suck e. cheese

It was my nephew's 7th (!) birthday on Mother's day, so his mom invited her favorite brother-in-law to the party at everybody's favorite: Chuck E. Cheese's!

Now, I grew up going to about 5 CEC parties a year when I was a kid. There were ball pits, skee ball games, ticket prizes, countless fun video games, party rooms, pizza, pop, beer and animatronic anthropomorphic performing animals. The room where the animals performed were dimly lit, and the shows were entertaining. Sure the animals weren't realistic, but how can you be when you only have 6 points of articulation, and 4 of them are in your head?

But goddammit, when I was a kid, this shit was FUN.

Fast forward 20 some-odd years later, and let me paint a picture for you.

First thing I notice is the place is bright as a strobe light showroom. Neon everywhere. Next thing, is this place is two levels. Upstairs and downstairs. Design flaw in my opinion. Sure there's an elevator, but there's kids running everywhere, and the stairwell is not the widest thing in the world.

DOWNSTAIRS

Downstairs has the eating/stage area. Tiny. Very bright, and you could barely hear the sound coming over the overhead speakers for the canned television CEC channel, which loops every 30 minutes or so some very uninspiring CEC themed skits and music videos.

The front stage was very tiny, with some kid controlled video cameras and a little mini stage with a non-working blue screen that the kids could perform in front of. Animatronic animals? One. Mr. Cheese himself from the waist up. Close enough to the edge that kids were all over him, sticking their fingers in his mouth while he performed. If this shit was real, he would NOT go for that. At all. The only really entertaining aspect of the dining/stage area were the television show themed posters which all had a disclaimer stating that these were parody posters. The first poster spoofed Seinfeld as "Cheesefeld", and had a picture of Chuck dressed as Jerry. The second was The C Files in homage to The X files. The last was a spoof on ER. Instead it was called ERrr. I didn't get it. And it had a surprisingly buff looking Chuck E. Cheese dressed in a white lab coat.

The rest of the stuff downstairs was mostly kiddie rides and video games. Nothing spectacular.

UPSTAIRS

Upstairs is strictly video games and ticket games. Lots of light-gun shooting games, racing games, skee ball, little "rides" and seating. All in all, totally uninspiring. There were about 3 games that looked interesting or fun, and that's just not enough. The arcade is dead. Long live the arcade.

THE EXPERIENCE

It was painful. I showed up early. Waited for 20 minutes. Apparently, showing up early is not as important anymore to anybody else except for me.
My brother and dad show up, and we all sit up front waiting for the rest of the gang. The kid working the front door (job? I think he was the gatekeeper. I didn't see the keymaster anywhere.) spent most of the time up front wearing plastic glasses with a big nose and a black moustache and checking his height on the "I think the criminal was 'this tall'" sticker on the door. My sister in law showed up with my nephews and my oldest nephew's friend. Good. The attendance is getting better.

I told myself that the only redeeming thing would be for some hot mom to be there and at least give me someone to stare at. Everybody who was invited showed up, including some hot moms. My joy turned into disappointment because kids were just dropped off. This is bad for me.

Ten seven-year-olds running around and having a good time. This was fun to watch. Little kids bragging about how many tickets they won and everything.

Pizza shows up and we eat. The pizza was sub-par, and no amount of crushed red pepper and Parmesan cheese could save it.

Let me tell you, though. This kid SCORED present-wise. Holy crap. Toys galore. Good for him. His uncle only got him a gift card, but that's like gold to a kid who wants anything and everything. GOLD I tell ya.

It came time to leave, and I was glad to go. Hot moms came back to pick their kids up and that was good again, but quickly turned to bad. I'm not going to say that I didn't have a good time, but I did find myself checking the time quite frequently near the end of the party.

So, to sum it all up: lame pizza + sub-standard entertainment + 2 levels of ho-hum + a rat with Bell's Palsy = happy little kids.

I guess it really isn't all that bad.

In researching the links for this post, I did come across an interesting word. Exonumia is the study of coin-like objects such as token coins and medals, and other items used in place of legal currency or for commemoration. My favorite line in the wikipedia entry for this is:

"The words exonumist and exonumia were coined in July 1960 by Russell Rulau, a recognized authority and author on the subject, and accepted by Webster's dictionary in 1965."

Do you think they intentionally said that the terms were coined in July 1960? Because that would be funny.