Bear with me, this goes somewhere.
A few years ago, I posted a night thread about Concept Unification, the unbelievably sterile name for the process of turning the Showbiz Pizza animatronics and restaurants into Chuck E. Cheese ones. We all learned a lot that night, including an unfortunate lesson about initialism. It wasn’t a thread I planned to follow up on, but then the story changed…
Once the decision was made in the late eighties to replace the Rock-afire Explosion band with the Chuck E. Cheese one, the next question was how to do that. The Concept Unification Prototype Stage was the first attempt . At the time, the Pizza Time Theatre stages with the Chuck E. Cheese characters were themed around houses, with the characters either sitting on a porch or popping out the front windows. The prototype for the converted Rock-afire stage kept that theme, but moved the characters indoors. The most interesting part of how the prototype was that one character, purple monster Mr. Munch, didn’t have a permanent presence on the stage at all – he was multiple smaller animatronics that would pop up in various locations depending on the show’s needs.
For decades, all that was available to document this prototype stage was a handful of pictures and concept sketches. It was thought that this stage was only ever installed in corporate headquarters as a test, and no other documentation existed. There was a lot of curiosity about it because the final stage installed in stores scrapped almost all aspects of the prototype, but it was accepted that we’d never get any more information about it.
On July 31st this year, that changed.
“Nadia’s Birthday at Showbiz Pizza May 1990” – an unassuming YouTube upload of a family birthday party in Dallas, digitized from an aged VHS with tracking and color issues. And, as it turns out, a minute of that footage was of the Concept Unification Prototype Stage. It was not only the first known footage of the stage in operation, but the first proof that it was ever installed in any of the Showbiz Pizza restaurants.
Sometimes, the internet is still cool. Sometimes, you still learn new things from it, or see something no one has ever seen before. I hope Nadia had a great birthday, and that someone is able to communicate to her just how much this footage means to a niche group of nerds. And I hope that the internet can keep surprising us in ways big, small, and wholly unexpected.
Have a great night, everybody. 😀