Chuck E. Cheese, the venerable children’s restaurant chain, is phasing out its animatronic band after 40 years, so Conan O’Brien booked them for one last performance. Unfortunately, it seems like the remaining members of Munch’s Make Believe Band are leaving on bad terms with corporate, as their goodbye song—first line: “Chuck E. Cheese can eat a big bag of dicks!”—makes all too clear.
Of course, the final members of the Chuck E. Cheese house band should have known better than to expect much loyalty from their parent company. The five-person lineup—Chuck, Helen Henny, Mr. Munch, Jasper T. Jowls, and Pasqually P. Pieplate—may seem like a full band, but the same people that are making a fuss about layoffs now were suspiciously silent when CEC Entertainment, Inc. saw fit to fire Madame Oink, the Mopsey Sisters, and Crusty the Cat back in the Pizza Time Theatre days. And when’s the last time anyone mentioned Billy Bob Brockali and the rest of the Rock-afire Explosion, let go during the merger of the Pizza Time Theatre and ShowBiz Pizza Place? If Mr. Cheese had seen Dook LaRue, Fatz Geronimo, and Mitzi Mozzarella as professional musicians to seek solidarity with instead of competition to destroy, he and the rest of Munch’s Make Believe Band might have been in a stronger negotiating position today. Which, ideally, would have prevented Mr. Pieplate from sabotaging the ball pit.
As a special bonus, here’s a local news report about the original Pizza Time Theatre (complete with Confederate flags), in which a Chuck E. Cheese puppeteer confidently predicts the creation of a “cybernetic human being” by 1998 or so:
