Hey, I'm Emma Sale, the host of Death, Facts, and Money, an interview show here at Slate. And I want to tell you about a very exciting event coming up in June. I am hosting a live episode taping at the Tribeca Festival featuring Peter Dinklage and his wife, Erica Schmidt. Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones, my favorite film station agent, and Erica Schmidt, who is a director, screenwriter, playwright.
They are married, and we're going to talk about making art separately in collaboration and how they've built their life around that. Join us. It should be a great event. It's their first joint interview they've done ever together.
And we are so glad at Death, Facts, and Money to be back at the Tribeca Festival. The show is June 10th in New York City at the SVA Theater at 5.30 p.m. And get your tickets at tridecaphilm.com slash audio. See you there.
This podcast contains explicit language. For Jared Sanchez's fifth birthday, he got to go to Chuck E. Cheese 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. Animatronics are mechanical objects made of pneumatics, 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 were also characters in side 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. He has a huge head, a jacket that's golden, off-white, with golden pants, huge paws that are fluffy like a teddy bear, and, of course, bright blue eyes.
Stares right into your soul. And then, of course, the neon sign that says the king. The king is about 10 feet tall, and when I first saw him, I thought he looked like a monkey. He is, in fact, a lion.
Naturally, the king performed Elvis songs. When I heard that and I saw him, I was just like, oh my goodness, this is where I want to come for every single birthday. And every single birthday from 1986 on up until 1992, that's where I went. In 1992, on Jared's 11th birthday, something happened.
I walk into Chuck E. Cheese. I always turn the corner, I remember, and I look where the king is, and I see, like, the neon sign's gone, the king's gone, the stage is still there. and you can see where it said the king where the neon had burned into the wall like an image and I go to this lady and I said you know ma'am where is the king did they move him to another part of the restaurant and she just looks at me and she says I'm sorry darling they threw that thing out months ago Jared never went back to Chuck E.
Cheese but he never forgot about the king this went on through high school and through college I would have dreams of walking into a Chuck E. Cheese I'd say do you still have the king like even if it's broken and the manager would turn around and say oh yeah it's down that hallway to the left so I'd run down the hallway in my dream and I'd see the shadow right and so then I'd turn and I'd wake up so and that occurred literally all the way to the year 2006 why do you think for some reason this animatronic this specific animatronic captivates you and then goes into your dreams this is Decoder Ring a show about cracking cultural mysteries I'm Will Paskin every month we take on a cultural question habit or idea crack it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters from the perspective of 11 year old Jared the story of the king was sad but simple he was there and then suddenly he was not behind this seemingly straightforward story is a much more complicated one the fate of the king is tied to the saga of the Chuck E. Cheese animatronics a saga that involves big personalities huge profits bankruptcy the birth of the family entertainment center a pizza rat a towering Elvis robot and dueling restaurant chain engaged in a conflict known as the pizza wars it's a saga about a fad something cool and modern that outlived its novelty and its utility and was tossed literally in the garbage can only to be saved and savored by the adults who loved it most so today on Decoder Ring what happened to the king Chuck E. Cheese has been around for 40 years now but the idea at its very core that it makes sense to combine video games bad pizza and a bizarre sage show still seems to me to just be very strange it sounds like three okay tastes that would just taste okay together but for a while it was hugely lucrative so why did it work?
to answer that we have to start at the beginning with a man who founded Chuck E. Cheese my name is Nolan Bushnell I founded Atari and Chuck E. Cheese Nolan Bushnell is a storied Silicon Valley figure because he created not one but two famous companies the first of those was Atari the pioneering video game company that made its name in 1972 when it released Pong the first hit video game Pong kickstarted a video game craze and by the late 1970s Atari was selling both home video consoles and the big coin operated video game cabinets Atari would sell those coin op machines to arcades for about $2,000 each but they would go on to make $30,000 to $50,000 for the arcade owners and so I thought to myself hey I'm on the wrong side of this equation Bushnell started Chuck E. Cheese from inside of Atari in order to go after that money a restaurant seemed like an obvious idea and pizza like the right food it's easy, cheap and made for sharing even when it's bad it's edible and it comes with a built-in wait time when customers could be playing games but a simple pizza arcade would have been a teenager magnet video game arcades at the time were already full of adolescence and had a bad reputation community leaders regularly tried to shut the places down Bushnell wanted to avoid all of that so he decided to go after a new market there was a huge demand by kids to play games but there was no really appropriate places they couldn't go to bars the only way to get kids that age to go anywhere though is to get their parents to take them and parents presented their own problems even with food our kids were thought to be expensive and sleazy and had a whole long association with juvenile delinquents how could you convince parents they were wholesome enough to bring their children there and then once they were there how could you occupy them the parents so they let their kids pump quarters into the machines I want the kids to have as much unfettered time to play games as possible that meant that the parents were really bored the solution presented itself when Bushnell took his kids to Disneyland and walked into the enchanted tiki room created in 1963 it was a Hawaiian themed music show that featured over 150 talking singing animatronic tropical birds Disney at the time was way out ahead of everyone when it came to animatronics and they guarded their methods zealously they were capable of doing things no one else could and the tiki room was a perfect example of this the thing I want you to understand here is that Chuck E.
Cheese backed into its animatronics they were never the reason the chain existed they were just a solution to a bunch of other problems including that they allowed Chuck E. Cheese to sell alcohol which in California at the time arcades were not allowed to do but Disney was the animatronics were away to disguise a boozy pizza arcade as family entertainment a lost leader that got people in the door to spend money on food merchandise and games in short the animatronics existed to sell the adults in the room not to please the kids though that's what they ended up doing today I'm keeping another promise by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch Mr. President thank you very much as we all live through the chaos of another Donald Trump presidency it can be easy to lose sight of his most troubling legacy the U.S. Supreme Court has reshaped the country's legal landscape on abortion guns, religion, and more I'm Susan Matthews in Slate's new season of Slow Burn we're taking on Trump's first Supreme Court pick we'll look at the influence that Neil Gorsuch has in this moment he is the most unpredictable vote on this court including his surprising pushback against the president who nominated him nobody showed Gorsuch who would join the majority on this he is the justice most likely to be a true wild card this is judicial hack Slow Burn becoming Justice Gorsuch it's a story that will shape America for years even lifetimes to come out May 13th wherever you get your podcasts Bushnell asked his engineers to begin building some basic animatronics soon after he went to a trade show for the amusement park industry the IAAPA where he saw a guy in a coyote mascot costume the project at that point was codenamed Coyote Pizza so he bought the costume and had it sent to his engineers thinking they could turn it into the company's animatronic mascot they said it's not a coyote it's a rat so I said okay I'm not going to slow the project down it's no longer coyote pizza it's Rick Rats pizza no one else on the team thought that naming a restaurant after a rat was a particularly good idea so he asked if they could just de-emphasize the ratness of the whole enterprise Gene Landrum was Chuck E.
Cheese's first president and the guy who was in charge of executing the whole project he's the one who came up with a new name I actually finally came up with the name because of Mickey Mouse Chuck E. Cheese I wanted it to be an adult Mickey Mouse soon after the first opening Bushnell left Atari altogether but not before buying the Chuck E. Cheese concept from them outright he promptly opened seven stores and in 1979 began franchising by the early 1980s there were over 100 Chuck E. Cheese's operating around the country and they were making four times what a regular pizza restaurant made as well as out earning Pizza Hut and McDonald's so the business was a huge success but I'm going to do my best to communicate exactly how strange the animatronics were even in this success Scott Wilson started doing voices for various Chuck E.
Cheese characters in the late 1970s eventually voicing Chuck E. himself Scott Wilson reading down Chuck E. Cheese Hey hi everybody Chuck E. Cheese here You know back when I lived in Joyce I used to hang out with this guy named Bruce Springsteen You know in the early days you would have never had the phrase where a kid could be a kid Where a kid can be a kid became Chuck E.
Cheese's slogan in 1985 and the entertainment was never kid friendly you know the nuances of the jokes were very adult would have been over the head of any 12 year old or under that's for sure Well why'd you leave ya? I don't know I took her out for a seven course meal 12 year old was the entire characterization of Chuck E. Cheese himself In the beginning he really looked like a rat and not a cute one beady eyed sharp toothed with a long snout he often appeared with a cigar and he was abrasive and rude Over the years his personality and his look would soften becoming cuter more mouse like but he held onto elements of his Joey Z rat persona for a long time Because I was described as a New York Jewish rat Like when you came for the job they were like this is a New York Jewish rat that's what you're doing Yeah that's the way I was told he was in fact there was a song or a slogan or something I can't remember hey with Chuck E. Cheese he's the rat where it's at Overall there was a seat of the pants quality to the process of creating the animatronics which are made by a group of engineers programmers writers singers and craftspeople The way we developed new characters was basically it was very organic very fluid ideas could come from everywhere In the late 1970s Jewel came in with a recently graduated art major who entered an ad looking for a craftsperson She wound up working at Chuck E.
Cheese in the 1990s eventually becoming the director of entertainment You know we had a lot of parties in the animation studio people would be drinking and say oh I've got a friend who does a great wolfman voice and someone else would say oh I can draw something up for that and we weren't doing focus groups we weren't doing surveys you know it just basically came from the employees working there Some of the most distinctive characters they came up with were called cabaret characters They were modeled on actual lounge acts and they performed in a side room called The Lounge This is where Jared Sanchez first saw the king who was based on that quintessential lounge act Elvis in his Vegas residency days The Lounge and the cabaret characters were initially supposed to be for adults I put a sign there for mom and dad only That's Gene Landrum Chuck E. Cheese's first president again Mom and dad could go in and sit at the piano bar and listen to music and relax while the kids are running playing Guess what? Oh the kids love the goddamn thing The most famous cabaret character was probably Dolly Dimples a hippopotamus who performed at a piano bar Lovely Dolly Dimples is at the piano Now that I'm here why don't you tell me about my future since I know all about my past and while you're at it why don't you sing along with my song California Every time she heard a high note her blues went up and down Really? Oh you really did Her blues went up when she heard a high note and then the kids were enamored with it and running up there and I said oh my god What have I done here?
Time has not been kind to any of this Technology and sophisticated children's entertainment have both improved a lot and they make the stage shows seem even worse while making the characters with their methodically blinking eyes dumpy proportions and herky-jerky movements look even more uncanny but in the late 1970s and 80s talking moving creatures you could be in the same room with just did not exist outside of a Disney resort and as janky as these animatronics were even then an article from 1982 describes them as quote whirring and clicking like a plague of locusts they were also a novelty new and mesmerizing learning about Chuck E. Cheese I too became mesmerized not by the animatronics but by the whole wacky scene it's also deeply unfocused route I mean a pizza rat it's a bit of corporate slapdash the birth of bizarre adult kids' face the first family entertainment center it was a place designed for children to go wild to binge on games and pizza and ball pits while their parents benignly neglected them as they had a drink and were serenaded by a hippo piano bar singer the Heaving Blosom it's the kind of thing that feels like it could never ever exist now prior to this episode I had never in my life been to a Chuck E. Cheese but I can still get nostalgic for the loosey-goosey carefree chaos of all of this but of course none of it was to last dressing dressing French dressing exactly oh that was good I'm AJ Jacobson author and puzzle lover if you're like me and you love that little dopamine hit you get when you solve a puzzle or uncover a missing fact please join us at the Hello Puzzlers podcast where we solve fun original audio puzzles with celebrity guests like Jack Shepard and Roy Wood Jr. something about Mary Poppins exactly this is fun today I'm keeping another promise by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch Mr.
President thank you very much as we all live through the chaos of another Donald Trump presidency it can be easy to lose sight of his most troubling legacy the U.S. Supreme Court has reshape the country's legal landscape on abortion, guns, religion, and more. I'm Susan Matthews. In Slate's new season of Slow Burn, we're taking on Trump's first Supreme Court pick.
We'll look at the influence that Neil Gorsuch has in this moment. He is the most unpredictable vote on this court. Including his surprising pushback against the president who nominated him. Nobody saw that Gorsuch would join the majority on this.
He is the justice, most likely to be a true wild card. This is judicial action. Slow Burn, becoming Justice Gorsuch. It's a story that will shape America for years, even lifetimes to come.
Out May 13th, wherever you get your podcasts. In order to understand how far Chuck E. Cheese would fall, I have to back up. Back into the 1970s, I'd introduce you to another major player in this tale.
I always wanted to be an inventor, so even as a little boy, I called myself an inventor. Aaron grew up in Orlando, Florida. In 1974, when he was just 20, he started a company called Creative Engineering to build a car that got really high gas mileage. The car didn't pan out, and Fector needed money to grow his company.
He started going door-to-door, trying to sell a pool cream device he'd invented. One day, he knocked on a random man's door. And when I gave him my spiel and said, hey, I'm an inventor, he said, oh, well, what can you invent? And I said, anything, you name it.
And he said, can you invent electronic things? I said, sure. He said, how about an electronic control system for a shooting gallery? I said, sure, no problem.
The man was a mechanical engineer who'd started a company that was beginning to supply amusement parks, who were desperate for the stuff, with animatronics like Disney's. Aaron learned the basics of his craft from the company before striking out on his own. Throughout the 1970s, Aaron got better and better at it. The first year he went to the IAAPA, the same amusement park conference where Nolan Bushnell had gotten the coyote suit for Chuck E.
Cheese. He took an animatronic talking head. The next year, he went with a whole bear. The year after that, he went with a band, made up of three bears.
And that's when Aaron met Nolan Bushnell, the Chuck E. Cheese founder you heard from earlier. He says, gosh, I like your bear. He says, I'm Nolan Bushnell.
I'm building all these restaurants, and I need some great animation like yours in my restaurant. I had heard of him, and I feared him. So I said, no, I'm not going to sell you a piece of animation. One, he was a lot more wealthy than I was.
He was a lot more powerful than I was. He was a lot smarter than I was. And there's no way in the world he's going to buy 100 pieces of animation from me. He's going to buy one piece.
He's going to see what I did. He's going to steal my secrets, and he's going to build them himself. I knew that going in. You know, that's what happened to my whack-a-mole game.
So this is the part of the story where I tell you that, yes, Aaron Factor did design the first whack-a-mole, the popular game where players use a soft mallet to whack moles on the head at the behest of a customer who then copied and marketed it. It's an amazing detail, what Aaron's actually very good-natured about, but it's only relevant to this larger story because it taught Aaron to be protective of his work. Nolan Bushnell, for his part, says he knew Aaron Factor, but that he never wanted his designs. Had you tried to get Aaron Factor to build stuff for you?
No. I didn't like his technology. We felt that hydraulics were too high maintenance. In the summer of 1979, Aaron read about a development with Chuck E.
Cheese. A businessman named Robert Brock, a major Holiday Inn franchisee, had signed a deal with Nolan Bushnell to open 280 Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater franchises. I got furious, and I sent a message into the universe.
I want that contract. Is it too late? Has the ship sailed? He decided to put on a huge and hopefully impressive show at that year's IAAPA.
He brought two animatronic bands, the Three Bears and a group called the Wolfpack Five, and had them play at the same time. It worked. They saw, and they took the story back to Bob Brock, and they told Bob Brock about this young guy that's got the most amazing animatronics, and you're teamed up with this Nolan Bushnell, you know, who's claiming that he makes the only animatronics out there. Bob Brock immediately decided that he was going to cancel his contract with Nolan Bushnell, which was music to my ears, and that he offered me ownership in this restaurant show.
The background information here is that Nolan Bushnell had assured Bob Brock that Chuck E. Cheese was the only company outside of Disney making animatronic characters. But here was Aaron Factor making better animatronic characters. It is the consensus that technically Aaron's animatronics were way more sophisticated than Chuck E.
Cheese's, more fluid and versatile, but there is absolutely no consensus that we're better as characters, and there are passionate feelings on this issue on both sides. Like, extremely passionate. Anyway, Brock, despite still having a contract with Chuck E. Cheese, offered Aaron a deal that included a 20% ownership stake in the company, and let Aaron retain the rights to all of his characters, which would be licensed to Brock's new company, royalty-free.
That new company was called Showbiz Pizza. The Aaron Factor animatronics that would eventually be showcased there were called the Rockafire Explosion, a five-piece outfit led by a bear named Billy Bob Broccoli. Let's give her a Beatles song, Leenie Bird. Close your eyes and I'll kiss you.
Tomorrow I'll miss you. Remember I'll miss you. Nolan Bushnell and Chuck E. Cheese did not find out that Showbiz Pizza even existed until the day in March of 1980 when the first Showbiz Pizza opened in Kansas City and refused to take delivery on the Chuck E.
Cheese animatronics that had been shipped there. Chuck E. Cheese sued Showbiz Pizza for breach of contract. Showbiz Pizza sued back for misrepresentation.
The two companies would eventually settle in Chuck E. Cheese's favor, but the conflict between the two of them became known as the Pizza Wars. We had a map of the United States in the hallway where there were pushpins of where Showbiz was opening. That's Jill Kamen again, who was working at costuming and designing characters for Chuck E.
Cheese at the time. It was really a competition between the two. Whether it made financial sense to open a store, you know, half a mile from a Showbiz, it didn't matter. You know, we were doing it.
The competition, fueled more by ego than strategy, began to take its toll on both companies, who by 1982 were not doing well. The 100th opening in Dallas was going to be the biggest party that you've ever seen. There was a ribbon cutting, there were dignitaries from the city, a marching band, and Billy Bob, the costumed character Billy Bob, was flown in in a helicopter. I wore the suit.
But the next day, after the big party, we got the message, we are losing money. There will be a significant tightening of our belt after this 100th opening is over. There will be no more wasted money. We're going to start cutting back on everything.
We're going to fire useless people. We are in financial trouble. The flagging fortunes of Showbiz and Chuck E. Cheese are often attributed to the video game crash of 1983, when for a host of reasons, the video game market just bottomed out.
But no one directly involved thinks that that mattered very much. The chains were already struggling by then, with mismanagement, overspending, fading novelty, and the simple fact that there were just way too many of them. I mean, how many robot pizza arcades can one country support? We pretty much figured out that we needed about a half a million population per store.
Nolan Bushnell again. And with Brock and us, both in, there was too many stores, and they camelized each other. In the case of a few quarters, the Chuck E. Cheese franchises became radically unprofitable.
And even Bushnell admits that he got cocky. Arrogance is not a pretty thing. And I just come off two major wins. I thought I could do no wrong.
And I started sailboat racing. Bushnell lost the confidence of the board and got pushed out. Six months later, in March of 1984, Chuck E. Cheese declared bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, Showbiz Pizza was barely holding on. Robert Brock had also been sidelined. And Aaron Fecker, who still owns 20% of the company, was constantly arguing with new executives about how to save the business. And I was vetoing.
I had vetoed power. All of the stupid ideas they were coming up with. They came up with their last plan. And that was the plan to merge with Chuck E.
Cheese. And that's what happened. Showbiz Pizza took over what was the last of Chuck E. Cheese.
This was the end of the pizza war. And Showbiz Pizza was the winner. It survived and Chuck E. Cheese did not.
Its victory seemed to promise a future in which the kid's birthday party place would be Showbiz Pizzas, not Chuck E. Cheese's. To promise a future in which no one even remembered what Chuck E. Cheese was.
But that's not what happened. And if we had just let them breathe their last gasp, Chuck E. Cheese would have closed. And the name would have been relegated to history.
Instead, Showbiz Pizza decided to become Chuck E. Cheese. And it decided to do that in part because of its relationship to Aaron and the Rock of Fire explosion. Soon after the merger, the Showbiz executives approached Aaron.
At some point, I said, Aaron, we own the intellectual property for Chuck E. Cheese's characters. But we don't own the Rock of Fire explosion. Remember, this was the original deal.
Showbiz got to use the characters royalty-free forever. But Aaron retained ownership of them. I said, yeah, that's right. It's a good deal for all of us.
Because you can't manage the Rock of Fire explosion. You're not the artist that created it. Yeah, but we want to own the intellectual property. I thought they were bluffing.
All they were offering me is that my characters would remain a part of society. So they were giving me nothing and they were taking my Rock of Fire explosion from me. Nope, not gonna do it. He kept his characters and he sold his stock.
That left Showbiz Pizza with only the Chuck E. Cheese characters, who they did eventually turn into their mascot. My characters were clearly better than Chuck E. Cheese characters.
It seemed to me that only the craziest idiot would ever choose the Chuck E. Cheese characters over the Rock of Fire explosion. However, I can't really say they're totally stupid because they're still in business. I guess what they knew.
You know what they knew that nobody else knew? They knew that it didn't matter how crummy the animation was. Just didn't matter. After severing ties with Showbiz, Aaron went out and tried to sell the 80 sets of the Rock of Fire explosion that he still had.
Nobody wanted them. Anitronics was over. Video games were over. The pizza restaurants with video games and pizza were over.
You know, it was just the thing was over. With the murder of Showbiz Pizza and Chuck E. Cheese in 1985, all of the Rock of Fire explosion characters who had been poised to survive went extinct. And all of the Chuck E.
Cheese characters who had been poised to go extinct survived. But the Chuck E. Cheese characters survived sudden extinction only to die out slowly. Scott Wilson, who you heard from earlier, kept poising Chuck E.
Cheese characters until the early 1990s. The Showbiz people were restaurateurs. They weren't entertainment guys. They struggled with that.
They just really didn't understand. Never the kind of attention or, you know, priority that in the early days where the shows were everything. I mean, it was all about the show. It was all about the character.
This is the heart of what happened to Jared Sanchez's favorite character, the King, both a soldier in and a victim of the Pizza Wars. The King was introduced in 1982, during the height of the Pizza Wars, when both companies were spending way too much money. He stopped being manufactured in 1984, when Chuck E. Cheese went under.
Though before that, there was a short-lived, last-ditch attempt to turn him into King Cat, that's with a K, a Michael Jackson-themed character. After Showbiz bought Chuck E. Cheese, no new Kings were ever manufactured. But until around 1989 or 1990, the company continued recording music for him to perform.
That's around when Scott Wilson recorded 18 to 20 Elvis songs for the character. That's the last set of songs that were programmed for the King. The rumor among Chuck E. Cheese fans about why the King was decommissioned has always been that Chuck E.
Cheese didn't have the rights to Elvis' catalog. But Wilson had negotiated permission directly from the Elvis estate, as the parent company had allowed both Chuck E. Cheese's and Showbiz pizzas to coexist. But in 1990, they finally began to convert the remaining Showbiz pizza stores into Chuck E.
Cheese's, part of a process called concept unification. The stores were also remodeled so they no longer had lounge rooms. This is when the King starts to disappear, though it kick around in some stores until 1995. Over the following decades, the other animatronics became less and less central to the store as well.
In 2017, the company announced they would phase them out completely, stating the kids stopped looking at the animatronics years and years ago. It's easy to believe that the animatronics, remarkably eerie-looking creatures from the mechanical age, couldn't hold kids' attention in a digital one. But I want to point out who that quote doesn't mention, parents. The whole reason the animatronics existed in the first place was to get parents in the door, to convince them an arcade was appropriate for children, and then to give them something to do while they were there, or at least a place to hide out and have a drink.
But Chuck E. Cheese was so successful at kidifying the arcade, making it alone seem wholesome, that the place didn't need the animatronics anymore. It had simultaneously become clear that it didn't matter if parents were entertained at a Chuck E. Cheese.
In fact, they probably would never be, but they'd tolerate it on behalf of their children anyway. The idea that at a family entertainment center parents should be entertained to was central to the original concept. But by 2017, that idea was so long gone, it wouldn't have occurred to anyone to mention it. In a present-day Chuck E.
Cheese, the only sign of the place's animatronic history is one vestigial Chuck E. When the store I went to was standing behind a barrier on an untrafficked part of the floor, mute, blinking, barely moving, an unimpressive oddity. I pointed him out to my daughter, but she wasn't interested. There was a TV screen right next to him, and he couldn't compete.
Chuck E. Cheese's animatronics, to say nothing of showbiz pizzas, would now be almost entirely forgotten, if not for the passionate adults who still love them, adults like Jared Sanchez. Jared went to military high school and then joined the Navy. When he got out, the guy who was trying to sell the king for $25,000.
You'd think that would be like, oh, hell no. You know, but I'm like, how can I get $25,000? He couldn't, but he called the guy who was selling it. You know, I'm talking on the phone to this guy who doesn't know who I am, and I'm like, this is just, I really, really would like this.
He's like, yeah, when you win the lottery, you come and call me again, okay? The seller took the king on and off eBay for the next nine years, dropping the price significantly. Jared stayed in communication with him the whole time, eventually sharing some childhood photos of himself with the king. And so in 2015 in November, he calls me up, and he's like, Jared, I have more pictures of you than I have of my grandchildren, okay?
I was talking to my wife, we're gonna make your dream come true. We're gonna, you know, we'll let you make payments, whatever. So thanks to the internet, which has kept so many childhood obsessions alive, Jared's dream finally came true. He got his king.
The only thing was, it was in terrible shape. It hadn't been turned on since 1994 and had been sitting in storage ever since. The fabric and the fur were torn, some of it had dry rot, and the squirrel had been living inside its eyes. Whatever, I'll remake it.
When I want something, I will figure out and I will do it. Jared had no background in engineering, but he caught himself to reverse engineer the whole thing, restoring and repairing the costume and the exterior features, figuring out how to retool the mechanics and get them working, and then learning how to program it with new movements. I can't get it to move, and so the first video I ever did on YouTube was the neck. The neck was working.
I'm like, oh, hell yeah, the neck's working. All right, looks like he's waking up. Hey, King, you waking up? You feeling better?
All right, more to come. Then later down the line, like two months later, the mouse started working, and then I was able to program it, and it is pretty painstaking to program. As Jared was doing all of this, his work life was getting intense. He lived in Florida, when he was commuting to another state, and he was away from his family too much.
He had to lay off a lot of people, and things became even more fraught after Trump's election. He had a breakdown. I was afraid of talking to anybody. There was a switch went off in my head, and I became a totally different person.
I was very quiet, and I didn't talk much, and I did not want to go to any store. I went to my doctor, and she's like, yeah, you're taking some time off. You're not going back there. And I'm like, okay, so I'm here at my house.
I've already got the king up and working to a degree, and then we started, I was like, well, I look up Weird Al. I've always been a Weird Al fan, and I'm like, well, parody. I could change the lyrics and give him a voice, and his voice in the beginning was really bad, okay? The singing was really bad.
Everything was really bad, but it didn't matter because I would make that up with my imagination. Jared started making videos for the songs, some of which he appeared in, and putting them on YouTube. There's this one country song, and it's called People Are Crazy by Billy Currington, I believe it is, and I did a parody of it, and it really helped me. Robots are good, beer is great, and people are crazy.
it really helped bring back jared by talking to a robot and becoming like i guess a character helped me break my shell that had been created jared now owns multiple versions of the king it turns out when you become known as the guy with the king people tell you when they have kings to get rid of he acquired one from a roller skating rink and then got a message from someone who said he had one in storage and give it to jared for free it would help him clean out the storage space we open it up and there wasn't one king in there there was two okay there was the neon the original neon the king sign there was two of those i mean talk about a dream come true like literally like living a dream of a dream that i've had before you know everybody we have just discovered something it's big um i wonder what this is another king head another king king four he's given each of the robots their own personalities and sometimes they all perform together so just in the past if you can lend your hand for the kings they are evolving for the kings they are evolving this lion has grown the beast of the past jared who works as an optician hopes that one day making content around the king will be his full-time job he thinks he and the king has something special to offer nobody has uh made like a show an online show a streaming show of animatronics interacting with humans so if a man can put on a purple dinosaur outfit well what the hell can a 10-foot animatronic do you know jared's parody videos of the king look particularly good but they're not the only videos to feature rehab chucky cheese and showbiz pizza characters in the middle eight aughts a rockifier explosion fan bought and refurbished a set of the band and started putting videos of them singing along to popular songs on youtube when they went viral there's another guy in rural mississippi who has perfectly recreated a showbiz pizza place there which includes some chucky cheese characters like the king and then there's aaron factor after cutting ties with showbiz his company has slowly dwindled from 370 full-time employees to just him in the years since he's worked on an early enol platform he titled the anti-gravity freedom machine he opened an animatrix pizza place himself for a few years and he worked on an experimental fuel called hydrillium that caused a serious explosion in his warehouse not too long ago but he is also still making songs and videos for the rockifier explosion hey we got the rockifier explosion up here for you tonight oh yeah that means no fighting and that includes tickle fighting no tickle fighting either aaron gives course at his warehouse to rockifier fans who communicate with him constantly and the rockifiers do pop up in music videos from time to time but i asked him how he feels about the fact that the rockifier characters have largely been forgotten i actually maybe i'm in denial maybe it's because i'm around them all the time and i'm around the fans and as far as i'm concerned the characters still exist and people still love them and they come to see them and i still write shows for them and i make videos of them and thousands of people see them and love them and if i can get to grow enough i can create a profitable business out of it again and my unprofitable business which is really a lot of fun and i love doing that's an important element too of any business you start you need to love it like you love your your podcasts i went to chucky cheese for the first time for the story and i was pleasantly surprised to be fair my expectations were extremely low like they could not have been lower i was prepared for something dingy and chaotic and loud for full sensory overload instead it was just slightly worn down and friendly most of the games had analog parts there was skeeball and a few simple rides and you could redeem your tickets for cheap prizes even the pizza wasn't as bad as i was expecting i mean it wasn't good but it really was edible i would never go without a child she had a good time and i can imagine killing an hour or two there again still there was nothing and i mean nothing magical about it and magical is a word that jared uses isn't that magical to see something that you know in reality is not real and it's moving talking looking around i mean that's the magic of of animatronics in general over and over as i was reporting this piece i kept asking people if the animatronics had ever seemed like the future and no one could quite bring themselves to say yes aaron factor the person who most views this kind of work as an art form occasionally calls some of them primitive jared was always totally unimpressed with all the other characters at chucky cheese all the people i spoke with who worked there talked to the animatronics with affection while also freely admitting that they were funky and limited and nowhere near as good as disney stuff the animatronics were never the future they were what people could do at the time an intermediate step before whatever came next and what came next was a gargantuan leap in digital technology that helped completely outmode this kind of animatronics but in being so completely overtaken by time and technology the animatronics have accrued a new kind of strangeness i don't know that they're magical but they really are alien and their former popularity makes the past seem kind of alien too so does the whole early history of chucky cheese we used to like things that looked like that people could create businesses that worked like what the past isn't just a foreign country maybe it's another planet the fact that the animatronics were always so imperfect though does make them a fascinating obsession one that's necessarily fueled by a deep personal nostalgia and that nostalgia has done something very neat animatronics were originally created with adults in mind even though it was kids who loved them and now after all this time it's finally adults who love them most i mean yes as a child i love the king but i would never have imagined this this is decoder ring i'm willa paskin you can find me on twitter at willa paskin and if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to code you can email us at decoder ring at slate.com if you're curious about what these animatronics actually look like and you should be please go to our show page slate.com slash decoder ring click on the episode and you will see some stuff if you haven't yet subscribe and rate our feed in apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts and even better tell your friends this podcast was written by willa paskin and was produced and edited by benjamin frisch who also does illustrations for every episode cleo 11 is our research assistant we want to give a very special thanks to for all of his help and his candor and for the decoder ring theme video he made for our live show it was great we really appreciate it thanks also to ariel stevenson alexis madrigal mike scherpenberg cassie hopp rett whitcomb brad thompson mike vaniello jeremy saussier carol helstoski faith smith mary jacobs and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way thanks for listening we'll see you soon you want some news that entertains just listen to decoder ring the best podcast you'll have a blast breaking-tastic decoder ring i was here on topics this spot i even learned about baby shark you'll like this cast and have a blast breaking-tastic decoder ring that's what the basket whoo she's good and the neighbor he'll keep your interest like a good hole short torporate that's right gonna be better than great great great great i check out the only january mom i'm really excited to hear that baunch call me crazy but you'll love it baby white king-tastic decoder ring thank you all right guys