Showbiz Pizza: A Retrospective History

In early March of 1980, Showbiz Pizza opened its doors, and a whole generation of children fell in love with animatronics, arcades, and really bad pizza.  Founded by Robert Brock, of Brock Hotel Corporation, and Creative Engineering, Inc., the “entertainment centers” featured an animatronics show that played at regular intervals, a large arcade section with games and coin-operated rides, and eventually some jungle-gym equipment for kids to climb on.  With the tickets won from the arcade machines, kids could select prizes to take home, ranging from five to five thousand tickets for various items, all branded with the Showbiz Pizza logo, of course.

The company’s friendly mascot often walked around in the store, greeting children and interacting with them on birthdays, and some locations had liquor licenses, allowing adults to enjoy a beer or some wine while their kids played or watched the animatronics show.

Ad c. 1980

To those of us who grew up in the 1990s, that description probably conjured up images of red, green, and yellow decorated Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurants, but for kids in the 1980s, that description seems to much oftener mean ShowBiz pizza and the Rock-afire Explosion.

In the late 1970s, the people who owned Chuck E. Cheese and his brother animatronic mascot, Billy Bob, were the same; Pizza Time Theater owned both properties and operated the restaurants in various states throughout the country.  But by the 1980s, Showbiz Pizza had become its own company, and the two franchises were in direct competition. Each brand had its advantages–Chuck E. Cheese was much more family friendly, and had the less frightening animatronic band, and according to one article I read, the better pizza.  Showbiz Pizza seems to have had the better animatronics and programming, and appealed to a wider range of ages. The shows at Showbiz in particular seem to have been themed to be a bit more adult, slipping in humor that would sail over children’s heads while adults got the slightly dirty joke.

Image found on Some Kind of Nostalgia.

Robert Brock had a strong background in franchising, and understood how the system worked, meaning Showbiz Pizza did a lot better business than Chuck E. Cheese.  It also meant Brock felt he knew what was best for the company, which eventually began to cause friction between him and the owner of Creative Engineering (CEI), Aaron Fechter.  It started with creative differences, as one would expect. CEI was in charge of programming the animatronics shows, the technology, and the creative content, and Fechter was quite protective of his creations.  Brock, on the other hand, wanted to be able to merchandise and create as he saw fit, without having to jump through Fechter’s hoops.

Eventually, in 1984, Showbiz acquired the Chuck E. Cheese franchises as well, creating Showbiz Pizza Time to merge the two companies.  And that was when things started falling apart for Fechter and CEI.

Unlike Fechter’s Billy Bob and the Rock-afire Explosion, Chuck E. Cheese and Munch’s Rock and Roll Band weren’t controlled by an outside entity.  Brock probably saw that he could do what he liked with the Chuck E. Cheese characters, without interference, and the process of Concept Unification was born.  However, before giving up on the Rock-afire Explosion entirely, Brock asked Fechter one last time to give him the rights to the property, without (at least according to Fechter) offering any kind of fair compensation.  When Fechter refused to just hand over his intellectual property, Brock started retrofitting Showbiz Pizza restaurants into Chuck E. Cheese restaurants.

Michael Jackson, Fatz Domino, and Aaron Fechter; from the CEI website (link in sources below)

Concept unification was a slow process that used the original framework for the animatronics and reskinned them, removing show elements and characters and replacing them with new ones.  Often the animatronic show would be the last thing to change over, with the restaurant decor being switched out first, and set elements slowly going missing while the show still played. Eventually, all franchised Showbiz Pizzas became Chuck E. Cheese restaurants.

You can actually watch training videos for technicians to use during Concept Unification on youtube (I’ll link one at the end, with my other references).  I found the footage fascinating, especially since I remember being very young and going to a Chuck E. Cheese near me that had apparently once been a Showbiz Pizza, or that had used animatronics from one.  Concept unification hadn’t quite switched over, and I distinctly remember a female mouse (Mitzi Mozzarella) and a gorilla keyboardist who lead the band instead of Mr. Munch (Fatz Domino). I can’t find any records of things like this happening, but I remember it being a big debate in my family if we should go back, since I was so scared of the gorilla (we went back, and I am still afraid of gorillas, but that’s a story for another day).

Nightmare inducing.  Credit to Pablo Iglesias Maurer.

In the early 2000s, Showbiz Pizza Time became CEC Entertainment, Inc., and is now owned by yet another company.  CEC now owns all of the Chuck E. Cheese themed pizza restaurants. There are a few other themed pizza restaurants that have tried to capture the success of Showbiz and Chuck E. Cheese.  Peter Piper’s Pizza combines an elaborate indoor playground with an arcade and a pizza parlor, and Discovery Zone has similar elaborate play structures, although the arcades seem to have been much smaller.  No one has really recaptured the success of Showbiz or Pizza Time, though.

Today, there are still a large faction of Showbiz Pizza and Rock-afire Explosion fans, mostly united through the internet.  Some have full animatronic shows that they program to perform to pop songs (I’ll link to some of that at the end, too),and a few of them appeared in a 2008 documentary about the restaurant chain and their enduring love for it.  The prevailing sentiment seems to be that the animatronic band is what they love.

While I myself have no experience with Showbiz pizza aside from the aforementioned childhood memory, The entire saga is fascinating.  I highly recommend checking out the documentary if you’re interested in nostalgia culture or pop history.

 

Sources:

• Wikipedia (for general information on themed pizza restaurants)
• showbizpizza.com
• mentalfloss.com/article/65560/chuck-e-cheeseshowbiz-pizza-robot-wars
• showbizpizza.wikia.com

Concept Unification:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXCrVNEwGxM

CEI Promo Material (c. 1994?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGPOT9Dpz2M

CEI Tour video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_hEpYCgOsI

Rock-Afire Explosion Documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTmhS6hcY-A

Creative Engineering’s website:

engineeringcreative.com

An Open Letter to Adam Sandler

Dear Mr. Sandler,

I have never liked you.  When I was in high school, at what I understand was the height of your career, you were a comedy great.  My male classmates quoted you constantly.  I’m pretty sure at least one of them wanted to be you.  You did SNL appearances and made movies that people wanted to see.

While I may not like you, I have respected your business sense and you acting talent.  You’re not a bad actor.  In fact, despite my distaste for Punch Drunk Love, I was very impressed with your performance in it.  You showed a kind of emotional depth I could identify with, and I liked the (possibly unintentional) elements of magical realism.  I also quite enjoyed your family friendly Bedtime Stories, even more so now that I am employed in the hospitality industry.

Where you have gone wrong, in my opinion, is in not actually working at honing your craft.  Instead of taking the time to write well, to act well, to think about characters and the choices they make, you resort to potty humor and bad language.  Instead of writing and acting in insightful, thoughtful pieces about current hot-topic issues, you make lazy racist jokes and choose stereotypes over archetypes.  Your man-child persona has long overtaken any serious acting or comedic ability you might have.  While other comedians of your age chose to age gracefully, embracing gentler forms of entertainment (Ben Stiller and the Night at the Museum franchise come readily to mind) or exploring growing older through their comedy and acting choices (Robin Williams, for example, or George Carlin), you chose to keep repeating the same idiotic plot lines and jokes, dressed up differently but the same, nevertheless.  Alec Baldwin came back from his missteps.  Will Ferrell manages to be (dubiously) funny without being crass and offensive.

Some might say it’s time for you to step to the rear and fade out.  You’re perceived by the vast majority of the public as a racist, misogynistic asshole, who would rather talk about bodily functions than be serious.  No one finds you funny in any lasting way.  Maybe you should quit now, and let your legacy be your SNL sketches and your work in the 1990s, with this whole recent ugliness allowed to fade into the background of pop culture’s memory.

Don’t do it.

Rethink yourself, instead.  Grow as an actor, a director, a producer.  Find people who you trust to help you grow as a human being.  Find new ways to be funny, to comment on the current state of affairs.  Find a new persona.  Abandon the mawkish man-child and reinvent your public image.  And for God’s sake, stop making the easy, lazy, offensive jokes your name has become synonymous with.

Sincerely,

 

The Part-Time Writer.