DATELINE: 1990

The Rat and Bear were no longer on good terms. The Rat was Chuck E. Cheese, mascot of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell’s Pizza Time Theater. The Bear was Billy Bob, mascot of Showbiz Pizza. After buying the bankrupt PTT in 1984, Showbiz was desperate to cut costs – and eliminating Billy Bob and the Rock-afire Explosion in favor of Chuck E. Cheese was deemed the way to go.

Showbiz broke off from Pizza Time Theater in its earliest days when the owner of Showbiz wanted to be more than a franchisee. Because they no longer had access to the characters and animatronics PTT had developed in-house, Showbiz licensed Creative Engineering’s Rock-afire Explosion for their restaurants. This means Showbiz never actually owned the Rock-afire characters, which is key to this whole ordeal. Flash-forward to after the merger. While Showbiz and PTT coexisted at first, Showbiz eventually realized that running two restaurants where the animatronics, shows, branding, merchandise, and…well, pretty much everything was separate was an unnecessary expense. According to Aaron Fechter1It should be noted here that Fechter is an unreliable narrator at BEST – but given how this played out there’s not much reason to doubt him on this claim, owner of Creative Engineering, Showbiz asked him to sign over the rights to the Rock-afire Explosion characters…without any monetary compensation. He refused2in part because he wanted to make an animated movie with the characters; this never happened, and then things started to get ugly.

First, Showbiz tried to go it alone. Instead of paying Creative Engineering to make them shows for the animatronics Showbiz made their own shows with sound-alike voice actors, as they had the legal right to do; this went over disastrously and Showbiz gave creative control back to Creative quickly. Then, Showbiz considered replacing the Rock-afire Explosion with licensed characters; after exploring options like Garfield, Spider-Man and Superman, Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo animatronics were installed as a test in three stores. Finally, someone realized – wait, we already own our own animatronic band thanks to the merger. What do we need Billy-Bob for when we can replace him with Chuck E. Cheese?

And so, we got Concept Unification, a process exactly as soul-sucking as its corporate, clinical name. The Rock-afire Explosion characters were stripped down, rebuilt, rearranged (or removed entirely in the case of poor Billy Bob), and redressed as characters from Pizza Time Theater. After a few nights3While Concept Unification was going on, the restaurants were, surprisingly, still open to the public. The Rolfe and Earl animatronic was left to perform a final, lonely show without the rest of the band, before being converted to Chuck E. Cheese as the final step of the process. I feel bad for any kids unlucky enough to have their birthday parties on one of those days. of labor, the band that was a part of so many childhood memories was suddenly no more, and by 1992 the Showbiz brand was all but dead in the US.

But, the reason why I’m writing this header, is the Concept Unification installation video that was sent to stores. It’s surreal. You can watch, step by step, as the Rock-afire Explosion is dismantled, as a dispassionate narrator describes every detail with smooth jazz playing in the background. It’s hard to describe just how bizarre the tape is; seeing the old show mostly thrown away or scrapped for parts is simultaneously depressing, a little horrifying, and utterly fascinating.

Unfortunately, due to copyright issues the videos on YouTube don’t quite give you the original experience; some of the background music trips YouTube’s copyright filters. If you want to see the source file in its original, VHS-rip WMV format you can find it here (and I recommend that because the soundtrack really is key to the experience). However, someone who I can only assume is a wizard found a way to remove the problematic music but not the narration, so this is a close approximation.

And, while I’m limited to one embed in the header I strongly encourage you all to watch the Concept Unification Demo, a clip that was included at the end of the tape. After watching the Rock-afire Explosion effectively die you can immediately follow that up with the reborn Chuck E. Cheese band introducing themselves with a Huey Lewis and the News cover. Going from the Concept Unification’s muzak and flat narration to Munch’s Make-Believe Band is a textbook example of tonal whiplash, and it’s absolutely part of the Concept Unification experience.

Enjoy posting! (Also, would this be something you all would be interested in reading more about? The history of Showbiz and PTT is fascinating, and while it’s been covered elsewhere online I’m considering doing a series of articles about it.)