animatronics and insparations!

april 15, 2024

hey everyone! welcome back to count down to Disneyland paris!

Did you know that the enchanted tiki room in Disneyland California was supposed to be an animatronic diner experience? Kinda like chuck e cheese or show biz pizza! Chuck e cheese was invented by Nolan Bushnell! The same man who invented Atari and made the very first commercial arcade game called computer space! Nolan Bushnell wanted more places to put his arcade games! So he wanted to create his own video game arcade! But he he didn’t want it to seem like he was competing with the arcade owners he was selling his games to! So he choose food parlor as the basis! But after visiting a pipe organ restaurant! He also noticed there was a need for live entertainment! The inspiration for that came from Disneyland California! From the country bear jamboree to be exact! Their lovable characters, dry humor and catchy songs were the inspiration for the characters! At first the plan wasn’t to have a rat as the mascot! But coyote! Nolan Bushnell even ordered a coyote costume! But when it was delivered to him it looked more like a rat! Nolan Bushnell decided to embrace this and decided to call the restaurant Ricky rat or rick rat! But Atari’s pr department didn’t think it was a good idea to have the word rat in the name of a restaurant! So then it became the big cheese pizza time theater! But for some reason the big chess was already licensed to a hotel chain! So then they decided to call the restaurant chuck e cheese’s pizza time theater! Chuck e cheese was a huge hit in the 80’s and early 90’s! But in the late 90’s visitor numbers began to dwindle! There wasn’t any interest in animatronic dinners anymore! There was too much supply and not enough demand! There were also a lot of other animatronic dinners! Like the rain forest cafe, show biz pizza, billy bob’s wonderland, there was one that had hanna barbera characters and even one that had looney toons characters! But still chuck e cheese tried to keep up! By rebranding some of their characters! For example there was a lion character named the king! The king was an Elvis themed character! And he was programmed to sing Elvis songs! But in the mid 90’s the Elvis theme was dropped in favor of a Micheal Jackson theme! Even chuck e cheese himself was changed a lot! He and his friends were first shown through portraits! Which was later replaced with the more impressive balcony variation! And then the balcony variation was replaced with full body animatronics! They tried to experiment with the very elaborate studio c and its rockstar chuck variation! But not even that was enough to save the chuck e cheese animatronics…. And by the early 2010’s Chuck e cheese began to face out all of the animatronics out of their restaurants… there is only one chuck e cheese left with the animatronics! But unfortunately those are no longer working…. But many of the characters of these once beloved animatronic restaurants were saved by the fans! Fans like these guys!

Thank you for reading! And see you next week!

the king

Cavity sam

Connor leschinsky

These are some pictures of the animatronics in their restaurants/attractions! The pictures aren’t mine! I found them on the internet! Sources vary! some of these are lost media! and pictures of them are very rare!

the enchanted tiki room Disneyland California! status: in operation!