A History of Chuck E. Cheese: Last Squeak Tonight with John Oliver (Web Exclusive)

Hi and welcome, if you're seeing this it's because you're under 35 and our main story this week was about the homeowners association so we thought we'd make a special substitute story just for you since you'll never be able to afford to buy a house . Absolutely never, will not happen, so instead of you having a house that is also an investment that again will not happen for you, we have created this segment that takes advantage of something that you and your age mates may have deep nostalgia for and means this, how many times can you go to Chuck Chees before you've done everything there is to do?

That is a very good question. Pizza tells the tunnel. Jump to the market right there. Chuck E Cheese, where the kid will be a yes, Chucke

cheese

with the seminal motto where. a child can be a child as opposed to a child being able to see a dead body in the parking lot, which I believe is the Applebees slogan and is not false. Also, if you're like me, you saw that ad and wondered who the old guy is at the end. I have about a thousand questions about incoherent Gandal. He looks like he just escaped from Jumangi and sounds like he just freed Bas Tryp Ofan.

It's hard to understand what he's saying there. but after my 50th viewing, I think I finally figured out what's going on. You see, they start the ad by asking how many times you can go to Chuck e-

cheese

s before you've done everything there is to do and they're done with it. pointing across the arcade while saying I started right here, implying that you've been going to Chuck-E-Cheese for 100 conservative years, essentially the message of the ad has reached Chuck-E-Cheese, we guarantee you'll die here Now if you were a child or parent at any time in the

last

four decades, you have undoubtedly been to a Chuck-E-Cheese at least once.

They are the original pizza and arcade restaurant that became famous for their animatronic band that played hits like this. together we get it we get it with you we get it together forever now that we're together things couldn't be better we got Le yeah chews make believe ban shreds and I'll introduce you to the whole gang later but it's real quick I just love the fact that This purple monstrosity is called a munch. I adore any creature named after a colloquialism for a certain sexual act and I must say the name fits, it's the face of a deep sea explorer, you can tell. per alicious never stops diving his treasure it's a pleasure for you he's a reverse DJ khed so to speak, but as an adult you probably only hear about the restaurant when it's pushed wrong, like the fact that it was recently discovered that some

chuck

-e- cheese's animatronics still run on floppy disks or when the company felt compelled to release a statement swearing that it wasn't recycling pizza slices, though when it issues a statement denying it already lost the argument and perhaps most notably, Chuck -E -Cheese may be in the news these days is that some kidney parties have become battlegrounds and it is the adults who are behaving badly.

We have several people injured here at Chucky Cheese, yes we are on our way, there was a fight that broke down. We've got people fighting I need a cop I need wow A 911 call from a Chuck E cheese shouldn't sound the same as one made after any Philadelphia sporting event, but the fact is that adults seem to love fighting at Chuck-E. -Cheese viciously and often just Google Chuck-E-Cheese Fight and you'll unlock hours of content and find articles like this one from 2008 about how a single Chuck-E-Cheese in Wisconsin had called the police to break up 12 fights in Just two years into the biggest fight, seven officers arrived to find 40 people knocking over chairs and screaming in front of the restaurant's music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chained namesake Mouse perform with a local city official subpoenaed to say who He is the father.

Going to take your kids to a place where there is alcohol and guns are brandished, it was like something out of the ordinary in Tarantino fil and that sounds good, doesn't it? Especially because if I were to bring a guest, those fights look a lot like Tarantino's movie included a bunch of white people saying they really shouldn't be white now, why does this happen so often? a kid and you might be thinking, well, John, it's stressful managing a group of kids and there's alcohol, that's why the fight starts, but no, no, I think it goes much deeper than that.

I think there is a rot at the heart of

chuck

echeese, well me. I don't have a definitive answer. I have a tantalizing theory and I'll be honest. When we started writing something about Chuck-E-Cheese for you, we thought it would be five or six minutes max, but the more we looked into it, the more we became fascinated and this officially got out of hand, so I'm going to be talking about Chuck -E-Cheese during and I'm not kidding about this for the next 2 5 minutes. You can stop viewing this at any time if you want. but this studio audience can't leave and abandoning them feels like shit of you, so let's start from the beginning, it was the spring of 1977, Woody Allen had the number one movie in the country, Son of Sam was terrorizing NY. and on May 17, the first Chuck-E-Cheese opened in San Jose, California.

The restaurant's game room was the brainchild of Nolan Bushnel, co-founder of Atari, you know, the company that created classic games like Space Race, asteroids, double pong, super pong, pin pong, hockey. pong super pong 10 Ultra pong Ultra pong doubles and quadr pong, each one of them is real, by the way, Bon was looking for a way to make money by using his game in arcades and adding entertainment to mealtimes, something he once described as fundamental. to The Human Experience because in discussing the invention of Chuck-E-Cheese he once said and I quote throughout

history

that there was a celebration and the celebration had food, drink and games without exception, whether you were talking about the solstice of summer with primitive man until the In the circuses of Rome there was always an element of entertainment.

I always felt like it was something that was missing in restaurants. I wanted to add a dimension of fun to the act of eating and this seems like a good time to remind you that in the 1970s literally everyone was on drugs and if you are thinking of the primitive summer solstice circuses in Rome, they both sound very violent and sexual . Yes, exactly, we'll get to that. Remember this moment because it will be important later. The point is the Chuck-E-Cheese. was a response to humanity's primary identification needs, checking that super ego at the door, as for the track The Animal Bushnel states that his decision to include talking animals was inspired by his trip to the Tiki Room at Disneyland, which in a way makes sense.

Chuck e-meche is something like Mickey Mouse's butter rat, but interestingly that wasn't initially what Bushnel was going for with the character Bushnell originally planned to name the coyote pizza restaurant, so he ordered what he thought was a costume of coyote for his main animatronic. It turned out to be a rat and Bushnell decided to follow it first. He thought about changing the name of the restaurant to Rick Rat's Pizza, but his team convinced him that having a rat in the name of a restaurant was not the best idea, so they agreed to name the rat. the Chuck Chuck E cheese mascot was originally more adult oriented he smoked a cigar he had a Jersey accent he was like a night out for adults like happy birthday to you happy birthday you get it it's true it's true the original Chuck. -E-Cheese was supposed to be a coyote and once a rat was actually a bit of a sassy Jersey, in fact here was one of the original animatronic shows from 1979, it's probably no surprise to any Bonnies that we get a upcoming birthday number. here, well it's a surprise to me, I didn't even get a gift even for Big C, that's because it's not your thing and with oh oh yeah, friends, I have to tell you it's a hard way to make a living sitting here . connected to the same computer as that fruitcake dog anyway listen let's find out which table is having a birthday party yeah chuckecheese was basically a comedic insult it was mean it was dangerous it felt like any minute He was about to put out his cigarette. on the arm of a child he was Joan Rivers meets Don Rickles meets all the guys from the Jersey Shore every birthday party probably started with a pizza delivery and ended with Chuck mercilessly destroying a 5 year old and the actor was filled in by other characters like the aforementioned Mr.

Munch, a Perma-hungry husky alien from the purple planet who, according to Bushnel, was a kind of our Cookie Monster, then there was Jasper T JS, the southern cowdog, who when first introduced it was flanked by Confederate flags and was later described by saying: The hound dog was stupid, since then there was Dolly Dimples, a seductive hippo torch singer who flirted with customers for quarters, as she said later the company's first president, Gan Landrum, every time she hit a high note, her breasts rose and fell. up and down when she hit her high note and then the kids fell in love with this and I was like, oh my God, what have I done here?

And I can actually answer that for you because it's very simple, you turned one of the deadliest animals in the world into a headliner at your casino and kids boob bar, that's what you did, do you also have any idea how astronomically How horny do you have to be to build dancing mechanical breasts for an animatronic hippo? It takes an otherworldly excitement to even throw something like that into a business meeting, probably several meetings, by the way, because I know it was a different emergency room, but it sure wasn't an immediate yes from everyone around the room. table, at some point you had to say: you know what I want.

I go back to my earlier point about the hippo breasts, if that's okay and once that was okay, you had to convey that level of arousal to a team of engineers, other human beings, you gave them notes like I think we can get more movement here. , It is not like this? It's crazy and I love it. so look, it's clear from the beginning that Chuck-E-Cheese took a lot of inspiration from Disney's Sesame Street and porn and they augmented all of this with a character dressed as Charles Entertainment Cheese walking around the restaurant and as we now know.

This concept was a huge success people loved the shit rat and its limits pushing Antics in 1980 they added dozens of stores, even some internationally, and began franchising the problem was that very soon their success attracted imitators there was the restaurant Captain Andy's Rivertown had text Critters Pizza Jamboree, Major Magic's Allstar Pizza review gadgets, laughing bees and one called Pizza Planet that had a really horrible mascot, now you can celebrate your birthday with Pepe Rooney and Sylvester Stallion on Pizza Planet no no no no no no no no no no no no I hate I hate everything about Dollar Store Kung Fu Panda here so much, I swore to myself I would go to my grave not knowing what it would be like if a panda bear was Michael Myers and that promise has now been broken fundamentally broken, but chuck-e- Cheese's big gun was a chain called Showz Pizza Place and at this point in the story we meet our antagonist and, as in so many great myths, the antagonist actually started out as an ally.

The success of Chuck-e-Cheese caught the attention of businessman Robert Brock. and he signed on to franchise over 200 locations, but that same year Brock ended up canceling the deal, found an engineer for animatronics, and launched his own chain of family restaurants. He called it chiz Pizza. The concept was more or less the same, they were different characters. but like the Pizza arcade games, there was definitely a rivalry between the two at the time and Chiz had arguably better animatronics. Chuck and his friends were limited to pictures on the wall. Chiz had a whole band called Rocka. A fiery explosion made of full body. characters now, that's a pretty clear advantage, isn't it?

The Chuck-E-Cheese characters were stuck on the wall like a furry portrait of Hogwarts with dead eyes, so if you wanted your kids to have fully articulated three-dimensional nightmares, Showbiz was really the only one. The Place You Need to Go Rocker's Fire B

last

was the result of a collaboration between Robert Brock and engineer Aaron Fecta. They basically took Nolan Bushnell's idea for an animatronic band and almost perfected it and made other adjustments to get an advantage over Chuck-E. -Cheese also includes a room where moms could go watch soap operas while the kids play, probably a big step up from the gift: Mom has a Chuck e-Cheese, which I'm pretty sure involved Chuck calling them Toots and whistling as they bowed. over the Bard ski machine come on it's my boy showz the pizza was a big hit and unfortunately things went south for our grumpy rat.

Chuck-E-Cheese sued Shiz Pizza, resulting in a 2-year legal battle which they eventually won, but thenthe video appeared. The gaming industry collapsed in 1983 and arcades were hit hard. Chuck-E-Cheese saw his income drop to the point of losing $15 million that year alone and, as the dumbest person in his family playing Monopoly, Chuck-E-Cheese declared bankruptcy, without However, Showbiz Peter. somehow he was able to weather the storm and in a catastrophic move that would forever change the world as we know it Shiz catches his competitor, that is, Shiz Peter snatched the rat from him, the copycat bought the original. I'll save it for gasping now in 1985, Shiz and the Chuck-E-Cheese merger is complete, but here's a twist because it soon turns out that the new company could no longer use the rocker's fire blast because Aaron Fecta, its creator , had separated from the company but still owned the rights and refused to hand them over. them to the newly merged company, essentially killing their own music career at Creations with the rockin' Fire characters now off the table, the new network took advantage of a bad situation and began modernizing the animatronics into Chuck-E-Cheese characters, He even posted this horrible video so franchises understand exactly how to take robots apart.

Now, a quick side note here. There are still huge fans of the rocking fire explosion who have carefully collected and restored the old original animatronics. A while back, one fan even went viral by programming his private collection to sing current radio hits like and these are real ushers who love this club. your eyes while you're on the other side and not at all shy I have something for you yes do it I can tell the way you look at me see aren't you entertained you're not entertained I don't have notes I don't have anything to say about that other than It's cool that they should play on the next inauguration, whoever it is and look, I'd be remiss if I didn't show you how they handled the rap break for that song because however you think they did it, they better let you off the hook. sexually mentally physically emotionally I know like your medicine that you take every time it's perfect there aren't many songs dirtier than Love in This Club and it's frankly surprising that the perfect presentation is through these tremendously healthy animatronic characters and at this point they really Have a quick side note to the side note we're already on because the resurgence of interest in the fire rock explosion about a decade ago resulted in the band being recruited to perform with CEO Green in the midst of his legal problems live.

Las Vegas in 2013, we have a clip of the performance and one part in particular doesn't feature a lot of sexual harassment. I mean, come on, Mr. Police. I gave him all the clues. Now back to Chuck-E-Cheese, the new one. The animatronics expanded the range of what the band could do, including the addition of a redesigned Helen Henny, the chicken singer who added a lot of class to the ACT Helen, how did you get your start in show business? Well, there are a bevy of artists in my family, my friends. I worked in Beville doing a trampoline act, there I am, but you mean you've never heard of spring chicken oh no, oh come on baby, why don't we paint the town and all that?

Come on, there's a star, just look at mom. dear face heartbeat body hair snatched you so much in therapy while we talk that it's a mother smacking your lips without murderer right there on the drums was pasquali who I can only describe as illegally Italian pasquali Pasali the chef here and I I keep time, I provide the rhythm while we sing RH. Be the first to tell you that I am quite the fan. Everyone can see what a great comedian I am. I hope I am not perpetuating the very thing I am condemning. when I say now it's a spicy hate to climb back in the mid 1990s Chuck E and the Gang were in their prime producing full length music videos, educational content and sketch shows that would be screened in stores in 1999 they even made a feature film titled chuckecheese.

In Galaxy 5000, the basic plot is this: a boy named Charlie Rocket needs $50,000 to fix his uncle's tractor and the only people who can help are Chuck and the gang. Now, why is the maintenance of vital farm equipment a child's responsibility? It never is. was made clear, but the mascot entering an intergalactic race, the titular Galaxy 5000 to win the prize money, isn't an absolutely wild moment in movie

history

, but here's just a taste of the tone. I'm Chucky and this is my navigator Jasper, hi. I'm amazed, I think runners are so fascinating, so you'll meet me at the soda shop tomorrow after the race, I bet we'll meet, wait Chucky, you slide the dog, yeah, yeah, everyone's sexually attracted by the human women, that is, you and Cannon.

You would think they would keep it in their pants while a literal child is with them, but no, they are honking, if they are horny, they are engaging in yes, what is the term CEO sexual harassment? That's all. I knew you don't need to know. At this point, Chuck-E-Cheese was on top of the world, but the good times never stay good, are you friends? In the 2010s, sales were down and its cultural cache was running out, so in 2012 the company looked for a new direction to breathe a little. life in the brand and the one they took was absolutely scandalous was no longer Chuck E, the wise and sparkling rat of the 70s and 80s or, indeed, the smooth-talking cat of the 90s and 2000s, now, according to the company , it wasn't a rat. not at all, he was a mouse with a never-before-heard backstory that they published in an entire book.

The new origin story says that Chuck-E-Cheese grew up in an orphanage called "Wait For It St Marinaras" and cites why Chuck E was an orphan, no. one knew when his birthday was so he never had his own birthday party, this made Chuck E sad so after winning $50 in a pong tournament, a good cross mark for the way he runs away to the city from New York, where he sleeps above the kitchen at a pizzeria then is discovered by a friendly Italian chef named Pasquali who hears Chucky sing and declares that a mouse who can sing my restaurant is saved.

I'm going to make you a star. All I want to say is that Chuck-E-Cheese was now far away. cry about the shitty cigarette smoking rap that started it all then in 2017, in a devastating blow, the company made this terrible decision. Chuckecheese restaurants are dissolving the classic animatronic band restaurant simply saying that people's taste has changed in 40 years, so do today's kids. They're not really interested in the robot troop oh, they're really not interested in the robots, okay? If that's true, then kids these days, I don't normally jump into the Generation Wars because I was born in Generation , they may burn in the fires of eternal hell, but sadly it is true that the animatronics began to be phased out, which is already brutal enough, but apparently when a store gets rid of them or closes a company policy that requires them to destroy the head of chuck-e-cheese and other brand-name items, something a local newspaper reporter once captured on video.

It's moving day for Chuck E cheese. This is Lorraine Swanson Al in the patch and us. You're smashing Chucky's head, it's symbolic, I mean, I guess, I guess it's symbolic, they're smashing a Chuck-E-Cheese head while a Chuck-E-Cheese store is closing, it's not exactly subtext, is it in To the extent that there is symbolism there, it is of the Darren AR an oi school of subtlety and hints that the point is that the company suffered a major setback in the mid-2010s and the pandemic simply made things worse and in a sign of how desperate they were to stay afloat. the company ended up doing this, well, get this, a Reddit customer, a Reddit user, I should say, in Philadelphia, thought he was supporting a local pizza business when he ordered pizza from Pascali's, but when his food arrived it looked familiar , texted GrubHub, uh, the driver says Hi, just curious, this Chuck-E-Cheese meal turns out the chain is operating a restaurant under a different name?

Pascali's pizza and wings. What is Chuck-e cheese? You can't just change your name and pretend to be something. otherwise, that's for rap artists looking to mix it up and companies that committed too many genocides. Look. I know I've been talking about Chuck-E-Cheese for longer than anyone thought was humanly possible, but this actually brings me to my point here. Chuck-E-Cheese has completely lost the plot, remember when I said I was working on a theory, this is the moment right now, my theory is that Chuck-E-Cheese was a brand founded in Darkness, there was an inherent meanness, a cruelty, a danger embedded in the company since the jump was inspired by the solstice celebrations and Roman circuses, its tone remained in the center and in a ditch, Chuck-E-Cheese was a consent of the children who craved it, They liked to be denied and the parents appreciated the children's entertainment with some for the moms were horny for the taboo attracted to the danger and the dads love to see the heaving chest of an oversexed animatronic hippopotamus.

Even Nolan Bushnel himself once talked about Chuck-E-Cheese in a professional tech talk like this, you can't imagine the weird things people do from inside a Chuck-E-Cheese costume. The other thing you don't know is the weird, weird things the employees do in the Chuck-E-Cheese locker room closet. Locked door. Small space anyway. Think about it. I'm pretty sure the founder of chuckecheese just admitted that people go into the costume closet and put on the mascot suit, which is the guy responsible for your childhood memories, I bet when I made that joke earlier about that Mr. Munch bore the explicit name conalingus.

You thought he was reaching a little, you're not so sure now are you? making Chuck-E-Cheese the target of sympathy instead of disgust, the more customers absorb the anger that once belonged solely to Chuck and now the balance is out of whack when Chuck Cheese was out of line, you, as customer, was free to relax. but now that the rat is brain dead and singing to a birthday orphan with no discernible personality who clearly no longer faces the Intergalactic NASCAR girls, the universe is off its axis, so where does this all lead? Honestly, I'm not entirely sure.

I stopped intellectually absorbing everything I said about 15 minutes ago, but the prompter tells me to say this chuckecheese, it's lost and we want to help them help themselves. You know we recently discovered that another beloved rodent is ready to enter the public domain. in the US later this year, the original Steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse will soon be a free agent and I highly recommend that you consider adopting him, he is the perfect choice, he is a famous rodent that loves to entertain and will not be. I'm afraid of overstepping the boundaries because once it enters the public domain you can easily turn a sweet, adorable mouse into a shit-talking mouse.

I'll show you how it could work. Please come here, Mickey, please come say hi, come say hi everyone, Hello, Mickey. Hey, how are you? hey W sh wow where is Shelly? You really won't let him go, Mickey, no, they haven't found her yet, right?, no, no, that's a solid point from Mickey to restore the balance. to the Chuck-E-Cheese universe, we promise he'll hit you with that classic hostile crowd work that this brand was frankly built on. How would you say happy birthday to children? Mickey, you're not special, nothing about you is special. I love Mickey, that one is just cold blooded and instead of singing happy birthday to your kids when he brings out the mascot, he says this as a citizen of the United States, you are part of the most violent genocidal imperialist empire the world has ever known. your silence is complicity, Lord Mickey and if you wonder if this one will shake it from inside the costume, we say oh, I'm doing it right now and we wouldn't have it any other way, so the offer is on the Chuck-E-Cheese table this disgusting mouse could soon be yours that's our show thank you very much for watching good night here he is no hey hey Micky don't you look over me don't look over me this is sexual harassment