It’s my birthday! And to celebrate, I’m going to finally finish a header I’ve had in the works for some time (seriously, I’ve had the draft version for well over a year), abandoned, and came back to. It turns out it’s hard to write a header when there’s very little information on your subject and the information that does exist is frequently contradictory. But here goes…

In 1977, the first Chuck E. Cheese restaurant opened and was an immediate success. More locations followed, as did the competing chain Showbiz Pizza. It was clear there was a market for this and other companies tried to get into the mix, including…Warner Brothers.

In 1981, Warner Leisure launched a family restaurant called Gizmos. There isn’t a ton of information out there about it, other than the walls were covered with all kinds of mechanical oddities, but it was successful enough to expand the concept in a much bigger way. In 1982 the chain, now rebranded Gadgets, opened a second location and added two animatronic shows. The first, Sammy Sands, was a lounge singer meant to entertain adults. The second?

That’s right, it was the Looney Tunes! The earliest iteration of the show included Bugs, Daffy, Porky, and Yosemite Sam. As Gadgets expanded, so did the show. Newer locations got a Revue with up to a whopping TWELVE characters. Ready? (takes deep breath) Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Yosemite Sam, Pepe Le Pew, Sylvester, Tweety, Sylvester Junior, Speedy Gonzales, Foghorn Leghorn, Henery Hawk, and the Tasmanian Devil. There were actually fourteen animatronics on stage, with two different Speedys to simulate his zipping around and a second Daffy for…well, you’ll see in the videos. The animatronics were high quality – big, detailed, and with lots of movements. And the shows were vintage Looney Tunes, each ten minutes long with Mel Blanc voicing all the characters as they sang, cracked jokes, and ended with a bang. There were, supposedly, 55 shows recorded with plans for more as the chain expanded.

Now, you might be asking, why haven’t you heard about this before? And the answer would be that Gadgets very quickly ran into financial trouble. They rapidly expanded to twelve locations, but stuck to smaller cities like Niles, Ohio and Towson, Maryland that limited their customer base. While the chain did attract young adults, it struggled to draw families. The animatronics shows were expensive to buy and to maintain, resulting in the restaurants limiting how often they ran the shows. Different locations having different versions of the show meant they couldn’t all use the same programming. And the video game industry crash in 1983 probably didn’t help anything either. Gadgets tried pivoting, creating a handful of Gadgets Cafe locations geared towards adults that dropped the Looney Tunes show, but that first 1982 location was closed by 1984 and the others soon followed.

But, as they say, the show’s the thing and is why I’m writing this header. For the longest time the only trace of the Looney Tunes Revue on the internet was a handful of pictures and a brief clip from a news report and it was thought the animatronics had been destroyed or lost to time. In 2020, however, a version of the show installed in a tractor trailer for carnivals popped up at auction, and even better – after a little TLC, it was still in working condition! While the characters eventually ended up in the hands of multiple private collectors, before they did we finally got to see them in action.

This video shows my favorite of the publicly known shows, the Halloween one (though sadly, this clip omits the intentionally discordant version of “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down” at the start of the audio-only clip).

This video shows closer views of the animatronics, and how detailed their movements are. And this news clip is the only known footage of the show with Taz in it.

My favorite aspect of the show can be seen in this chunk of the Riverboat Revue show, It’s an animatronic effect that’s pure Looney Tunes, and very clever. If there’s one video you watch in this header, make it this one!

It’s a shame the chain came and went so quickly, because I would have adored this place as a kid. Screw you, Charles Entertainment Cheese – I’m gonna go spend my birthday with Bugs instead!

Have fun posting!