Chuck for prez...

The story of how a pizza palace became an American trademark

One of America’s single, greatest inventions, Chuck E. Cheese is a restaurant that encompasses everything that we love about our country; it represents the “amusement park” ambiance that has become the social norm for our nation as a whole. Chuck E. Cheese is what makes us American; we go there either for our kids, or so we can be one for at least a little while.

But Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz Pizza, CEC’s former sister restaurant, represent more than just a “pizza puppet palace;” the history of Chuck E. Cheese and its founder, Nolan Bushnell, represent Corporate America’s need to use money in order to build a real-life dreamscape. Started in 1977, the original CEC restaurant, known as Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater, was founded by Bushnell in San Jose, California, and is still recognized as the first restaurant ever built to integrate live, animatronic entertainment with the in-dining experience, along with an indoor arcade.

The founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell’s concept for the original Pizza Time Theater was influenced by his previous experience in the amusement park industry, along with a particular reverence for the Walt Disney Company. After the original Pizza Time Theater opened in San Jose in ’77, Bushnell began the process of expanding Chuck E. Cheese into a franchise, and by November of 1978, Bushnell had left Atari to buy the Pizza Time Theater concept from Atari’s parent company, Warner Communications.

As the franchise expanded, Bushnell formed a business merger with Robert Brock of Topeka Inn Management in 1979. Under this agreement, Brock was given the legal authority to open Pizza Time Theater franchises across 16 states throughout the southern and southwestern U. S., including a company subdivision, known as Pizza Show Biz, specifically for the development of the already-existing, Pizza Time Theater restaurants. The legal dispute between Bushnell’s Pizza Time Theater and the restaurant that would soon become known as Chuck E. Cheese’s “twin,” Showbiz Pizza, started after Brock had met-up with Aaron Fechter of Creative Engineering in November of ’79. Afraid that Fechter’s animatronic actors would be too-strong of competition for the brand-new, Pizza Time Theater franchise, Brock asked Bushnell to release him from their co-development agreement. Together with Fechther, Brock formed Showbiz Pizza Inc.; Bushnell sued Brock for breach of contract, and Brock counter-sued, claiming misrepresentation. Bushnell and Brock went to court in March of 1980, but the case would eventually be settled out-of-court, Showbiz Pizza agreeing to pay Bushnell and CEC a portion of Showbiz Pizza’s profits over the next decade. Showbiz opened their first restaurant in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 3, 1980.

Bushnell’s Pizza Time Theater had gone completely public by 1981, but because of the explosion of the video game industry, Bushnell himself was falling into debt, the company losing $15 million in 1983 and preparing to file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy on behalf of Pizza Time Theater Inc by ’84. Showbiz Pizza Inc bought the Pizza Time Theater company, now almost at the point of filing bankruptcy, and the merger that would eventually become known as Showbiz Pizza Time Inc in 1984 would last until ’92, when both Chuck E. Cheese’s and Showbiz Pizza were unified under the “Chuck E. Cheese’s” name, with the company renaming itself as CEC Entertainment in ’98, completely removing Showbiz from the corporate label. As of 2009, there are 542 Chuck E. Cheese restaurants operating throughout North and South America, as well as in the Middle East.

But where Chuck E. Cheese’s and Showbiz Pizza hold significance in American society is in their reinforcement of an idea, the idea that in this country, we can do something that makes us unique above all others; we can create the “Willy Wonka” factory, the ultimate “dreamscape.” In America, you can be anywhere in the universe, real or imagined, and still be in one place.

- Sal Alaimo Jr. (5/24/11)

S. J. A.