Chuck E. Cheese Pizza War

Decoder Ring

Slate Podcasts

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2019

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn. Sign up now to listen and support our work. The King was an animatronic lounge singer who performed in Chuck E. Cheese locations in the 1980's and early 90's, but then he disappeared. The King was a victim of a conflict known as the pizza wars, when Chuck E. Cheese faced off against its rival, Showbiz Pizza for pizza arcade supremacy. The foot soldiers in the pizza war were the animatronic bands that staffed each location—including The King. This episode is a chronicle of the pizza war, with the founder of Chuck E. Cheese, Nolan Bushnell, it's rival, Showbiz Pizza's Aaron Fechter, the people who designed the characters and animatronics, and the people who continue loving these characters, like Jared Sanchez, who continue to create work with these once discarded creatures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast contains explicit language.
0:07.0	For Jared Sanchez's fifth birthday, he got to go to Chuck E.
0:12.0	For the very first time.
0:13.8	All you could see is neon lights, the lights from the arcade cabinets.
0:18.0	That was awesome.
0:19.0	It was the mid-1980s, and Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater, as it was then called, had three major selling points,
0:25.6	pizza, video games, and an animatronic stage show.
0:29.8	The first two things are self-explanatory.
0:32.1	The animatronics are something else.
0:34.0	Welcome to my place.
0:36.0	I'm Chuck E. jeans.
0:38.0	We're going to sing some tombs that is sure to please.
0:41.0	So while they're in the kitchen tossing pizzas though
0:44.8	animatronics are mechanical objects made of mummatics, hydraulics and other
0:48.6	parts that can perform rudimentary movements all by themselves. They exist to entertain people.
0:54.6	Every Chuck E. Cheese in the country at the time and there were hundreds of them was home
0:58.8	to a bantering singing five-piece animatronic set led by Chuck E. Cheese, a pizza rat.
1:06.7	There are also characters inside rooms, spaces that could be reserved for birthday parties
1:11.3	or parents could get away from the hubbub of the
1:13.5	arcade. It was in one of these rooms that Jared saw the animatronic character that
1:18.2	really would change his life. I turned the corner and I saw this huge thing.
1:25.2	It resembled like Elvis Presley in a way.
	...

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