Chuck E. Cheese announced a new look for the restaurant's mascot and 80s nerds stuck in a world that is never allowed to change went into full-on panic.
Right. Because this...
...is somehow incalculably worse than this:
As if Chuck E. Cheese has never been changed by board rooms packed with marketing execs.
Ahem.
If anything, these people shrieking about their murdered childhoods ought to cast back a little further and be pissed off about the loss of this:
Chuck E. has always been a very cheap company. For decades, it has run on a variation of Kevin Yee's Rizzo Factor, where corporate decisions are determined by the mission statement "They're kids, what do they know?" Remember, when Showbiz Pizza locations were turned into Chuck E. Cheese's, they didn't bring in new robots. They didn't even bring in the specific robots that were made for the original Chuck E. restaurants. They just stripped the Showbiz robots of their fur and put them in new suits, whether the existing cartoon character designs matched or not. And go stop by your local Chuck's and tell me how long it has been since they changed the interior decor. My local Chuck doesn't even close the curtains anymore where the show is paused.
Now, I'm not saying *this* isn't creatively bankrupt...
...but this is just another terrible step in a restaurant that has been pretty terrible for generations. So reactions like these...
...just show off an ignorance of history, a misunderstanding of business, and a bizarre loyalty to a company that has never been more than a kid-pandering playpen for mediocre pizza.
THEY own Chuck E. and THEY need to stay in business. So THEY get to do whatever they want. If Chuck E. dies, it won't be because they put Chuck through a redesign wringer, it will be because the company has been ailing for years.
The real question will be, how will they adjust the robot show? Because I don't have a lot of faith that they'll even bother. Maybe this will be the excuse they need to dump the expensive-to-maintain robots altogether and just install more TV screens. The show has been inching toward that for years anyway.
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