Flashback Friday: Gen X grew up at ShowBiz Pizza, home of so-so food, amazing robot bear
Welcome to Flashback Friday, a feature that runs Fridays on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants that they once loved but that now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.
This week’s featured restaurant, ShowBiz Pizza, was a 1980s kid’s restaurant dream come true.
People who grew up in Wichita or other big cities in the 1980s — within proximity to a ShowBiz Pizza Place — probably don’t realize how jealous we small-town kids were.
I was in Dodge City, but the television stations we watched were based in Wichita and constantly aired commercials promoting ShowBiz (“where a kid can be a kid”) and it’s animatronic Rock-afire Explosion band, led by Billy Bob Brockali the bear along with dog drummer Dingo Star, gorilla keyboardist Fatz Geronimo, and singer Mitzi Mozzarella.
Much like Casa Bonita and its cliff divers, which we also saw on commercials, we couldn’t believe such magical places actually existed, much less that we’d ever see them in person. My husband, who grew up in small-town Wyoming watching Denver television stations, reports having the same experience.
I never made it to ShowBiz Pizza, but now that I’ve taken a deep dive into its history, I’m not surprised. The restaurant rose to popularity quickly but wasn’t actually around long — though modern-day parents are still enjoying (surviving?) its legacy at Chuck E. Cheese.
ShowBiz was founded by hotel franchisee Robert Brock three years after the first Chuck E Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre opened in California. Brock had originally signed on to open more than 200 Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time restaurants across the country but didn’t like his contract, according to the Kansas City Star, and instead decided to start his own version of the restaurant.
Brock’s first ShowBiz Pizza Place opened in 1980 in Kansas City, Missouri, offering Gen-X kids something they hadn’t seen much of before: a business made just for them that offered not only singing-and-dancing robotic animals but also arcade games, pizza and candy.
In July of 1981, the Wichita Eagle announced big news: ShowBiz Pizza was coming to town. Brock Hotel Corporation planned to open two of the restaurants: one on the west-edge of Towne East Square and one at Twin Lakes Shopping Center at 21st and Amidon. At the time, 25 ShowBiz Pizza restaurants were operating in 11 states.
By November, the first Wichita ShowBiz was ready to go in a newly constructed building at 333. S. Armour. But excited families learned there had been a snag. A city ordinance requiring that anyone whose business included coin-operated game machines be a resident of Sedgwick County for at least two years had kept the Topeka-based owners from getting the city license they needed to legally open.
Not a problem, Brock said. It asked a Wichita-based corporation to apply for the license then lease the machines to ShowBiz. The ploy worked, causing many political observers to wonder if the ordinance — whose stated purpose was to keep organized crime out of Wichita — had any point if a company could so easily find a loophole.
Ten days after it was originally scheduled to open its doors, the Towne East ShowBiz welcomed its first customers. Brock added the Twin Lakes ShowBiz the following January on the upper level of the center’s northwest corner.
Wichita’s ShowBiz restaurants soon became the places children begged their parents to take them, the places many threw their birthday parties. The restaurants offered thick-crust pizzas, hot dogs, salads, sundaes, pitchers of soft drinks and beer. Big kids could play on the 50 electronic games, and little ones could bounce in a ball pit. Adults could escape to a “sports room” with a big-screen TV, a VCR and seating for 45.
But the main attraction was that animatronic band, made up of singing, dancing, instrument-playing animals whose technology kids of today would scoff at but that delighted children of the 1980s. A 1983 advertisement in the Wichita Eagle promised “10 Exciting All New Shows” from The Rock-afire Explosion, including a tribute to Buddy Holly, a Beach Boys medley, and a performance of “Born to Run” by Beach Bear — another member of the slapstick group.
For a while, ShowBiz was doing gangbusters business for its owners, who in July of 1982 reported that the restaurants had brought in record profits and revenues in the second quarter. That same year, the Brock Hotel Corporation relocated to Dallas.
By 1983, the area was full of ShowBiz restaurants: two in Wichita, one in Salina, one in Topeka and five in the Kansas City area. A different owner also had ShowBiz restaurants in Hutchinson and Manhattan.
But the magic didn’t last long. Traffic started to die off at the restaurants: Parents weren’t impressed by the food or service, and kids were starting to play video games at home. Just two years later, in May 1984, the ShowBiz at Twin Lakes closed, and its space became part of Winston’s, a New York based department store that moved into the center.
The Towne East location stayed open until September 1985, when its contents were auctioned off. The Wichita Eagle reported that the Red Lobster restaurant chain, which already had a west-side store, would take the building over. Red Lobster still operates in the building today.
In January of 1986, the once-flourishing Brock Hotel Corporation, having suffered a 75% drop in stock price, was named the biggest loser among Kansas corporations. “Analysts attribute much of the company’s loss in glamour to the ill-fated ShowBiz Pizza Place franchise operations, which tried to appeal to young families with games and pizza,” said a 1986 Wichita Eagle article.
In May 1985, Brock Hotel Corporation acquired the assets of Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time and started operating as Showbiz/Pizza Time Theater Inc. In 1992, the franchise re-branded all the remaining restaurants to Chuck E. Cheese.
A few years later — in 1991 — Wichita learned that it would be getting its first Chuck E. Cheese restaurant at 3233 N. Rock Road. It opened in December of that year and remains in business to this day — though in 2020, the chain’s modern-day parent company, CEC Entertainment, filed for bankruptcy and had to reorganize.
The dancing animatronic animals started being phased out in 2017 (by that time, Rock-afire Explosion had long-since been replaced by Chuck E. Cheese’s Munch’s Make Believe Band). Now, nearly all the animals have been retired.
Showbiz’s Rock-afire Explosion, however, still has a cult following. It was the subject of a 2008 documentary, “The Rock-afire Explosion,” and in 2018, an arcade bar called Rock-afire opened in Kansas City, Missouri, featuring original members of the robot band that had been salvaged from a local ShowBiz.
It lasted only a year.
More Flashback Friday stories
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