What’s Juicy?
The Pizza Place in Stephenville, Texas is the birthplace of Mr. Gatti’s Pizza. The company website has the story, but the date is wrong… at least that is what The Pizza Place’s Facebook says. Jim Eure (pronounced your) sold this restaurant pretty quickly and moved to Austin. I made up the line about teaching the T-sippers a thing to two about pizza. The story about using his wife’s family recipes is true. I actually used Ancestry to see if her father’s last name is Gatti (it is). I got the explanation of the pizza ingredients from an article in the Tarleton Campus Newspaper. The unique features are also real. They were listed in the sale ad for his restaurant in Stephenville.
When Eure started in Austin, his business grew quickly, and he named them all The Pizza Place. The story about the confusion this cause is detailed in his advertisement explaining why he changed the name.
Godfather’s Pizza did come out with a “pizza you can’t refuse”, If you want some entertainment, check out old Godfather’s ads on Youtube. They did have pizza buffets, but I do not know what Colonel Eure thought about them. From what I’ve read about Eure, he took a lot of pride in his pizza craft and did not take short cuts. Eure did sell his business to a couple of guys that did well in Kentucky Fried Chicken. I don’t think his motives were influenced by Colonel Sanders’s honorary ranking.
Atari co-founder, Nolan Bushnell, did start Chuck E. Cheese. Most of the information, including the quote, was taken from an Atlantic article. I DO NOT think Bushnell was intentionally trying to lead children to a life of gambling, but this quote from the same article shows that he was using them a bit.
“The reason for doing the animals, believe it or not, was not for the kids. It was meant to be a head fake for the parents. Kids are really smart at knowing how to play their parents. and the kids knew that if they said, ‘I want to go to Chuck E. Cheese and play the games’ the parents would just see themselves spending money. But if they said, ‘I want to go see Chuck E. Cheese entertainment — and it’s free,’ they’d be good to go,”
Bushnell was planning on naming it Coyote Pizza and then found out his costume was a rat. Rick Rat’s Pizza was also an idea and was pretty bad. Unfortunately, there was not an Italian uncle named Carlo Edoardo Formaggio. The real story is that someone else came up with it. The motivation for the animatronic show was Disneyland’s “Country Bear Jamboree”. I said Jubilee in the video. It is kind of confusing since Showbiz Pizza Place ended up creating “Country Bear Jubilee”. I wish I had understood that before I recorded the video. The rinky tink piano was probably not stolen from The Pizza Place.
Bushnell and Brock started out as partners but split before Showbiz opened. Brock had better animatronics. Like I said above, the “Country Bear” flavor was pretty intentional. There is probably no connection to the logo designs but it is a pretty neat coincidence.
I’m not sure who came up with the idea for video game tokens but they did become a standard in the industry. I made up the idea that Mr. Gatti’s business focus was on quality pizza. I’m really not sure what it was. The video game crash of 1983 is real and led to the fabled mountain of video game cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. It is a fascinating story.
Showbiz bought Chuck E. Cheese’s and did phase out the Showbiz restaurants by the 90’s. Then they shortened the nose on the rat to make him into a mouse. All of the talk about gambling addiction is fictitious as far as I know. There were some lawsuits against them for promoting gambling in children. I don’t know what became of them. I do not know the motivation for switching to game cards, but it did happen. I made up the sinister side of it but a part of me believes it really is true.
The Pizza Place in Weatherford is the last of the old buildings left. The Stephenville location was purchased by Beans and Franks in Stephenville and they started selling the pizza inside their store. It is actually amazing to see that the menus are so similar, including the Sampler and Vegetarian Sampler. I’m not sure of another pizza place that uses provolone cheese.
The lightning crash was fake.
Keep it Juicy!
Tommie thinks that she remembers a Mr Gatti Pizza in Midland in the early 80s.
She says it had the first big screen TV she ever saw. She doesn’t remember whether she liked their pizza.
There used to be one in Slidell next to Delchamp’s on Pontchartrain. I remembered the big screen tv they had. As far as the pizza goes, it says it’s the best in town. I looked up newspaper articles. This one is from 1987.