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Chuck E. Cheese Pulling Plug on Animatronic Robot Band For Good

Chuck E. Cheese will remove its signature animatronic house band from all but two of its more than 400 U.S. locations by year's end.

The animatronic group that has been a staple at the Chuck E. Cheese pizza and arcade chain for four decades is going into a permanent deep freeze by the end of this year due to changing tastes among the ball pit set. The band known for its stilted movements and blinking, shifty eyes, will be replaced by giant TV screens, digital dance floors and trampoline gyms just a few years after the chain temporarily closed a number of locations during the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the summer of 2020. For now, the company is not saying what will happen to the hundreds of animatronic figures once they exit the stage more than four decades after Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell had the brainstorm to match a pizza restaurant with then-novel video games.

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