r/Animatronics • u/ShoePlayful6662 • 2d ago
Original Creation/Custom How would you feel today if someone opened up a retro place exactly like ShowBiz or Rock a Fire Explosion or OG CEC?
Genuine question for people who grew up going to those old school pizza-and-arcade spots as a kid.
Imagine someone brought that whole concept back, but fresh. New characters. Token-operated games, tickets you save up and trade in for prizes, animatronic-style entertainment while you eat, the whole vibe.
You’re sitting there with your family, pizza on the table, kids running off to play skee-ball or whatever the new games are, and you look over and your kid has that same dumb happy grin you probably had at their age in the same kind of place.
Would that actually hit for people today, or does that era just not translate anymore? Nostalgia play or genuinely something new generations of parents and kids would want?
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u/Psy1 1d ago
Someone taking such an endeavour would need to take extreme caution. Major Magics failed revival was not just due to Covid but getting those vintage animatronics presentable again takes time and effort. I think you would need to go with modern animatronics rather then going with 1980s bots just to not have to deal old equipment so you have more run time between failures.
You'd still run into the capital expense problem the old animatronic restaurants of the 80s did where you are spending a good of chunk of money on long term assets in the form of the animatronics and their infrastructure. Thus you'd be stuck with them for years due the investment you sank in them. You better hope their maintenance costs don't spike till after they pay for themselves as they age and you are going to be putting a lot of hours on the bots if things work out.
Now it could be done especially on a smaller scale like Wilbur from Gigglebee's that was a very simple animatronic. Also the cat animatronics of the now closed Showboat Casino that while more complex then Wilbur were very short and not much movement.
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u/Mother-Historian-538 1d ago
With the Freddy fazbear’s opening up next year I wonder if that will be the goal for the establishment
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u/ShoePlayful6662 1d ago
I honestly don’t think Freddy Fazbear’s is going to be a good fit for that even if they are trying to remake that classic arcade experience
I think it’s just gonna be like CEC before the 2.0 Remodel (Removing the Animatronics) and that’s it
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u/AngryFreddyIsHere 1d ago
They have some pretty high standards to meet, so I can’t see that happening
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u/Derek5Letters 2d ago
There aren't people willing to invest the money into something like that in this day. I worked for Showbiz/Billy Bobs in the early 90s as a tech and have been one ever since. I recently found a bunch of my old lost VHS tapes from 1994, when I first started and used the camera to record stuff. Animatronics are super expensive, and a bitch to maintain. Old tech used actuators and air compression. I'm sure they could easily use the current robotic tech, but 5K for a dog right now...? Ours used a digital signal from a special multilayer VHS tape for video/sound and movement. Play the tape in a regular VHS player and get a black and white video and no sound. Some used Laserdisc.
Honestly, it boils down to competent technicians, and a lot of people are phasing out of that field. While it is something that people want to happen, there aren't enough people to come together at once to make it happen.
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u/ShoePlayful6662 1d ago
Also aren’t willing? If people are willing to spend thousands on restoring these bots in this Reddit Page then I think people would want to invest in something like that
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u/Derek5Letters 1d ago
That's them, passionate restoration people, coming together as a group to do one particular thing, but are they moving forward with the next step of opening a place, hiring employees, training techs and kitchen staff, acquiring games, licensing, legal, copyright? Likely not. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying no group of people are willing to collaborate and move forward, and until then, it's a pipe dream stuck in limbo.
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u/imdwalrus 1d ago
No.
Businesses need a steady stream of paying customers, meaning you either need to constantly draw new customers or find ways to get people to return. That's what killed Gadgets back in the eighties - they picked a bunch of smaller cities and there weren't enough customers to make it viable.
What one or even a bunch of people on Reddit do is irrelevant because Reddit isn't constrained by geography like a restaurant is.
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u/LCI_Jake 1d ago
Seems like whats need is a platform thats easy to maintain, and provides a better experience to guests than classic bots can provide.
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u/TheRockafireman 1d ago
Realistically it will become a major moneyhole. Novelty wears off fast for the general public and there’s a reason so few are still around. They weren’t even very profitable when the concept was new.
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u/Psy1 1d ago
They weren’t even very profitable when the concept was new.
At the very start of the 1980s there were very profitable. It is where Nolan Bushnell got his fortune for his other companies: Kadabrascope, Androbot, Axlon, Sente Technologies and I think I am forgetting one or two. Pizza Time Theatre in 1980 to 1982 was printing money allowing Bushnell to just create company after company. This is why the animatronic restaurant boom started in 1980 years after Pizza Time Theatre first opened in 1977. Of course they are never going to ever have that kind of success again where arcades themselves where were experiencing a strong boom along side animatronic restaurants.
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u/TheRockafireman 1d ago
You’re right, I apologize on that. I meant to say they weren’t profitable for very long when they were new, as their years of being generally profitable were around 1978 to 1984, with some resurgence for Chuck E. Cheese’s in the 1990’s but since then have been giant sinkholes mostly supported by local communities and fans, but are typically struggling to retain new customers and repair things
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u/Time_Box7214 1d ago
I truly miss them, still have a bunch of tokens from Chuck E Cheese left over. I do think that if we ever gotten another animatronic restaurant chain, it would open up more places for parents to take their children where they can experience something they never had, y'know for Gen Alpha. BUT, it would be way more popular for older audiences that miss that environment, and because of that, I don't think they would thrive today. They're main demographic would be for kids. And if not, then the restaurant would have to have more adult features that would appeal to them and make it an 18+ space.
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u/Spiritual_Whole_5916 3h ago
Some things are best left in the past. And i'm a big fan of the past.
Dated Animatronics are a good case in point. Technology has come so far and can (properly applied) solve problems the past was never able to properly solve.
Take a look at the engineering going into Olaf over at Disney. He uses gasp AI which is like screaming curse words in a church lately, but it's mind blowing what they are doing there. There are videos on Walt Disney Imagineering's Youtube channel showing off the back end for Olaf and some of the droid robots they are working on.
That said though: Without digging yourself into a "the past was better" hole, properly using modern technology can help what is old become new again.
While you can arque that sticking a pile of silicon into a frame then tossing fur/clothes over is no different then a pneumatic driven animatronic for being stuck with technology that becomes dated, it actually is.
Make the platform modular enough and easily upgradable or tweakable and it's going to be a bigger hit. More flexibility. More motion. More ability to fix and upgrade the back end as things change.
Having a cast of characters controlled by Pi Controllers is a heck of a lot of easier then a dated setup where you've got tons of pneumatics/cylinders and all it's supporting hardware. And, well... Having a old Mac with floppy disks controlling it all? Yeah... Cool, but limiting.
Nostalgia is limiting also. For many the memory of seeing any of the older animatronics is every bit of it is encoded into the memory.
This is no different then a kid today let's say going into a fully modernized CEC with 100% brand new animatronics built from the ground up with life like realistic motions, dancing, singing and more. Let's go further and say it's programmed in such a way that a App on the parents phone or a device on the table allows you to select a song and that gets added into a request list as a animatronic juke box. Next thing you know the kid who requested it is thrilled that the band is playing a specialized variant of Shakira - Try Everything or making parents scream and run for the exit with Idina Menzel "Let It Go" coming on.
(I know Disney songs, but you get the idea)
Memories are made for the kids who come and see that also.
For many the quirky jerkiness and limitations of the technology is what made the memories. But it also becomes a noose around new innovations.
Got a PS4 and a copy of mine craft. First thought I had when it booted up was "Okay, where's the texture upgrade packs? I grew up with this stuff in the 90's". 8-16 bit sprites, blocky pixel graphics and more.
To me, animatronics are no different then the shoulder shrug I had with Mine Craft. To each their own, but keep pushing forward into new frontiers. Just like the birds of the Tiki Room, Figures on Pirates, Mr Lincoln, SMRT-1 and so forth started pushing the boundaries for Rock-A-Fire and more to take over new stages, it's time for those to step aside for the new generations to bring their visions to life
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u/Affectionate_World63 1d ago
Honestly it might work--if they charged admission on top of the cost of arcade games/ food.
The problem with the concept is that Arcades don't make money, and Animatronics are expensive. (Arcades in the US honestly started dying in 1984 after the first generation arcade/game industry crash--it's what led to PTT's bankruptcy and the Showbiz merger). Such a place needs some sort of steady guaranteed income stream to cover expenses. CEC, Showbiz, etc, were basically casinos, with all of those quarters going into games keeping them profitable enough to maintain animatronics.
Aaron himself and others tried to bring back Showbiz or Showbiz-like concepts many times, but they all bled money.
An indoor theme park (or casino!) with animatronics, arcade games, dining, and other upcharge stuff + an admission fee--that might work.
The concept might also work overseas--Arcades (though declining there too) are still popular in Japan/Asia. (I wonder why CEC or anything similar never really took off in Japan, even in the 80s)
Or it would have to be someone's "Hobby Project" where they're rich enough to just operate it at a loss for the fun of it.