Yep, it's been a while since I've written a Valentine to my childhood. Just remember that I'm too shy to have a girlfriend so don't worry about me breeding in the near future.
Recently at the Rifftrax Blog, Mike Nelson posted one of their recurring short entries about some odd character and how he or she felt. I wish I had the sense of humor to pull that off, because it would solve the problems I have with taking the week off after writing my entertainment entries. Anyway, the post that inspired today's post was about Chuck E. Cheese. I was the age where this place was huge to kids like me, so let me see what I remember.
The Pizza/animatronic entertainment place that I remember most is not a Chuck E. Cheese but Showbiz Pizza, which was sorta the same thing. We had one in Laurel, MD and I'm sure it was the place we went to the most. Showbiz, if you don't know, has a big stage with three separate parts and has an animatronic band known as Rock A-Fire Explosion. Observe.
The tables that you see in this picture were reserved for birthday parties. We usually got a booth on an upper level looking over the tables. I never had a birthday party at one of the closer tables, and while I probably wanted to, I think it was good idea not to for the sake of my parents. I wonder if I'd have the patience to be an adult at a place like this while my kids spent their tokens. I would probably enjoy or put up with the singing, but I think I would snap at any misbehaving kid.
Anyway, at Showbiz we would always get pizza and a big pitcher of soda. I don't think we ever got anything else, at least for my sister and I. My parents may have gotten a salad or whatever.
The thing I always linked to my memory of Showbiz was Fatz Geronimo, the gorilla. He was in the center of the center stage and was always playing the keyboard. I always thought of him as the leader of the group even though it was suppose to be the bear/beaver thing at the right. Hmm, I guess maybe there's a bit of truth to thing about monkeys making things better. Damn.
The rest of the center band was ok. The polar bear was kind of forgettable. The other two characters, a mouse and a dog, were so similar looking to Chuck E Cheese characters that I would be surprised if Nolan Bushnell hadn't sued. Mitzi Mozerella is like Chuck E with a blonde wig! Dook the space dog was pretty weird looking, and I always thought of him as the equivalent of Jasper Jowls, even if the only reason was because they were dogs.
On the right stage was a wolf and his puppet. I can't say much about them since they rarely showed up. I think they did comedy bits, but I only remember them showing up at the end of a big finale. Once they showed up, you knew that you were only seconds away from the curtains closing for a long time. Then it was back to watching those damn monitors and waiting for the minutes to tick off. Welp, time to play some video games!
As a greedy kid who lusted after video games, it was frustrating how quickly you could spend those tokens. I have a horrible memory but I still remember returning to the table and begging for more. I would occasionally get lucky. My favorite game at that Laurel location was The Goonies. I don't think the NES ever got the first version of that game, or if it did it was very early and I never had a chance to grab it. Goonies had you as one of the kids going around mansions kicking mice. You can also drop bombs and blow up doors to release items and other goonies. I once pumped the hell out of that machine and got to the third or fourth area. I'm sure by then I was getting to old for the ball pits and only concerned myself with the games.
Other games I remember include a Nintendo Vs machine, which I remember because I thought it was weird that they had Duck Hunt even when I had a NES. At one poin they had a TMNT arcade machine, and I started what turned out to be a run to get to the final boss. I actually traded anecdotes with some other kids about how it compared to the NES version. Yeah, that's my generation right there. I was also introduced to Super Pac-Man and, get this, a couple Bible games. They actually had Noah's Ark and some other game, but they were at much smaller "kiddie" machines and I was too embarrassed to play them.
I don't remember too much about stuff like ball pits. Showbiz at Laurel wasn't that big, so they couldn't have really elaborate stuff. I think it had a standard jungle gym set with chutes, but it wasn't long before I was too big for that kind of thing. I do remember one kid ride where you strap a small child in a seat and the seat circles around vertically. I may have even been a little scared of it because it goes a few feet up.
I'd like to share one anecdote that I can still remember. One time some teenagers were having a party in the birthday area. The bear (who I still think looks more like a big beaver) was actually talking to them. The teenagers started popping balloons, much to Billy Bob's annoyance. He tried to get them to stop, and at one poin one of the teens walked up to the animatron. He tried to pull Billy's tooth, and everytime the bear growled, which was pretty funny. At the end, Rock Afire Explosion had it's big number. When the song was just ending and the lights were going out, one of the teens got on stage and ran backwards into the wolf section of the stage. All the teens had a big laugh over that. The funny thing is I never saw him come out from behind the curtains. Maybe I just missed it, but after that my imagination was fired up. No, I didn't think the animatrons were real, but I did have fun imagining some guards tossing him into some underground cell.
By the end of the eighties Showbiz bought Chuck E out, which I didn't learn until recently. All of the Rock Afire stages were converted into Chuck E stages, so I always assumed that Chuck E Cheese won out, but apparently Nolan Bushnell ran into financial problems. It sounds like he's a good ideas guy who has problems with actually maintaining a business. Anyway, Showbiz in Laurel became Chuck E Cheese, and Rock Afire Explosion was no more. I can't remember what the stage looked like afterwards, but I'm sure the characters were replaced. I guess I was losing interest in the stage at this poin and only cared about The Goonies.
Later on when my sister was still young enough to join the place, they started putting guards at the door. You know you're too old for a place when they finally worry about children getting hurt.
If you think it's weird for a 27 year old to be nostalgic about this kind of stuff, check out this website. Not only do they have lots of info about both places, it also has a friggen podcast! I started listening to the latest episode wondering what they had to talk about, and the first news item was about some kid who recently got molested at a Chuck E. Cheese. Wow, just wow.
I'm going to start a new post to talk about Chuck E Cheese. I have a few more stories about that, and then I'll move on to something else.
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