This podcast contains explicit language.

For Jared Sanchez's fifth birthday, he got to go to Chuck E.

For the very first time.

All you could see is neon lights, the lights from the arcade cabinets.

That was awesome.

It was the mid-1980s, and Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater, as it was then called, had three major selling points,

pizza, video games, and an animatronic stage show.

The first two things are self-explanatory.

The animatronics are something else.

Welcome to my place.

I'm Chuck E. jeans.

We're going to sing some tombs that is sure to please.

So while they're in the kitchen tossing pizzas though

animatronics are mechanical objects made of mummatics, hydraulics and other

parts that can perform rudimentary movements all by themselves. They exist to entertain people.

Every Chuck E. Cheese in the country at the time and there were hundreds of them was home

to a bantering singing five-piece animatronic set led by Chuck E. Cheese, a pizza rat.

There are also characters inside rooms, spaces that could be reserved for birthday parties

or parents could get away from the hubbub of the

arcade. It was in one of these rooms that Jared saw the animatronic character that

really would change his life. I turned the corner and I saw this huge thing.

It resembled like Elvis Presley in a way.

...