A singing hippo drove the wandering scholar to revisit the second-ever Chuck E. Cheese before it finally gets demolished.
In 2020, the Kooser location of Chuck E. Cheese closed for good. The ruined building has remained empty ever since, with much needed affordable housing units ready to emerge.
Nolan Bushnell opened the first Pizza Time Theater in 1977, right where Santana Row is now. The Kooser location was the second one, debuting in December 1978. Upon its debut, Kooser was officially the largest pizza parlor in the United States, according to the promotional materials.
Initially, the San Jose Mercury News observed Dolli Dimples at the piano bar with a “bright orange wig on her head and eyelashes fluttering over her big blue eyes like frenzied butterflies.” By the Merc’s analysis, Dolli Dimples had “a combination of Pearl Bailey’s throaty voice and Mae West’s salty asides.”
This was the San Jose of 1978. Those were the cultural references put forth by the only newspaper in town. Pearl Bailey and Mae West. Thankfully, the eventual rise of alt-weeklies documented the rise and fall of Pizza Time Theatre as recently as a few years ago.
Also, a masterful online repository of crowd-sourced history, in true old-school Silicon Valley fashion, exists at cheeseepedia.org, where one can find more than 2,100 articles about Chuck E. Cheese contributed by over 900 obsessive fanatics, replete with extensive notes and references, detailing all the Animatronics characters, their movements, specs on the Cyberamic Control System, plus original press releases and promotional materials. One even finds all the building permits that people downloaded from the City of San Jose’s permits page.
Initially, though, in 1978, the Merc did provide some decent flavor on Kooser. They tracked down 18-year-old Donna E. Miller, a graduate of Mount Pleasant High School, who provided the voice for Dolli Dimples. Apparently, the Chuck E. Cheese honchos found her singing at Great America, which, by the way, is now also on its last legs, here in the current era of 2025.
Miller sang the tunes for Dolli Dimples and then it was the job of Mike Hatcher to make the foam and fiberglass hippo shake to the music. Hatcher drew on his background in microcomputers, semiconductors, animation, radio and puppeteering to construct the singing hippo.
Hatcher was proud of his work at the time.
“Judging from customer response, there’s no telling how far this could go,” he told the Merc.
It was true. Before another year unfolded, many more Pizza Time Theatres were in the works. The company ran a job ad requiring a BSEE and a minimum of five years of digital and analog design. The position involved animation systems and control electronics.
A few months later, in March of 1979, the Merc wrote a more elaborate story, speaking with Hatcher, who was then working graveyard, crunching code for three hours to produce each minute of Dolli’s performance, which became one of the Kooser store’s major selling points in the late ’70s.
By then, audio publications like Mix Magazine and Recording Engineer, along with the venerable Personal Computing, all ran features on the various technologies behind the Animatronics systems at Chuck E. Cheese. The Kooser location even appeared on an episode of Real People.
Nowadays, you can’t tell the story of Silicon Valley without Pizza Time Theatre. No wandering scholar can saunter by the wrecked Kooser building without picturing those huge animated characters, most of which had been gone for years by the time the place bit the dust. The modern-day Chuck E. Cheese couldn’t hold a candle to the original, sad to say.
Thankfully, we still have the obsessive fanatics at cheeseepedia.org who spent hours downloading San Jose city building permits. Everything is now stashed away for public consumption at the Internet Archive. Amazing.
I’m not suggesting the building be saved. Everyone knows we need more housing. The Kooser location had long since deteriorated into a total dump. It’s safe to say it died a natural death.
Nevertheless, the 20,000-square-foot complex, at the time of its demise, was the oldest continuously running Chuck E. Cheese anywhere in the world. Now the one in Huntington Beach is the oldest one. San Jose has lost to SoCal yet again.
