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
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