True Stories #417 - The Mascot Mistake

Nolan made a coyote mascot for his new restaurant, but when the costume went wrong, Nolan's destiny changed.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you're about to hear is
a true story. Nolan decided he wanted to open a restaurant.
He wanted to open a family establishment. Families meant kids,
and children love a mascot, and so if he could

(00:25):
come up with a great character, the kids would want
to come, they would bring their parents, the money would
roll in. It would be a combination made in restaurant heaven.
And so he came up with the idea of a
mascot coyote. He had the design drawn up. He hired
a costume maker to manufacture the outfit. It was eventually delivered,

(00:47):
but when Nolan opened the package, he did not see
a coyote. Something had gone horribly wrong. Imagine his shock
and dismay when this prototype mascot outfit was a rat.
He stared at the thing, but rather than send the
whole thing back and start over, he reset something in

(01:09):
his brain. He thought, okay, fine, they sent me a rodent.
I will have a rodent mascot called Rick. And years later,
Nolan's franchise would publish a children's book that featured this
mascot's backstory, and it's rather alarming. Whose idea was this
depressing tale in a nutshell. The story goes like this.

(01:33):
The rat character grew up in an orphanage called Saint
Marinera's because the rat had just been dropped off at
the door of the orphanage by some unknown parent rat.
The kid didn't know his own birthday, but he loved
birthday parties when the other kids and the orphanages were
celebrating their own special days. He loved the music and

(01:55):
the games, the balloons, and the food, and he especially
loved singing the Happy Birthday song, even though he never
heard it sung for him. In this sad tale, the
day eventually came when this rat would grow up to
a kind of rat adulthood, or at least to a
point where he was too old to stay at the orphanage,

(02:18):
and so he moved out or he was kicked out.
He became a homeless rat in New York City, and
one day from the street, he heard music coming from
a radio which was inside a nearby pizzeria, and this
rat decided to sneak in there and grab some sleep
surrounded by the songs. But the owner of that shop

(02:41):
saw the rodent he was not happy. The man tried
to kill him, until something amazing happened. This little homeless
rat began to sing along with the music on the radio.
The pizzeria owner was shocked, he was amazed, he was
in press. His anger immediately vanished, and the man thought

(03:04):
to himself, wait a minute, what a great attraction that
would bring people far and wide to my establishment. And
so this man hired the creature. Yet on the first night,
stage fright kicked in. He was right there in a
room filled with customers. But our hero could not get

(03:25):
past his anxiety. He froze up. He couldn't sing. The
audience started to boo. But then he saw a child
in the audience. It was a young boy wearing a
paper birthday crown, and suddenly the rat could not help
but give voice to the sudden song in his heart.

(03:46):
He filled the room with his talents, and the audience cheered,
And after that day that pizzeria became the most popular
restaurant in town. Are you onto me with this one?
Or maybe you figured it out at the beginning of
my story here, But I just found it a strange

(04:07):
and unusual tale. The idea that a costumer confused a
coyote shipped a mascot rat outfit for a character that
would one day be featured in a strange children's story
about abandonment, homelessness and a murderous guy who ran a restaurant.
But I guess a whole lot of kids' stories have

(04:28):
gone to dark places. Sleeping Beauty had the Girl and
the Coma Hansel and Gretel had the Witches of a
watershipped down was loaded with themes of violence, fear, death,
And there are so many others Pinocchio, Cinderella, Little Red,
Riding Hood, Rumpelstilt Skin. Now, don't get me wrong, I
am not equating those literary children's classics with this book

(04:53):
that was published on a restaurant website. I'm just saying
some stories with happy endings do take a few scary
roads to get there. And this is a story that
you can remember the next time you go out with
your kids and you grab a bite at that food
place which has for decades been the popular restaurant chain,

(05:16):
the one that was supposed to be branded with a
coyote character before it became Rick Rats, until Rick Rat
was discovered to be already copyrighted. So a name change
means that you and I now know this restaurant establishment
as Chuck E Cheese. By the way, Nolan, the guy

(05:36):
who founded Chuck E Cheese, he founded another organization that
you might have heard of, the legendary video game company Atari.
And that explains why Chuck E Cheese became the first
major restaurant establishment to feature both pizza and video and

(05:57):
carnival styled games in the set game place. And now
you know this true story True Stories podcast dot com