There's a sign post up ahead! Next Stop! THE FUN ZONE!
There's a certain establishment in town that I've been curious about for a while.
It used to be a Chuck E. Cheese, but, in the last year, the name suddenly changed to “Fun Zone & Pizza” and the logo switched from the familiar smarmy Chuck E. Cheese face to a picture of a kid riding on a pterodactyl. According to what little information I could find online about the switch, the owner just ripped the trademarked faces off the robots but kept everything else the same. So now we had an intriguing mystery: What did the robots look like now? Were they just bare metal skeletons like Arnold at the end of Terminator? Did they have new faces? Were their heads covered by paper bags? IT IS A MYSTERY TO DISCOVER
So last night, I convinced moodyferret and dirge_de_valeur to accompany me there for my birthday celebration. Knowing that Chuck E. Cheese pizza is absolute garbage, we assumed that Fun Zone's pizza would be even worse. So we played it safe and ate beforehand, only visiting Fun Zone for the games.
Now, even the cleanest, best maintained Chuck E. Cheese restaurant always has that whiff of desperation, that cloying over-eagerness that makes it a vaguely uncomfortable experience for anyone over the target age. Poorly run Chuck E. Cheeses are just sad. So imagine the bleak David Fincher-esque nightmare of a generic Chuck E. Cheese knock-off that literally does not give a shit.
First, there was nothing there. Fun Zone was an obvious victim of gradual arcade deforestation, with large patches of barren carpet wasteland growing as the old broken games were removed but no new ones brought in to replace the fallen. On our visit, Fun Zone had three functional video games: a jet ski racing game, Dance Dance Revolution, and, of course, that one Jurassic Park game that all arcades seem to have, the one where you sit in a jeep and shoot out the back at a Tyrannosaur.
Fun Zone also had a pinball machine. ONE pinball machine, because I don't count the weird pint-sized Mario Brothers themed machine with the broken flippers that was obviously designed as a baby's first pinball for little kids. (Strangely, the one adult pinball machine was NOT the Addams Family. Because, seriously, have you noticed how many of those Addams Family pinball machines are still lingering on in for forgotten midways and boardwalks? They must have been some crazy overstock down at Bally.) Anyway, this particular pinball machine was a Jurassic Park model, the dashboard so scuffed by years of abuse that it was just a gray mess with the occasional velociraptor foot or tail still faintly visible.
Literally half the games were broken and when I say literally, I mean LITERALLY because every second game was malfunctioning in some way. Luckily, they were mostly broken in amusing ways that suggested a playful robot intelligence just coming into self-awareness; machines would dispense tickets in completely random patterns unrelated to your actual score as if the whole restaurant was an underground experiment in variable ratio partial reinforcement conditioning. A skeeball machine would spit out 3 tickets if you scored a 50,000 basket, but the same machine would then give you 50 tickets for a series of gutterballs. One machine, a sort of wheel-of-fortune deal where you tried to launch tokens into baskets on a spinning ferris wheel contraption, actually jammed while Dirge was using it, allowing us to launch token after token into the scoring basket while the wheel strained to resume movement. Not that it mattered, because tokens that missed the wheel completely also resulted in the machine giving tickets. Other machines were broken in more mundane ways - like the basketball game where the balls were jammed up inside the hoop. Others were clearly not intended to be used by adults, like the tiny air hockey table that you had to squat down to use and whose walls were so low that the puck went flying off the table with every knock.
Three employees shuffled around aimlessly behind push brooms, presumably pretending to be busy in case the manager showed up. Other than a small birthday party that was just dispersing as we arrived (one kid even gave us his tickets as he left) and this one weird guy with a teenage girl whom I presume was his daughter (seriously, no clue what they were doing there), the place was deserted. We waited by the prize counter for 20 minutes before we were able to get anyone's attention.
Of course, as every kid knows, the real attraction of Chuck E. Cheese is the ball pit. No wait, scratch that. As every weirdo fanatic who posts on Internet Chuck E. Cheese fansites knows, the real attraction of Chuck E. Cheese is the robot show. Even as a kid, I was never all that impressed with the robot show, when a comatose Chuck and pals sputtered to life every hour on the hour to deliver circa 1930s vaudeville routines. Somehow I accepted most of his motley crew on their own terms - The purple monster thing, the hillbilly dog, the Italian stereotype - but the only one that I felt was somehow wrong was Chuck E. Cheese himself. Everything about him, from his nasal Jersey accent to his carnival barker fashion sense, made him come off as a total sleazeball, someone who should be hawking patent nostrums in an old west movie. So naturally, I was insanely curious to see how Fun Zone had improved on the original line-up.
There were three robots: two dogs and a cow. They appeared to be constructed from repurposed Halloween costumes. Otherwise, very little was different. The brown dog was still holding the Swiss cheese banjo formerly held by Jasper Jowls, and the cow sat in front of a sign that still read “Pasqually's band.” Unfortunately, there wasn't any birthday party going on while we were there, so we didn't get to see the robots in action. Assuming that they worked. Which is really a big IF.
EDIT: Surprisingly, even though Moody was really hostile to the idea of visiting Fun Zone at first, she totally loved the little plastic sea life prizes so much that now she wants to go back. Who'd have thought that Made-in-Taiwan weedy sea dragons and sea snails would have such power? So we returned to Fun Zone again, this time also bringing my little sister. There were a few more people there this time, including this one little toddler who really loved skeeball. When my sister put a token in the skeeball machine, he immediately trundled up and claimed her game. Without a word, he just started grabbing balls and lobbing them down the alley. At first he rolled them down the alley, but he didn't have enough upper body strength to make them go over the hump at the end before the scoreboard. After a few tries, he realized that he had more luck by throwing them, although, being a little kid, he didn't have very good aim and tended to completely miss the scoring holes. More often his balls smashed loudly into the metal caging and bounced back at his head. Skeeball is a very dangerous game. You might say... the most dangerous game of all. He didn't care about the tickets he won. When my sister handed him his winnings, he tried to jam them back into the machine, possibly hoping it would buy him another game. When Moody set down her tokens to play a skeeball game, he ran up and stole some. When he finished playing, he came back and demanded more. It was one of those things that was cute instead of assholish because he was still too young to talk and could barely even walk straight. This kid's parents were no where within sight, so after about 45 minutes we started wondering whether he was an orphan owned by Fun Zone. Eventually, a woman came up and started playing with him, so hopefully that was his mom.
Also, Moody asked an employee whether the robots still sang and danced. He told us that they didn't. While in some ways I'm disappointed that there isn't some sort of half-assed Robot Suicide Show, I think this actually just makes me love the Fun Zone even more.
We got photos of the non-robots but wouldn't you rather see video? Good, because I found this weird video on YouTube where some old guy and a developmentally disabled man complain about the lack of animatronics at Fun Zone. You also get a brief glimpse of the game room, but this video doesn't really do justice to how empty it looked. Still, enjoy.
According to that lispy guy, the pizza is actually better now that it's no longer a Chuck E Cheese. I think our next move will be to actually try the food there. What can I say? We're stepping into THE FUN ZONE!!
EDIT EDIT: Ooops almost forgot Dirge's take on Fun Zone:
A dark cathedral of joyless saurian worship. This place has sank into such depths of depraved morbidity that it has become like a twisted, Hitchcock-esque nightmare. The carpets are lush blankets made possibly of mold and broken dreams. The salad bar is strewn with a mess of salad, olives and cheese, in reference perhaps to masticated bodies of the old animatronics inside the walls. Ten dollars gets you roughly five trillion tokens, which can be used to play that games that reward your failures and punish you for your successes. Skee-Ball is particularly belligerent. The show room has seating for a hundred people, but the only thing there are tumbleweeds made of crushed hopes and shattered childhoods. There are three bizarre, ghoulish felt-covered robots on the stage, and the televisions blare odd cartoons from another universe. Saturnine wraiths called 'employees' push brooms to and fry with no awareness to the living within their walls. The only dinosaurs present are paintings on the wall, created in the last, spastic throes of hope that this place could ever be enjoyed by anyone.
I definitely recommend Fun Zone & Pizza.
TLDR: Fun Zone is the local analogue to the Craggy Island Fun Fair.
Click to viewIt used to be a Chuck E. Cheese, but, in the last year, the name suddenly changed to “Fun Zone & Pizza” and the logo switched from the familiar smarmy Chuck E. Cheese face to a picture of a kid riding on a pterodactyl. According to what little information I could find online about the switch, the owner just ripped the trademarked faces off the robots but kept everything else the same. So now we had an intriguing mystery: What did the robots look like now? Were they just bare metal skeletons like Arnold at the end of Terminator? Did they have new faces? Were their heads covered by paper bags? IT IS A MYSTERY TO DISCOVER
So last night, I convinced moodyferret and dirge_de_valeur to accompany me there for my birthday celebration. Knowing that Chuck E. Cheese pizza is absolute garbage, we assumed that Fun Zone's pizza would be even worse. So we played it safe and ate beforehand, only visiting Fun Zone for the games.
Now, even the cleanest, best maintained Chuck E. Cheese restaurant always has that whiff of desperation, that cloying over-eagerness that makes it a vaguely uncomfortable experience for anyone over the target age. Poorly run Chuck E. Cheeses are just sad. So imagine the bleak David Fincher-esque nightmare of a generic Chuck E. Cheese knock-off that literally does not give a shit.
First, there was nothing there. Fun Zone was an obvious victim of gradual arcade deforestation, with large patches of barren carpet wasteland growing as the old broken games were removed but no new ones brought in to replace the fallen. On our visit, Fun Zone had three functional video games: a jet ski racing game, Dance Dance Revolution, and, of course, that one Jurassic Park game that all arcades seem to have, the one where you sit in a jeep and shoot out the back at a Tyrannosaur.
Fun Zone also had a pinball machine. ONE pinball machine, because I don't count the weird pint-sized Mario Brothers themed machine with the broken flippers that was obviously designed as a baby's first pinball for little kids. (Strangely, the one adult pinball machine was NOT the Addams Family. Because, seriously, have you noticed how many of those Addams Family pinball machines are still lingering on in for forgotten midways and boardwalks? They must have been some crazy overstock down at Bally.) Anyway, this particular pinball machine was a Jurassic Park model, the dashboard so scuffed by years of abuse that it was just a gray mess with the occasional velociraptor foot or tail still faintly visible.
Literally half the games were broken and when I say literally, I mean LITERALLY because every second game was malfunctioning in some way. Luckily, they were mostly broken in amusing ways that suggested a playful robot intelligence just coming into self-awareness; machines would dispense tickets in completely random patterns unrelated to your actual score as if the whole restaurant was an underground experiment in variable ratio partial reinforcement conditioning. A skeeball machine would spit out 3 tickets if you scored a 50,000 basket, but the same machine would then give you 50 tickets for a series of gutterballs. One machine, a sort of wheel-of-fortune deal where you tried to launch tokens into baskets on a spinning ferris wheel contraption, actually jammed while Dirge was using it, allowing us to launch token after token into the scoring basket while the wheel strained to resume movement. Not that it mattered, because tokens that missed the wheel completely also resulted in the machine giving tickets. Other machines were broken in more mundane ways - like the basketball game where the balls were jammed up inside the hoop. Others were clearly not intended to be used by adults, like the tiny air hockey table that you had to squat down to use and whose walls were so low that the puck went flying off the table with every knock.
Three employees shuffled around aimlessly behind push brooms, presumably pretending to be busy in case the manager showed up. Other than a small birthday party that was just dispersing as we arrived (one kid even gave us his tickets as he left) and this one weird guy with a teenage girl whom I presume was his daughter (seriously, no clue what they were doing there), the place was deserted. We waited by the prize counter for 20 minutes before we were able to get anyone's attention.
Of course, as every kid knows, the real attraction of Chuck E. Cheese is the ball pit. No wait, scratch that. As every weirdo fanatic who posts on Internet Chuck E. Cheese fansites knows, the real attraction of Chuck E. Cheese is the robot show. Even as a kid, I was never all that impressed with the robot show, when a comatose Chuck and pals sputtered to life every hour on the hour to deliver circa 1930s vaudeville routines. Somehow I accepted most of his motley crew on their own terms - The purple monster thing, the hillbilly dog, the Italian stereotype - but the only one that I felt was somehow wrong was Chuck E. Cheese himself. Everything about him, from his nasal Jersey accent to his carnival barker fashion sense, made him come off as a total sleazeball, someone who should be hawking patent nostrums in an old west movie. So naturally, I was insanely curious to see how Fun Zone had improved on the original line-up.
There were three robots: two dogs and a cow. They appeared to be constructed from repurposed Halloween costumes. Otherwise, very little was different. The brown dog was still holding the Swiss cheese banjo formerly held by Jasper Jowls, and the cow sat in front of a sign that still read “Pasqually's band.” Unfortunately, there wasn't any birthday party going on while we were there, so we didn't get to see the robots in action. Assuming that they worked. Which is really a big IF.
EDIT: Surprisingly, even though Moody was really hostile to the idea of visiting Fun Zone at first, she totally loved the little plastic sea life prizes so much that now she wants to go back. Who'd have thought that Made-in-Taiwan weedy sea dragons and sea snails would have such power? So we returned to Fun Zone again, this time also bringing my little sister. There were a few more people there this time, including this one little toddler who really loved skeeball. When my sister put a token in the skeeball machine, he immediately trundled up and claimed her game. Without a word, he just started grabbing balls and lobbing them down the alley. At first he rolled them down the alley, but he didn't have enough upper body strength to make them go over the hump at the end before the scoreboard. After a few tries, he realized that he had more luck by throwing them, although, being a little kid, he didn't have very good aim and tended to completely miss the scoring holes. More often his balls smashed loudly into the metal caging and bounced back at his head. Skeeball is a very dangerous game. You might say... the most dangerous game of all. He didn't care about the tickets he won. When my sister handed him his winnings, he tried to jam them back into the machine, possibly hoping it would buy him another game. When Moody set down her tokens to play a skeeball game, he ran up and stole some. When he finished playing, he came back and demanded more. It was one of those things that was cute instead of assholish because he was still too young to talk and could barely even walk straight. This kid's parents were no where within sight, so after about 45 minutes we started wondering whether he was an orphan owned by Fun Zone. Eventually, a woman came up and started playing with him, so hopefully that was his mom.
Also, Moody asked an employee whether the robots still sang and danced. He told us that they didn't. While in some ways I'm disappointed that there isn't some sort of half-assed Robot Suicide Show, I think this actually just makes me love the Fun Zone even more.
We got photos of the non-robots but wouldn't you rather see video? Good, because I found this weird video on YouTube where some old guy and a developmentally disabled man complain about the lack of animatronics at Fun Zone. You also get a brief glimpse of the game room, but this video doesn't really do justice to how empty it looked. Still, enjoy.
According to that lispy guy, the pizza is actually better now that it's no longer a Chuck E Cheese. I think our next move will be to actually try the food there. What can I say? We're stepping into THE FUN ZONE!!
EDIT EDIT: Ooops almost forgot Dirge's take on Fun Zone:
A dark cathedral of joyless saurian worship. This place has sank into such depths of depraved morbidity that it has become like a twisted, Hitchcock-esque nightmare. The carpets are lush blankets made possibly of mold and broken dreams. The salad bar is strewn with a mess of salad, olives and cheese, in reference perhaps to masticated bodies of the old animatronics inside the walls. Ten dollars gets you roughly five trillion tokens, which can be used to play that games that reward your failures and punish you for your successes. Skee-Ball is particularly belligerent. The show room has seating for a hundred people, but the only thing there are tumbleweeds made of crushed hopes and shattered childhoods. There are three bizarre, ghoulish felt-covered robots on the stage, and the televisions blare odd cartoons from another universe. Saturnine wraiths called 'employees' push brooms to and fry with no awareness to the living within their walls. The only dinosaurs present are paintings on the wall, created in the last, spastic throes of hope that this place could ever be enjoyed by anyone.
I definitely recommend Fun Zone & Pizza.
TLDR: Fun Zone is the local analogue to the Craggy Island Fun Fair.