A couple of years ago, the company that owns Chuck E. Cheese announced that the pizza parlor's famous animatronics would be phased out and replaced with human entertainers. That process has yet to be completed, but as the robotic characters wear out, out they go. People who grew up in the 1980s have vivid memories of birthday parties and family time spent at Chuck E. Cheese. According to those who were there at the beginning, the arcade games were the main point of the business- after all, founder Nolan Bushnell's other business was Atari. The pizza was added to make it kid-friendly, and the animatronics came later. When people get nostalgic about childhood Chuck E. Cheese visits, it's the alternately funny and terrifying animatronics that stand out.
Gene Landrum, Chuck E. Cheese co-founder: Bushnell gave me the money and he gets so much of the credit, but let me tell you how it happened. May 17th, 1977, I opened the first Chuck E. Cheese in San Jose, California and when I was putting it together, I went to Disneyland to do some research — I’m a bit of a research nut, see, so I went to Disney. They had hundreds of games and you could also go to the park and see all these animatronics, like the Country Bear Jamboree, and of course, they had Mickey Mouse! So I said to myself, “I got it! They have Mickey Mouse, I can do Chuck E. Cheese, it’s sounds the same, see? Mick-ey-Mouse, Chuck-E.-Cheese.” So that’s where I got it from. And Nolan had a rat costume in his office, so it worked out.
I wanted to create a place where a kid could be a kid. So often when you take a kid to a restaurant the parents say, “Sit there, be quiet,” and the kid knows that this isn’t a place for them. So with Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theatre, I wanted to create a place where a kid could be a kid, so that’s where that came from.
Strangely, there is no explanation for the rat costume in Bushnell's office. What we do have is the story of Chuck E. Cheese and that of their rival Showbiz Pizza and the creepy characters found at both at Mel magazine. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Sam Howzit)