thing about Palm though, was that
it was fast, like the feedback you know of moving
those paddles like you, it felt fair. There was a
certain amount of skill that was involved, unlike games like
(10:44):
et most of which ended up in a landfill. That's
also a story for another day. Story. It is a
very true story. But the industry that essentially Bushnell and
Dabney founded is today worth you know, close to one
hundred billion dollars and just more advanced than any of
these folks at the time. Never could have dreamed of. Yeah,
(11:12):
and they said, look, the profits that Attari are magnificent.
We're doing gangbusters. We're doing we're doing busters numbers here,
and there's not really a way for us to stay
competitive because so many other forces are entering this market
and innovating in their own way. So eventually Nolan sells
(11:37):
Atari to Warner Communications in nineteen seventy six for twenty
eight million dollars. And what do you say, guys? Should
we do an inflation calculation? There? Can we have a
boot candidate and a booth and a boo what do
we got? What do we got? What do we got?
(11:57):
And we're talking twenty eight million dollars in nineteen seventy
six dollars today would be a whopping a boob. Oh,
we have to skip it. It It won't let us do ten.
Oh yeah, okay, here's how we'll do it. Yeah. I
(12:18):
don't know how much of this we want to leave in.
Uh spoiler alert. Folks were not great at math. Apparently
neither is the internet. So this is so much money
that hang on. Okay, oh wow, just this alone is
making this a two part episode. Okay, this is so
(12:41):
much money that we had to go to our trusty
inflation calculator and put it in in a couple of
different blocks. So twenty eight million dollars nineteen seventy six,
like you said, Noel today, that is one hundred and
fifty one million dollars, one hundred fifty one million, five
(13:01):
hundred two thousand, one hundred and fifty eight dollars and
twenty eight cents. That's crazy, that's crazy. What we're saying
is he didn't need the money after that. He didn't.
He didn't need the money obviously. But you know what,
a lot of times these types of creators, the true creators,
they're not the business guys. And again you'll see that
(13:22):
if you watch Hold and Catch Fire. They really do
a good job of showing those types and like the
true creative innovators versus like the ones that are just
in it to make to turn a profit. So yeah,
he also though, did, in order to get that payout,
have to sign a five year non compete agreement, which
is the killer of creatives, right if you're if you
(13:42):
can't compete in that space anymore. He did remain on
as head of Atari, but because of now being part
of this giant corporate structure, he wasn't able to innovate
like he used to be able to. That's another price
of you know, I wouldn't call this seven. I don't
know selling out at such a loaded term, but that
is one of the prices of of you know, selling
(14:03):
your company as you unless you have it very specifically
outline in the terms, you know, you're gonna have a
new corporate overlord. But there was one project that he
got the green light on and it involved yea of
all his ideas, these suits are saying, well, like of
all his ideas, the suits are saying, go back, Nolan,
(14:27):
and go back to that restaurant thing you had my
attention and now you have my interest. You know, only
at this stage it was called Coyote Pizza Um and
he I guess he talks about an amusing anecdote of
kind of selling the story, you know, selling the branding
(14:47):
behind it. He ordered what he thought was a full
sized coyote costume, and instead of a coyote, they screwed
up or he maybe miss you know, identified it in
the catalog. It was a giant gray rat. The rat
costume you have became very popular around the Atari HQ.
(15:08):
So so there you might have clocked at the beginning
of the show, folks where we said that there was
this mascot that was a chain smoking rat with a
Jersey accent. That was their Bob Ross happy accident of
Coyote pizza. They said, Okay, for a while, Rick Rat
(15:28):
was so popular around the office that he became the
unofficial mascot for Atari. Basically, I mean, you know, they're
similar enough. They're both scavengers, you know, they're both have
kind of matted fur and eat carry on and smoke
cigars and were bowler hats. You know, what you can
do with the coyote, you can also do with the rat.
(15:48):
So the suits at now Atari Corporate or like go
with God, and they essentially they gave him, didn't they
give him someone to help him out, the Gene Landrum
I believe his name. Yeah, yeah, So okay, here's here's
their idea. And we've got quotes from Gene on this.
(16:11):
So Coyote Pizza is taken off. People love Rick Rat,
and Jean says I did the complete business plan for
the rollout of the Atari twenty six hundred. It was
going to take him another year to get it designed
and put in at emotion, and Nolan said, hey, Geen,
you got all this time, go go to a business
plan just like you did before. I loved it, but
(16:33):
go do it for this uh family entertainment concept. And
then Gene takes to it like a fish to water
or a rat to smoke in cigars. Apparently, he says,
he comes up with all the ideas and you know,
and Nolan, one thing that's really stand up about Nolan
Bushnell is that he gives credit where he's where it's duing.
(16:54):
He says, in a real way to him, Gene is
the founder of Chuck E Cheese because Jean took this
idea and made it reality, like renting the facility, hiring people,
getting recipes, everything right. Jeene was on the ground floor
for it. Yeah, exactly, And I mean it really was
(17:15):
a concept that outside of like you know, the Country
Bears Jamboree, which doesn't a restaurant experience, it's just you know,
a old honkytoonk kind of show, wasn't really out there.
So that even this was in the same way that
Atari was really the first you know, home console to market,
it didn't ultimately end up being the one that was
the most impactful that would have been the nes you know,
(17:36):
that came a little later because the twenty six hundred
that we were talking about too, was plagued with all
kinds of problems, or they like pored it over things
like pac Man and made all these investments in you know,
high level intellectual property like et. But the ports didn't
look very good, and then some of those bets on
intellectual property really failed. Like I mentioned at the top
of the show, et it was such a poor seller
(17:57):
that ended up in a landfill. But this whole rush
Shrunk concept thing really seemed to have legs. So they
do a little bit of shuffling around. Landrum's kind of
he's a bit not in charge. He definitely has a say,
and Landrum is developing this idea Rick Rats Pizza up
starts to transform Rick Rats gotta go, he says, Nolan,
(18:20):
we're making this the kids place. We can't have a rat.
It's too predatory and too lethal. Now that's interesting because
we know kind of where things landed eventually with Charles
Entertainment Cheese. Yeah, so they had to they had to compromise.
Just like William Faulkner said, kill your darlings, you know,
you have to make tough decisions when it comes to
(18:41):
effective creativity. And I'm sure they quoted Faulkner a lot
in the early days of Chucky Cheese. Sure. So originally
what they did is they tried to find something that
was less maybe predatory or lethal, because Jean was concerned
a rat would be kind of scared. So Rick Rat
(19:01):
became Big Cheese. Doesn't sound gangster ish at all, yeah, right,
it sounds like he got a promotion in the mob one.
He's the Big Cheese now. Yeah, but he This was
before the age of widespread internet, right, so they couldn't
(19:21):
just google the name, and it took them a second
to learn that the name had already been taken somebody,
some other company had trademarked Big Cheese. So they went
to the next best thing, Chuck E Cheese, which Nolan
called a three smile name. That's really cute and as
we mentioned before, just like coincidentally with Max's mysterious e
(19:45):
middle name, the eastood for entertainment. But an important part again,
they don't speak about, you know, we know how litigious
the mouse is, so you don't see a lot of
people saying, you know, how long. Yeah, that's definitely where
we got are what we were trying to do. But
chuck each cheese does that ring a bell? Mick e mouse?
Chuck e cheese? I mean, you know, I guess when
(20:06):
you steal, you steal from the best. We are going
to get into a bit of how some of these
things were lifted from the imagineers in just a second. Yeah, yeah,
because there is definitely there's definitely a vanilla ice, you know,
queen situation going on here. So Landrum, despite his initial reservations,
(20:28):
he actually was in the boardroom when after he had
made this first pitch, everybody went nuts. They loved it,
and he said, I wouldn't hire me. Jean said, don't,
I wouldn't hire me. I'm an electronics guy. But he
got really into this and he started thinking about it
very seriously, and he said, look, we want a family
friendly atmosphere. We don't want any of those rowdy hooligans
(20:51):
that you see at other pizza places. So our solution
is that all miners will have to be accompanied by adults.
And this is something that occurs today right like it Also,
if you think about it, and they don't say this,
but if you think about it, it's a great way
(21:13):
to make sure that every table has more customers. Yeah,
not to mention that they also sell beer to this day.
That's you know, for the adults. And my kid is
not a chucky cheese birthday party age anymore. But when
she was a little younger, I remember taking her to
the one and I've obviously not been as a parent
ever before, and they do a thing I don't know
(21:33):
if they've always done this, where they give you an
invisible ink stamp on the back of your hand and
on the back of your kid's hand, and they have
to match so that when you leave, they shine a
line on it and see if they match, to make
sure that no one's snatched somebody else's kid, which I mean,
it's a good safety measure to agree, you know. Also,
(21:55):
here's the thing, why would you have your kid's birthday here? Well,
you would have it there because technology comes together in
a very cool way that is also a little bit
cheaper than Disney just being brass tacks. Here. If you
go to this pizza place, then you are guaranteed to
see animatronic like live cartoon characters that sing songs and
(22:18):
they do comedy bits like vaudeville style every eight minutes
on the dot as you and your family and your
kids friends eat your pizza. The pizza is just sort
of a smaller part of the experience or part of
the gestalt here. People aren't going because they're rave Michelin
(22:40):
star reviews of the pizza. And I'm bummed that when
I was at Disney World, I didn't got to get
a chance to go to another one of the inspirations
for this outside of pizza, which was the Enchanted teaking Room.
And also, by the way, if anyone's interested in Disney
history and the history of the imagineers, there's a museum
that's not affiliated with the Walt Disney Company. It's called
the Walt Disney Family Museum, and it's in the Presidio
(23:04):
in San Francisco, and they have a lot of the
prototypes for those things, and a lot of like the
technology that like eye Works invented, you know, who was
one of the original kind of right hand tech people
at Disney, like the optical printer and the multiplane camera
and all of that stuff. And they have like some
of the you know, the animatronic prototypes for what would
(23:25):
end up being the Tiki Room and the Country Bear Jamboree.
But yeah, surprise, the Country Bear Jamboree did predate all
of this Pizza time business. So and as we know,
Bushnell originally wanted to go to work as an imagineer
at Disney, so it makes sense. I would say, probably
goes a bit beyond inspiration and a little more straight
(23:46):
out theft. I don't know, but I haven't heard anything
about a knee lawsuits because we know that Disney is
very litigious, and nothing in our research points of any serious,
you know, legal cases between the two. Yeah. Yeah, it's
a good point. It's a good point. Maybe they gave
them a pass because if you think about it, the
(24:06):
existence of a Chuck e Cheese at this point in
time is also helpful for Disney, right true, so it
makes them look good as well. There may have been
a calculation there also. I gotta just say, you know,
plagiarism aside whether or not we want to consider this stealing,
and it does cleave pretty closely to Disney. Just for
(24:30):
the record, if you put all that to one side,
the technology behind it is so impressive. They automated these
with real to real tape. That's how they like program them.
That's nuts, I mean. And there's anybody that's you know,
even a sort of audio nerd out there, understands that.
Like you know, with computers, you have so much precision
(24:53):
as to like when audio connects or synchronizes with picture
and stuff like that. But real to real tape is
literally magnet netic tape. You can you can automate a
start and stop of something like that, but it has
to all be a program that runs in sync with
these other devices that you know, the movement of the
animatronics and stuff, and then it just stops and it's
(25:14):
all kind of sync up together. It's another thing that
at the Family Museum you can really see how they
did sound sync in the early days of like you know,
Fantasia for example, where every little audio queue syncs up
with a visual you know, to the on the dime,
and it's so difficult to do. We take it for granted,
you know how analog and hands on and really just
(25:35):
required so much thought, you know, to to do all
that stuff. So you're right, even this kind of kind
of poor man's version of that still quite impressive, oh
very much so. And also if you if you want
to get a sense of how impressive it is. Just
go over to YouTube and watch watch these lovely characters.
When something goes wrong, it's terrifying. Uh, And it's worth
(25:58):
it's worth your time if you're like I don't have
enough nightmares on a on a daily basis. And it
left a mark pop culturally in that respect too, because
of things like five Nights at Freddie's, you know, where
you have these like animatronic things jump scaring you, you
know at all of Yeah, because it is nightmare fuel
when the skins are off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so
with that, let's give some shout outs some credit where
(26:21):
it's due to the other people associated with the design
of Chucky Cheese and other characters Bob Flemates or Fleamates,
and then engineers like Larry Eamons and Rob Milner, these
are all Atari guys. And then Harold gold Branson is
the one who said let's put some skin on these,
(26:43):
let's make them not look like Westworld minus masks. So
Harold Goldbrandson is the reason they look cute rather than sinister. Yeah,
if you watch that Rocke Fire explosion documentary, there is
a really good point that I think it's bushnell I
can't remember one of one of the one of the
(27:04):
main players points out is that, you know, this is
a combination of many disciplines. It requires computer programming, it
requires engineering by building the skeletons, and it requires things
like special effects, makeup experience, you know, to make these
these stretched kind of you know, posable, articulatable faces. And
so it was all kind of coming together in this
(27:25):
final presentation that really combined all of these completely you know,
different backgrounds one hundred percent. And this is where we
shout out the real to real tape wizard Mike Hatcher,
who programmed a lot of these movements. So all these
(27:47):
folks kind of voltrod up they assemble their avengers as
a result. The first Chucky Cheese Pizza Time Theater opens
May seventeen, nineteen seventy seven, San Jose, and this was
an old brokerage building. It was pretty big, five thousand
square feet. They had an indoor arcade. Of course, the
(28:09):
marquee event. The big tent here is the animatronics show
and Null people really liked it, and they started adding
different guest characters too, right yeah, and again started to
keep harping on this, but like a the same with
the Country Bears Jamboree. They have several different stages and
different kind of guest performers pop in. And I also
(28:29):
just wanted to point out that originally, I think it
was just like animated torsos. They didn't even have like
bottom halfs and they just appeared in these kind of
fake picture frames a zone call. Yeah, just yeah, just
like that. But no, you're right. They definitely started to
bring in other characters like Dolly Dimples, who's a piano
(28:50):
playing hippo, and the Fantasy Forest Game Preserve, which I
guess that's her band, and that was named after gold
Brandson had a company called Fantasy Forest, so we named
it after that. And then we also had let's see
the there was. They made some changes there were there
(29:11):
was a group of backup singers called the Warbletts, and
they changed them to the Mopsie Sisters. Uh. And then
they had a character called Krusty the Cat, which isn't
particularly appealing, and they switched that one out for a
little purple fella named mister Munch. Yeah, they had a
lot of folks in there. It's kind of like how
(29:32):
McDonald's had its pantheon, you know, in the seventies and eighties.
Oh yeah, the Grimace, which Max pointed out to us,
is apparently meant to represent a giant taste bud. Is
it true, Max? Yeah, according to Wait Wait don't tell me,
so you know, yeah, it could be just comedy, but
that's what they said on Wait Wait, don't tell me?
It's one Oh Max forgot to tell you. This is
(29:55):
totally off the rails here too. But we you know,
we're huge fans public Radio and Noel and I got
to meet and hang out with Ophia Eisenberg from asking
me another. You may know her as her Ripe Bagonias
if you listen to the show, So we might actually
be able to talk a genuine a radio expert onto
(30:18):
the show. Maybe, right. I guess we got to do
a good job with this episode. We'll do our best, Yes,
we'll see. We'll do our best to do our duty
to God in our country and Charles Entertainment cheese. Uh
so ya. Sari was kind of getting fed up with
the whole restaurant idea. It was no longer particularly aligned
(30:40):
with their goals because they had, after all, bought a
video game company right right, and they like this, So
the thing is you can do these fun, experimental projects
when times are good, but when when times get a
little bit leaner, the fun stuff goes out the window
when you got to focus on your core mission. And
(31:02):
as har A's having a hard time getting into the
home video market and really establishing a good steak, so
their parent company, Warner sells the restaurant and concept to
Nolan Bushnell. They sell him his own dream back to
him in nineteen seventy eight for five hundred thousand dollars.
Bushnell doesn't waste any time, he doesn't give up. He
(31:24):
incorporates the business. It's gonna be Pizza Time Theater Incorporated.
We're going to open more of them. I'm going to
appoint myself chairman, and Gene, I need you on this.
Forget Atari, forget the suits where Rick rap people through
and through. Yeah, and they really start to try to,
you know, launch a seriously intense marketing campaign. They need franchisees,
(31:50):
you know, they need swag, They need to get people
aligned with this brand. And they had like a PR
firm that they were working with called Easily Public Relations,
and they were making some kind of outlandish claims that
also seemed to me that might have attracted some legal proceedings,
(32:10):
but I again, we didn't read much about that or anything.
But they claimed that the Pizza Time Theater had the
only computer controlled three D animation outside Disneyland. A bold claim. Yeah, which,
well it's bold because what's interesting about it is that
it's not true, right, It's that's the interesting part, that
(32:32):
it's very much on purpose wrong. I don't know if
we can lay this at the feet of Nolan and
Gene because they cracked a deal with a Well, no,
they know, you're right, they did. They were the ones
who propagated some of the embellished marketing, but they also
(32:52):
were successful. Yeah. They got the interest of a guy
named Robert L. Brock. Yeah, Bob to his friends, Brock
to his friends. Yeah, bah bah bah bah bab Barrock. Yeah,
and Bob Bob Brock is the president of TIM. Yeah.
That that's that, That Tim, the one you're thinking of. No,
(33:13):
not that, not that Tim. That's the Topeka in management,
Topeka and his old I'm sorry not to rag on
the guy, but his claim to fame was he was
incredibly rich because he owned the largest franchise of holiday
in hotels, the most innocuous and boring of hotels in
all of the world. But they've sure been around for
(33:35):
a long time and they did probably, as far as
I know, originate the Continental Breakfast, but maybe not. That's
just what I associate it with. Well, every every day
is a holiday at the end, You're welcome, Bob. Yeah,
that hotel Motele holiday. And uh, these guys are trying
to get into the tech sector now, Uh, to a
(33:56):
to a degree, I think he just something he understood restaurants,
you know. I mean, after all, hotel, you know, management
is part of the hospitality sector. So this is like,
you know, it's a restaurant, I know what that is.
The other stuff is a sort of extra, but also
seems to be, you know, aligning with kind of cutting
as transo Brock invested. In June of nineteen seventy nine,
(34:17):
he signed a two hundred million dollar co development deal
with Bushnell, which gave Brock exclusive franchising rights to Pizza
Time theaters in sixteen states across the southern and Midwestern
United States. The contract also included some language around some goals. Right. Yeah,
(34:38):
and this is where it gets a little bit tricky.
So this is also a turning point, and this is
going to be a two part episode of Folks. The
contract they sign with the president of TIM is, Yeah,
they're going to give them two hundred or two hundred
and eighty five stores, that's what they wan want to
(35:00):
grow too. And of those two hundred and eighty five,
the majority two hundred stores are going to be operated
directly by TIM. The other eighty five are going to
be kind of sublet subfranchised out. And this turns out
to be a bit of a Faustian bargain, I can
see that. And then, just so I'm getting the terms straight,
would the completely owned and operated ones would those be
(35:22):
what you might consider like the flagship stores and then
the franchised ones or like maybe in smaller markets or
something like that, or I don't know, I'm trying to
understand experientially what would be the difference or is it
just a logistical thing, like why do it this way? Yeah,
well we're going to have to find out in Part
two Entertainment. Cheese done. I'm sorry, I didn't mean. I
(35:49):
didn't mean to leave it with such a cliffhanger. All
let's hang on the cliff together, because we'll be back
this Thursday with the rest of the story. But in
the meantime too, we want to say thank you to
everybody's been tuning in while we are on the road.
You might have noticed sometimes our mics sound a little weird.
We've been recording in different hotel rooms thanks to Max
(36:10):
Ver's patients. Noel, you and I have been playing Russian
Roulette basically with Wi Fi connections. I think you had
a slow one last time. I get a slow one
this time. But we're not gonna let that stop us
from telling mister Cheese's story. Nah, we wouldn't. It's just
too important. It's just too damn important. You know, you
owe it to yourself to a full understanding of the
(36:33):
cultural experience that is the United States and Charles's entertainment.
Cheese is gonna get you there. And seriously, you might
think you've heard the best bits, I assure you there
is much more to come. So thanks to our research
associate extraordinaire doctor Z for this one and more to
come from this incredible story in the next episode. Who
(36:54):
else we got to think? There's others. There's others, Oh
so many, Chuck e Cheese. Let's think also, of course,
our pal mister Matt Frederick, who is hanging out with
us here as we were on the road. Let's thank
Eve's JEFFU Christopher hastiotis here in spirit. And then, of
course the our own field correspondent, let's call him Alex Williams,
(37:19):
who composed this track. He showed did. We'll see you
next time, folks. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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