Entertainment
Munch’s Make Believe Band leaving all Florida Chuck E. Cheese locations. Here’s what’s new
Animatronic bands to be phased out by end of 2024
Pizza robots from the 1980s live on in Mississippi
In the 1980s, ShowBiz Pizza and Chuck E. Cheese restaurants were a cornerstone of American pop-culture with their animatronic robot shows and arcade games, and 30 years later, Damon Breland is keeping that slice of history alive.
Hattiesburg American
- The animatronic Munch’s Make Believe Band will be phased out of all but one of the company’s more than 400 U.S. locations by the end of 2024.
- The move is part of an ongoing $300 million fun center remodel plan.
Raise your plastic cup, the song is over. One of the country’s longest-running musical acts is finally winding down its tour as the furry, relentless cheerful animatronic critters of the legendary Munch’s Make Believe Band at Chuck E. Cheese approaches its final gig.
The restaurant-arcade chain famous for cheap pizza, flashing lights, ball pits, games and endless birthday parties announced last year that the raucous and somewhat unsettling act that has wobbled onstage for decades to the delight of children and devoted adult fans will be phased out of virtually all of its more than 400 U.S. locations by the end of 2024, including the 31 Florida locations.
The members of the band — Chuck E. Cheese, with Mr. Munch on keys, Jasper T. Jowls on guitar, Pasqually on drums and Helen Henny on vocals — made the announcement themselves in a video “press conference” that the act would keep going at only one location.
“It’s true,” Chuck E. Cheese said. “We are going to be performing on a regular basis here in Northridge, California.”
“It’s called a res-i-den-cy,” said Mr. Munch.
“We thought we should let you know officially,” Cheese said. “Especially all you superfans out there that want to know where to find us.”
Chuck E. Cheese to remove nearly all classic animatronic bands
Chuck E. Cheese, mascot of the global family entertainment chain, announced the animatronic Munch’s Make Believe Band will remain in just one location.
The full band will keep on rocking at the Northridge location near Los Angeles. One remaining “Studio C” location, featuring a single animatronic, will be in Nanuet, New York.
Instead, the space will be filled with giant video walls, interactive screens, digital dance floors and trampoline gyms in what chief executive David McKillips told the New York Times would be the company’s largest and “most aggressive transformation.”
Images released of what new Chuck E. Cheese locations will look like, such as one coming to Port Orange, Florida to replace a slightly smaller one torn down in 2022 after Hurricane Ian badly damaged it, show more activities, less “live” music.
But the band will live on in Northridge, jerky movements, shifting eyes and all. “We love performing so much, it’s practically hard-wired into us,” Cheese said.
Chuck E. Cheese changes for new audiences
After four decades of slightly creepy (but cult-favorite) family entertainment and some rough years during the COVID pandemic, Chuck E. Cheese is looking to attract new audiences with an ongoing $300 million fun center remodel plan “to meet the active play needs of young children that improve their cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being,” the company said in a release.
By February this year, there were more than 100 trampoline zones added to locations in Florida, California, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, New York, Texas, Virginia and Nevada, according to a release, with safer places for smaller kids to bounce away from the bigger kids.
The company also debuted a new birthday show featuring a video performance by Chuck E. Cheese available in English, Spanish and American Sign Language, available along with a large variety of songs, lessons and holiday observances on the Chuck E. Cheese YouTube channel. In December 2023, a “grown-up menu” was added with different pizza toppings available, more complex wing sauces and rubs, meatballs in Sweet Chili, Spicy Korean BBQ or Buffalo BBQ sauce and three different types of cake.
Chuck E. Cheese locations offer a monthly Sensory Sensitive Sunday when the venues open two hours early with dimmed lights and lower volumes to create calmer environments for children with sensory sensitivities.
What is Chuck E. Cheese?
The place where “a kid can be a kid,” the family entertainment giant began in the 1970s as Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater in San Jose, California, the passion project of Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari. The idea was to offer a single place to go for arcade and video games, food, music and fun for kids and their grown-ups. If you were born since then, you probably went to at least one of the half-a-million birthday parties hosted there every year.
For the band, Bushnell has said in interviews he was inspired by the Enchanted Tiki Room and the Country Bear Jamboree at Disneyland. He had an animatronic mascot built to entertain children while their pizza was cooking, which was supposed to be a coyote until he got a closer look at the rat costume he’d actually bought. The more-marketable Charles Entertainment Cheese was born.
The band lip-syncs and moves along with show tapes which are changed every few months. Until 2014 Munch’s Make Believe Band played cover songs, but from then on they performed originals. In 2017 the company announced a general remodel, phasing out the animatronics in favor of a dance floor but it was delayed due to the pandemic and a bankruptcy.
The company (and the animatronic characters) have gone through several changes since then. Chuck E. Cheese currently has nearly 600 corporate and franchised locations in 45 states and 17 foreign countries around the world, with new one opening in Australia and Africa this year.
“Chuck E. Cheese is and was an essential part of growing up,” Nolan Bushnell of CEC said in the press release. “It has had an enormous impact on how families have fun, providing a place where kids and adults alike could be entertained – from animatronic shows tailored more for the adults to games and prizes for the kids. It’s great that the original animatronic band will remain in residency at the Northridge location while the other locations offer experiences and create memories with the new vision.”
How many Chuck E. Cheese locations are in Florida?
There are currently 31 Chuck E. Cheese locations in Florida, according to the company website. You can find them at locations.chuckecheese.com/us/fl.
Contributing: Doc Louallen, USA TODAY
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