Pasqually P. Pieplate, we hardly knew ye.

I mean, you can just say it's because Five Night at Freddy's ruined it. We all know did. In a shocking move, Chuck E. Cheese is removing the animatronic animal band that have been a part of the pizza restaurant/Lord of the Flies simulator longer than I've been alive. In an even more shocking development, Chuck E. Cheese, as a chain, still exists. 

Coming soon: Spirit Halloween Store!

(source: the crushing inevitability

of capitalism's death spiral)

I remember it being poorly lit, like maybe they
were trying to hide something? But now I realize
it was probably cheeper than cleaning the carpets.

If I may wax nostalgic for a moment, I remember fondly the days where whatever adult happened to be watching the kids that day would take us to Chuck E. Cheese where they could, for a couple hours, sit at the bar and smoke while we ran amok in the arcade, ball crawl, and some weird rat maze under the stage that housed the workings of the aforementioned animatronic nightmare fuel that was the Check E. Cheese band. Hey, did you know that arcade machines once had built-in ashtrays? Well they did. Because the 1980's.

I wonder what kind of background checks
they did back then...wait, it was none, wasn't it?

Don't worry, this isn't going to turn into some kind of old man rails against change because things were better when I was a youth. The weren't. Chuck E. Cheese was great if you were say, seven years old, but for adults it must have been a cacophonous, chaotic, hellscapes, and almost certainly a super-spreader event for colds, flus, and any number of projectile-vomit-inducing illnesses. Of course they needed a full bar. And God help the staff of glorified baby-sitters that had to work there for what I'm sure were laughably low wages, even for the time.

Above: a gif I found of the pizza chef
shoving a pizza, presumably topped with
the souls of children, into the oven.

Anyway, the band, if you're unfamiliar, was a line up of dead-eyed animals and, for some reason a pizza chef called Pasqually P. Pieplate. The band would gyrate and jerkily imitate the playing of instruments while prerecorded and barely intelligible songs would blare out of synch with the puppets' mouth flapping. But I guess when you're a child it's diverting? Or possibly the stuff of night terrors, which brings us to Five Night at Freddy's. The video game series about similar robots coming to life and murdering people, or something. Look, I don't know, I was born when people could still smoke in a kid's pizza restaurant.

The game and related media are shockingly popular and are almost certainly the reason the restaurant chain is loosing the band. The company says it's something to do with appealing to the digital generation which is, you know, bleak, but I think they're just trying to avoid comparisons to the murder puppets from Five Nights so beloved by zoomers.

Honestly, I don't care. I'm a grown adult and at some point in the 90's
Chuck E. Cheese was retconned (ratconned?) from being a rat who owns a
restaurant to a hip mouse who roller blades and has "'tude." #notmychucke.*

*is that how one hashtags? Did I get it?