Where That Damn Creepy Chuck E. Cheese Band Came From, And Other Stories
Welcome to What You Missed This Weekend, a second look at some of the best stories we posted while you were out living your life. Inside: animatronic rock acts, activism as an undocumented immigrant and an analysis of gendered language in screenwriting.
A Long, Detailed History Of — Oh God No, Not Them
Fact: I did not have a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese as a kid. I know I thought about having a birthday party there: after all, the ads they'd play during Saturday morning cartoons sure made shitty pizza and arcade games seem like musts for a birthday. Surely, I definitely attended one or two other kid's parties there, and those must've sealed what kept my own celebrating away.
Fear.
In part, fear of being too big to crawl around in the colorful gym set tubes and getting stuck, but primarily fear of the Chuck E. Cheese animatronic band.
The story of the band (and of the great Showbiz/Chuck E. battle) has already been lovingly told in the 2008 documentary "The Rock-afire Explosion," but now Chuck E. Cheese is retiring the robots. Jamie Loftus, who is responsible for other great stuff like eating "Infinite Jest" page-by-page, compiled an up-to-date history of Cheese's band after the retirement news broke. Anybody interested in the history of video games should give it a look, considering the franchises initial ties to Atari and the later reinterpretation of the animatronic band as terrifying killers in the "Five Nights At Freddy's" franchise.
Sorry, did I type reinterpretation? My bad: they've always been creepy murderers, and the only way I'll ever set foot in a Chuck E. Cheese again is if they stay gone.
Advocating For The Undocumented When You Are Too
Shea Serrano is my favorite writer over at The Ringer. The steady stream of plain-fun pieces like "What is the best worst movie dunk?" and "An ode to Letty Ortiz, the secret MVP of the 'Fast & Furious'" keep me checking in weekly, but when Shea turns towards longer, more serious topics he's always bringing his A-game.
This story about Cesar Espinosa is no different. Espinosa is the 32-year-old in charge of FIEL, a Houston-based organization that helps undocumented immigrant families and students. The organization skews younger, looking to fill a niche and connect people to the scant opportunities for citizenship and stays granted through the DACA program. They had their work cut out for them before Trump; now with more aggressive ICE policing and snap deportations, FIEL's work will be that much harder — and more important than ever.
In the wake of the historic flooding caused in Houston by Hurricane Harvey this weekend, it's important to remember that not only are many of the people affected worst by the storm part of vulnerable communities, but many of them might be undocumented.
With a terrifying natural disaster at hand, you'd hope that maybe ICE would show compassion to families just looking to survive the storm. Unfortunately, there's already been a report to the contrary.
Against the backdrop of a literal storm or no, Espinosa is committed to the fight for immigrant rights — take a little time to get to know him.
Subtle Cinematic Sexism
A good piece at The Pudding will stick with you for a long time. The site's blend of data-viz and plain-old good-question-asking leads to pieces that are particularly good at making you look at their subjects differently. "She Giggles, He Gallops" is a fascinating analysis of gender tropes in cinema through a lens you might not think to apply: the screen directions.
The results are disappointingly reflective of already-clear gender biases in cinema: women are far more likely to be directed to "weep," "blush" or "tremble" and men do things like "grope," "bark" and "smash."
There's a nice sprinkling of interactivity in the piece allowing you to break up the results by the gender of the screenwriter and that of the characters they're writing about. The authors also don't shy from addressing the elephant in the room — maybe things would look different if 85% of the screenwriters responsible for the 2,000 scripts they analyzed weren't men.
At the very least, this should serve as a great lesson to aspiring screenwriters: prevent yourself from using any over-common by gender verbiage in your stage directions. According to the numbers, those movies have essentially been made. A lot of them have. Over and over again.
One Last Thing…
You should absolutely stop to watch this Houston news crew come to the aid of a trucker trapped in their cab by floodwaters. The devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey is mind-boggling, but nothing's quite so amazing as human kindness in the face of disasters.
