went to chuck e. cheese yesterday
So a girl I work with, who has become my smoke-break buddy, was a having a three-year-old bday party for her daughter and asked a bunch of us to come to Chuck E Cheese. I felt strange going to a small child's party, especially a girl I met once at lunch last week, but her mom said it was just going to be her boyfriend and her parents, so weirdly, I said "Sure, why not." The place was oddly packed, for a Tuesday night anyway, and much smaller than I remember. I used to have bday parties myself at Showbiz Pizza, the predecessor to Chuck E. Cheese, and haven't been since. Not much has changed: awkward mechanical animals, mediocre pizza, overpriced games, unenthused teen workers, and vastly unrealistic prizes for the amount of tickets you win. My brother and I used to take Will, Charlie, and Sammy to Enchanted Castle for their bdays, but at least that place has mini-golf, laser tag, bumper cars, and virtual reality games...Chuck E. Cheese is literally an enclosed playground with a few Freethrow games and a Whack-a-Mole. Oh, then there's the "entertainment" area, where they've eliminated all characters except Chuck E. and he pivots and blinks on a bizarrely inconsistent basis. Then occasionally a song like "Everybody's Working For the Weekend" comes on, and he lipsynchs, which is terribly creepy.The games were still as fun as I remember and I was way into them, especially the Freethrow game, even though the basketballs were flat and totally affecting my shot, and Skeeball, at which I scored a new personal best of 27000. Also as I remember was the fact that you get what seems like a zillion tickets, and then you take them up to the prizes counter and discover they're worth two erasers and a keychain. That's still a bummer. Especially when they had this amazing Tootsie Roll pillow I had my eye on. I have no idea how my parents ever afforded a bday party at one of these gaming places--you go through tokens in about 2.5 minutes, and can easily blow fifty dollars in half an hour. I kind of want to go back to Enchanted Castle and play laser tag. I wish I knew some 11-year-olds who would want to do that.
posted by SES @ 5:34 PM
5 Comments:
Remember when Chuck E. Cheese was called "Showbiz Pizza?" When they changed the name, that's when all the prizes started sucking. They give you about a million tickets just for opening your eyes but then you can't get anything more than a sticker or some plastic bracelet with hearts on it. Back in my day, I was getting stuffed animals and crazy cool fanny packs. Those were the days.
zero posts is like being the last kid picked for kickball...man!
and I totally remember Showbiz, my allegiance was always with Showbiz after Chuck E Cheese's started popping up everywhere. Then they just took over. Chuck E Cheese was a minor secondary player compared with Billy Bob, and then all of a sudden, he gets his own restaurant? Whaaat?
I do remember leaving with those piece-of-shit prizes and feeling like I just won a hundo shopping spree at Toys R Us. Always wanted a giant stuffed animal, like the kind you win at carnivals. Never got a fanny pack either, you must have been quite a skeeball whiz
You guys got is all wrong. chuck was the original, showbiz was a poor imitation.
but i loved them both. my brother and i used to work together at ski-ball. he'd run up the alley thing near the target and i'd roll him the balls and he'd pitch them right in the 500 point hole.
and with our millions of tickets, which we weren't stupid enough to waste on those crappy toys, we'd pay little girls to give us BJ's in the ball pit. ah, that was one hell of a 26th birthday party!
Hey Tommy you should totally go to Chuck E. Cheese and pretend like you're 11-14 and then impress the girls when you buy beer and cigarettes. Bonus: They're young enough to not really know that you're raping them, they'll think it's partly their fault afterwards. Stupid kids.
PS Remember when there were only about 10 showbiz pizzas left in the country around '95? If you saw one it looked really trashy and semi-deserted with mexican kids smoking wicky sticks in the parking lot. (cigarettes dipped in formaldehyde) Yuck they were really creepy.
I just wanted to post one more time to get that comment number up. I know how it feels
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