Learning Day: The Chuck E. Cheese Archives 🌭

Some would say picking on a Chuck. E. Cheese animatronics fansite curated by a single man for over two decades is low-hanging fruit, beneath the ambition of a seasoned comedy columnist working in the cursed media space. Others, who are clued in and in the know, will understand that I recently mangled my butt in an ass-clapping accident and had to have emergency butt surgery, so it’s pretty impressive that I turned in a column at all. Still others, who are even more clued in and so deep in the know that they may as well be fucking TimeCops, will note that I pushed hard on social media for permission to make this column just a bunch of pictures of my ruined anus. Those people, God willing, will now storm the 1900 HOTDOG Discord and swamp it with petitions demanding the release of the “Untitled Michael Swaim Injured Butthole Project.”

But while we give that process time to work, let’s talk about this freaky shrine to a bankrupt pizza chain built around filthy scraps of carpet stretched across rusty dusty steel wireframes hooked to rotors so they can jimmy and shake along to distorted eight-track music while kids pass around bird flu and learn how to finger each other behind the skeeball machines.

Showbizpizza.com (ver. 5.0) isn’t just the most meticulous collection of Five Nights at Freddy’s fodder ever indexed and cataloged, it must be among the most thorough catalogs of anything, ever. Not since Darwin classified the entire living kingdom – or even WikiFeet – has so much passion been put into archiving something that arguably shouldn’t have been suffered to exist in the first place. This alone is not mock-worthy. In fact, I can’t stress enough how innocuous the fine people at ShowBizPizza seem to be, and how vociferously I will publicly come at you if you take this column as an invitation to bully them. What they do, they clearly do out of love, the same kind of niche love that empowers the very website I use to indoctrinate you now. Who am I to crap on that kind of childlike wonder? Who are any of us?

THE STUPIDEST THINGS ABOUT THIS CRAZY WEBSITE I’VE FOUND SO FAR (SO DUMB)

Let’s just establish base parameters on what I mean when I say this site is “thorough” when it comes to chronicling the history of the Chuck E. Cheesiverse. Lots of people are thorough. Dan Carlin is thorough. Alex Schmidt and Katey Golden are thorough. I’m famously thorough, especially when looking up the proper spelling of the one woman’s name in a list of three names. Then there are the rare brushes with next-level thoroughness we all have. Perhaps you attended a county fair, saw someone’s collection of every kind of plastic army man ever produced since 1909, whistled low and sweet, said “that’s thorough” through grit teeth, and retired to the gymkhana to eat chocolate-fried pork and watch the guy from Cake collapse on stage.

My point is this: this Chuck E. Cheese fansite has an official Mission Statement. That statement – manifesto, really – is three hundred twenty-three words long, and begins with the site admin and primary force behind this well-made madness admitting what we already knew in our hearts…that it all started with a defining childhood trauma. Fascinations usually do. Same reason I’m “fascinated” by tap shoes. Speaking of which, Mommy liked to two-step, but Mommy don’t two-step no more no more, Mommy don’t two-step no more.

Highlighted above – “I was terrified of them, and spent the majority of the night turned away from the stage…staring instead at…the back wall of the showroom.” This whole thing started the way Blair Witch ended: with intense terror, a shadowed figure facing the corner of a filthy room, and effects that look like shit in retrospect. Nevertheless, the die was cast, and now there’s a website where you can access full written reviews of every single “showtape” ever associated with an entire family of franchises. Showtapes include the tapes that ran on background TVs in the space, training tapes shown to employees, the works. Want to decide whether you should watch 1983’s Uncle Klunk Showtape featuring Jeff Howell, the second Uncle Klunk, or the official Chuck E. Cheese Birthday Song played at live shows performed in 2002 (April – December)? They’ve got you covered. Simply read the first review, found in the Rock-afire Explosion Showtapes section, subsection Birthday/Special, then click on over to the Chuck E. Cheese (Live/Road/Birthday) page and slap your peepers on review number two, then look up and realize your hands are bony and withered now, and the sands of time have made little mounds around your ankles. Die.

Oh, and if you send them your address, they’ll mail you free, unusable arcade tickets salvaged from the ShowBiz Pizza Zone in Phenix [sik] City, Alabama, owned and operated by THE Chris Thrash!

I could gush endlessly about the reams of archived corporate documents, the virtual collectibles museum – which has an attendant six-episode webseries – and something called “Info University,” but I’ll leave that level of thoroughness to the eggheads at Knowledge School.

Honestly, the whole thing is so much sadder than you think. To be clear, I’m absolutely not talking about the perfectly lovely person who spent their spare time on a fun hobby until it ballooned into a big dumb website twenty years later. That’s how I made my career, for God’s sake. That person’s cool and living his best life, and if you take this article as an invitation to bully him I’ll find you and forcefeed you pictures of my mangled butthole. No, what’s sad is the tragic rise and fall of the whole “eat bad pizza while you watch a bad show but at least the brats shut up for a minute” industry. Again, I can’t possibly impart all you’d learn by exploring the site’s exhaustive timeline, but the chronicling includes:

🍕 Dorks feuding over patents for stuffed animals with crap inside having their visions completely trampled by soulless execs trying to cut costs enough that they can franchise this crap out using modular units of copyrighted characters they stack in a warehouse and sell along with the ingredients and decorations.

🍕 A scandal known as “funnergate” and something non-ironically called “the Animatronics Pizza Wars.” “Hey, my grandfather didn’t lose a leg and have it replaced by an animatronic leg in the Animatronics Pizza Wars for me to not get a veteran’s discount on this pizza!”

🍕 The consolidation and absorption of lesser Chuck E. Cheeses like G. Willikers, The Pizza Time Theatre, ShowBiz Pizza, ShowBiz Pizza Place, Loony Bird’s, Bullwinkle’s Family Food ‘n Fun, and Billy Bob’s Wonderland, and complete eradication of the Rock-afire Explosion band from the Chuck E. Cheese timeline, which I lay firmly at the feet of cancel culture, a joke that’s almost old enough to call hacky and retire forever, but not quite!

Bankruptcy after crippling bankruptcy led to a big internal policy push called Brandwide Concept Unification, which is always a heartening phrase to hear bouncing around the office. Then they revamped all the stores still in operation as a brand new, updated “rockstar” version of Chuck E. Cheese’s…and then COVID, like a week later. As a final insult, one of the parent conglomerate’s last acts before declaring bankruptcy themselves was to fire the working stiff who had voiced Chuck for twenty years and replace him with the main guy from Bowling For Soup, which is somehow, against all mathematical probability, devastatingly sad for all three parties involved.

The chain’s last last act though, if we’re being thorough, was to rebrand as Pasqualy’s, named after the broad Italian chef character who started it all.

In actuality, this represented a large holding company’s temporary investment in a string of pop-up kitchens delivering Chuck E. Cheese’s fare through services like DoorDash. Mmm, all the atmosphere of not being at a Chuck E. Cheese’s, plus the terrible food of Chuck E. Cheese’s at my fingertips! Understandably, that was that. Cheese One had fallen. But, from the ashes, rising like a phenix, came this hero and his website, little knowing that he’d give me something to write jokes about so many years later. I salute you sir, and if anyone takes this article as an opportunity to bully, harass or harangue you in any way, please ping me and I will have Seanbaby punch them four times in lieu of payment for my next four pieces.

Also, there are definitely still Chuck E. Cheeses around, so something else obviously happened after that. I’ll never know though, because I applied a wholly appropriate amount of thoroughness to this endeavor, and that’s what frees me up to paint my little models of space marines and pile them up and jerk off on the pile. Chuck E. Cheese: Where a kid can be a kid.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: John McCammon, whose eyes were drawn to name recognition, thus priming him to meet the enemy’s gaze. RIP John McCammon.