A few weeks ago, I was stirred from bed by an inexplicable thirst. I lurched out of my room and padded to the kitchen. Cracking the fridge open, the gentle spill of light revealed an astonishing sight—a bear and a gorilla! Thankfully, it was just Billy Bob and Fatz, my pizza robots.
You might not know them by name, but I’m sure you remember pizza robots, those animatronic avatars that danced and sang before a piping-hot pie arrived at your family’s table. Here’s the first part in a brief series of how I came to be one of the few who have their own.
Pizza robots have been in the spotlight lately thanks to the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie and the announcement that all but a single Chuck E. Cheese restaurant will remove their animatronics after nearly fifty years. Kids might find them dreadfully démodé these days, but robots were all the rage in the 1970s! Video game pioneer Nolan Bushnell is to thank.
As the founder of Atari, Bushnell was constantly in search of family-friendly places to install arcade games like Asteroids and Tank1. Eventually, he decided to establish his own. At Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre, captive kids had nothing better to do than pump quarters and tokens into Atari machines while their pizzas baked2.
The kid-friendly Munch’s Make Believe Band had replaced the bawdy Pizza Time players when I first experienced Chuck E. Cheese in Castleton, Indiana, as a seven-year-old. Making eye contact with what looked like a piano-playing ottoman was the most terrifying experience of my life! I didn’t know it then, but I’d made my first trip to the uncanny valley.
It took a record-breaking streak of nightmares before I decided to find the experience intriguing. Eventually, I devoted hours to scouring the internet for information. I absorbed every skit, every sketch, and every song the characters sang, and that’s when I discovered ShowBiz.
ShowBiz Pizza Place started in 1979. The chain’s Rock-afire Explosion blew the Pizza Time Players out of the water! The chain’s mascot, a hillbilly bear named Billy Bob, had undeniable appeal. On top of that, the band’s animatronic drummer actually played a real drum set! Customers flocked to ShowBiz, and it became the fastest-growing food franchise in the country in 19813.
Pizza Time Theater didn’t fare as well. The 1983 video game crash catapulted the company into bankruptcy4. ShowBiz plucked it up and decided to rebrand around Chuck E. Cheese. I had no way of knowing that the terrifying purple footstool I’d winced at started life as the Rock-afire Explosion’s mighty Fatz Geronimo, but plenty who frequented ShowBiz during its heyday sure did.
By the early 2000s, a handful of super-fans had acquired their own Rock-afire Explosion shows from its original manufacturer. Against all odds, some restored their robots to working condition. I couldn’t believe it when I learned that one of those fans lived half an hour away from me!
Out of nowhere, a mutual friend invited me to see the show. The band played hit after hit, and I fell hard and fast. The transition from grainy VHS footage on YouTube to seeing the Rock-afire Explosion performing “live” was like stepping into a different dimension, almost like I’d stumbled into a dream.
It wasn’t a nightmare this time, but the experience was still intense: my senses were on overdrive as I took in every detail, from the reds and yellows of Billy Bob’s overalls to he shimmer of Fatz’s jacket. After I recovered, I made friends with the band’s gracious owner.
Eventually, I met nearly everyone who kept the Rock-afire Explosion alive with their own personal pizza robots. In 2019, our group learned that a chain of arcades in Illinois, Odyssey Fun World, was selling its old robots. Two “New” Rock-afire Explosion shows were up for grabs!
Opportunities like that are few and far between. The group hunkered down, pooled its funds, and delivered a check the next day. Unfortunately, the timing couldn’t have been worse for me: I was back in school. The buy-in was more than I could afford.
I still wanted to contribute, so I volunteered to go to Illinois and help my friends dismantle everything. We spent our first day in Naperville, where we wrenched to the tune of a hundred chirping arcade jingles. Our second day took us to Tinley Park, and that’s where we learned something intriguing: there was a third show at Odyssey, and it was ours as well.
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Sources Cited
1 Bowman, E. (2023, December 1). A visit to the last animatronics still singing in Chuck. E. Cheese. All Things Considered. Web. Retrieved December 15, 2023.
2 Packer, L. (1979, October). Catering To Kids. Food Service Marketing. Trade journal. Print.
3 Kloss, G. (1981, August 6). It’s not your typical pizza place. The Milwaukee Journal Green Sheet. p. 1.
4 Chuck E. Cheese files bankruptcy (1984, March 29). The Santa Rosa Press Democrat. p. 4.
Ted, very interesting. Looking forward to future installments, and a deeper dive into the world of animatronic characters.
There will be at least two more soon!
This is a great story, and a reminder that if you find something interesting, it is a certainty that someone else will too.