CHICAGO (CBS) — A Chuck E. Cheese in the state of Illinois will be one of the few to retain an animatronic band.
In November, Chuck E. Cheese announced it would be pulling the plug on its animatronic performances at all locations except one in Los Angeles’ Northridge neighborhood — where the company said Munch’s Make-Believe Band, as it is known, would maintain a “permanent residency.”
Chuck E. Cheese also said that another location in Nanuet, New York, in Rockland County north of New York City, would keep the animatronic band — and remain a “100% retro store,” according to published reports.
But that had to be it.
However, in recent days, Chuck E. Cheese announced that three more locations would keep the robot belt, including one in the Town & Country Shopping Center at 2369 S. MacArthur Blvd. in Springfield, the state capital. Also on the list to retain the band are Chuck E. Cheese in Hicksville, Long Island, New York and Charlotte, North Carolina.
Earlier this month, Chuck E. Cheese President and Chief Executive Officer David McKillips told CBS News that the company needed to keep up with the times and the interests of today’s children. For example, the animatronic band was on its way out, while trampoline zones and floor-to-ceiling Jumbotrons overlooking digital dance floors were on their way in.
“This is the most exciting time in the brand’s 47-year history,” McKillips told CBS News. “It’s a complete brand transformation here at Chuck E. Cheese.”
Active play areas are an important priority, McKillips said.
“The most important thing for mom is that it’s bright and clean, and now we’ve embraced active play by installing trampolines at all our locations from coast to coast,” McKillips told CBS News.
He added that while Chuck E. Cheese has an “incredible legacy of bands,” the reality remains that “like any other great brand, you have to evolve.”
Chuck E. Cheese has a total of 19 locations in Illinois, including two in Chicago: one in the Riverpoint Shopping Center at 1830 W. Fullerton Ave. along the North Branch of the Chicago River, the other at 5030 S. Kedzie Ave. in Gage Park. There are also twelve suburban locations and five more upstate or elsewhere in Northern Illinois. Chuck E. Cheese also has a location in Merrillville, Indiana.
Dating back more than 40 years from Chicago, Chuck E. Cheese and his animatronics once had competition
Chuck E. Cheese was founded in 1977 by Atari’s co-founder, Nolan Bushnell, with its first location opening Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater in San Jose, California. It was the first family restaurant to combine food with arcade games and animated entertainment.
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Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater arrived in Illinois in 1981, with a location in Loves Park near Rockford. A few years later, a Chicago location opened in the Harlem-Foster Shopping Center, at 7300 W. Foster Ave. on the northwest side of the city.
Unlike today’s brightly lit spaces, Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater in the 1980s consisted of so many huge, dimly lit rooms with arcade games, mini carnival rides, Skee-Ball and Whac-A-Mole, ball pits and mazes with rope ladders to climb.
The Foster Avenue location featured three different rooms with animatronic music acts. A large dining room with the Pizza Time Players – Jasper T. Jowls, Pasqually, Mr. Munch and of course Chuck E. Cheese himself, who at the time was depicted as a casino pit boss rat with a New Jersey accent instead of today’s mouse in a skateboarder outfit. Other party rooms featured a gang of dogs called ‘The Beagles’, and a lion in a white and gold jumpsuit called ‘The King’ – mimicking real recordings of The Beatles and Elvis Presley respectively. A fourth animatronic act, jazz-singing hippo Dolli Dimples, was the first sight seen upon entering the entertainment venue.
An April 1983 article in the Chicago Tribune cited Chuck E. Cheese as one of the few operations capitalizing on the trend of offering pizza, video games and other family-friendly entertainment under one roof.
“The combination pizza restaurant and video game parlors have invaded the Chicago area like locusts in recent months,” Richard Phillips wrote in the article. “By the end of the summer, their numbers could double.”
Chuck E. Cheese’s main competitor at the time was ShowBiz Pizza Place, which at the time had just opened a Park Ridge location as the fifth largest in the Chicago suburbs. ShowBiz had its own animatronic band known as the Rock-afire Explosion, led by a bear character named Billy Bob Brockali.
The article also highlighted a third operation that was strictly local: ShowTime America, formerly and later known as Sally’s Stage, at 6335 N. Western Ave. across from the Nortown Movie Theater in West Rogers Park. Sally’s Stage had no animatronics – it was famous for its Barton theater pipe organ and hostesses on a roller skating rink. But Phillips’ article noted that as of April 1983, Sally’s — albeit under the name ShowTime America — included free video games for customers and “Roger, a remote-controlled robot, who [when functional] impresses children with questions and hands out free tickets for ice cream sundaes.”
Of these, only Chuck E. Cheese remains – and not the one on Foster Avenue, which later became a Little Ceasar’s Caesarland and is now a Planet Fitness gym. ShowBiz and Chuck E. Cheese merged after Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater filed for bankruptcy in 1984 – and although they continued as separate concepts for a while, the Chuck E. Cheese name had prevailed throughout the enterprise by the early 1990s. The spot where Sally’s Stage once stood is now occupied by a Hanmi Bank.
As of last August, Chuck E. Cheese operated 568 corporate and franchise locations, as well as 122 Peter Piper Pizza restaurants.
