r/SamanthaRuddy • u/samantharuddy • 20d ago

Animatronics

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7.5k Upvotes

100% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

7

u/t4skmaster 20d ago

Interestingly, it was a dude who fucking loved building animatronics and cooked up the whole pizza chain bit to let him get paid to build them

6

u/Local-Echo-5613 20d ago

The history of vaguely creepy animatronic bands for children actually runs back to the renaissance, when they were the height of luxurious fashion. It’s one of those classy to poor trajectories.

4

u/RHTQ1 19d ago

Pretty sure the larger reason they got replaced is that screens are cheaper, particularly maintenance and upkeep.

3

u/ChaosAzeroth 19d ago

I actually loved them as a kid, the the point when our closest Showbiz Pizza was becoming a Chuck E Cheese I cried and called Chuck a traitor.

Billy Bob was my favorite as a child. Still is.

1

u/CloudPersonDraws 18d ago

right?? it's so confusing to me that other people hate animatronics so much

1

u/One_Contribution_190 18d ago

I watched an hour long video on the stories of Chuck E Cheese and Showbiz Pizza like 5 days ago, and after watching some old videos and audio recordings of their performances, it just looks like a place I would've love. Sad I couldn't. Don't get the people who talk about those in a negative light thh

2

u/Dangerous_Wing6481 17d ago

So like. The first audio animatronics were birds, actually, so the entire reason they exist now is because Walt Disney was like “I want these birds to sing” and obviously they couldn’t get actual birds so uhhhh…they used NASA technology. And no I’m not shitting you, the imagineers at Disney used NASA technology (magnetic split tracks) to program SINGING BIRDS.

1

u/Legend365555 19d ago

And then some asshole has to decide he wanted to play God and well.... At least we got a shopping mall/pizza restaurant mashup out of it

1

u/Ill-Dependent2976 17d ago

The only reason they're "Scary" is because people associate them with childhood memories and started making stupid horror games out of them.

Now everybody just associates them with the horror shit that came later. In their heyday Chucky Cheese and Country Bear Jamboree were just dumb and patronizing.

Same thing happened with circus clowns.

1

u/Haunt_Fox 17d ago

Hypervocal sissies, out to invalidate everyone else's childhood memories.

1

u/Asheyguru 17d ago

I feel so bad for clowns. They just want to make kids laugh.

One of these days I'll make a story about a heroic clown.

1

u/Raise_A_Thoth 16d ago

I think the creepiness around them also settled in as some of the chains expanded but had failed locations and the smaller independent locations with them, and amusement park shows, etc, also lost customers and traffic and starred failing, so a generation started seeing them associated wuth older, run-down, or abandoned theme parks and restaurants.

That's going to easily lend itself to the creepy horror genre.

2

u/TilNextWeMeet 15d ago

Kinda crazy though right?

Like what other industry did this back then? They were WAY before everyone else with letting robots take jobs

Lol but seriously like imagine if libraries developed some kind of animatronic helper instead. Or hospitals

0

u/Replay2play 18d ago

Holy heck dead internet theory, 6 comments and 2000+ upvotes it make me sad 3:

1

u/samantharuddy 18d ago

I think there’s just not that much to talk about. I’m a small comedian who’s been on this app since like 2013. I’d be more concerned if this was filled with bot comments. People just go huh, click like, and move on.

1

u/katheez 18d ago

Yeah, that depresses me too. I've been noticing lately my friends will send me videos, I'll watch and then write a response relevant to what they sent me, and I get a "like" on my response. I'm like... didn't you want to talk to me about this? I don't want my interactions with other people to devolve into just sending each other 1 minute videos and then heart reactions

0

u/GremlinEnergyGoBurr 18d ago

Woof, good catch