You can see the Chuck E. Cheese animatronic band in California -

After a storied 40 years together, an iconic American band made an announcement that stunned fans and fellow musicians: The group would soon retire.

The news made headlines worldwide in 2017. Singer-songwriter Father John Misty said in an emotional tribute that Munch’s Make-Believe Band had “introduced me to music” and remained a creative force “for so long.” Fans on message boards wrote of wanting to “cherish the remaining time we have with them.”

Sure, they play stiff and have a pretty regimented set. But that’s because they are the group of animatronic, anthropomorphic animal musicians at Chuck E. Cheese.

This week, a glimmer of good news came for followers of the band fronted by a giant rodent. CEC Entertainment officials announced that rather than retire entirely, Munch’s Make-Believe Band would be kept alive at one location. The band will have what the pizza and arcade entertainment chain — a kind of Disney in the suburbs — called a “permanent residency” in California.

All 472 domestic and 86 international locations of Chuck E. Cheese are undergoing renovations, CEC Entertainment CEO David McKillips told The Washington Post on Monday. That includes removing the musical animatronics and adding trampoline zones.

Right now, he said, 60 to 70 locations still feature the band. By the end of next year, Munch’s Make-Believe Band will only be performing at the Chuck E. Cheese in Northridge, Calif. The location will feature the band while also getting the updates the company considers essential to its future, including “immersive video hubs” and an interactive dance floor as well as more-muted colors.

“You have the ability to see this timeless brand and the future of the brand all in one location,” McKillips said.

The company released video footage of a “news conference” with the band members: Chuck E. fronts, Mr. Munch is on the keyboard, Jasper T. Jowls plays guitar, Helen Henny sings and Pasqually drums.

Chuck E., whose real name is Charles Entertainment Cheese, explains how excited they are to be able to continue playing music in front of crowds.

“We love performing so much. It’s practically hard-wired into us,” Cheese said.

Like victory, successful bands have a hundred fathers. In the case of Munch’s Make-Believe Band, it was the commingling of visions from two eccentric dreamers in the ’70s, backed by a wealthy businessman.

Nolan Bushnell, a Utahn, headed to California in the mid-’60s with dreams of working for Disney. When he didn’t get in with the mouse, he went on to co-found the video console game company Atari, according to SFGate. He, naturally, then saw an opportunity in arcades. He wanted quarters from teens but didn’t want his businesses to become hangout spots, so he created a place that wouldn’t allow unaccompanied teens, according to a 1982 article in Fortune magazine. The idea for animatronic entertainers was to reduce wages.

Bushnell then saw the future at a convention — a human-size coyote costume, SFGate said. He purchased his own, but when it arrived, he realized it had a thin pink tail: It was a rat. The mascot he initially named Rick Rat quickly became Charles Entertainment Cheese because Disney wasn’t thrilled about the similarities to another rodent of note.

His vision made its debut in 1977 in San Jose: Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre. It featured Cheese, with a cigar and a vague New York-style fuhgeddaboudit accent, as part of an animatronic band then called the Pizza Time Players.

A year later, major Holiday Inn franchisee Robert Brock came onboard after getting wind of the company’s massive profits, Fortune reported. With Bushnell needing credibility after being ousted from Atari, the well-heeled Brock in mid-1979 signed a co-development deal to build up to 200 restaurants in the Midwest and southern United States.

The relationship between the businessman and the inventor quickly devolved into lawsuits, Fortune reported. Brock was looking for a way out in November 1979 when he heard about young inventor out of Florida named Aaron Fechter, who was purportedly making better singing animatronics than Bushnell.

Fechter had taken a roundabout path into the world of animatronics, stumbling upon the technology while selling a pool-cleaning device door-to-door, according to the 2008 documentary “The Rock-afire Explosion.” He combined his skills as a keyboardist and a mechanical whiz to create the musical animatronic that was the Rock-afire Explosion.

“Animatronics is like everything there is in the universe put together. You’re creating an artificial life form,” Fechter said in the documentary.

Brock signed a deal with that young inventor and then demanded that Bushnell let him out of the contract. That led to more lawsuits, but Brock ended up sticking with Fechter.

Together, they created an entertainment business featuring pizza and an animatronic band — sound familiar? — named ShowBiz Pizza in 1980. It grew to 200 restaurants.

But by the mid-1980s, both ShowBiz Pizza and Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre were struggling financially. When Pizza Time filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1984, Brock saw an opportunity. He bought Pizza Time and merged the two companies into ShowBiz Pizza Time.

Fechter said in the documentary that he didn’t like Brock’s plan to merge with the rat. He said Brock told him the only way to keep Rock-afire alive was to give up the license and copyrights to the band, some of which Fechter voiced himself. Fechter refused and walked. The Rock-afire Explosion was no more. Brock had hundreds of restaurants partially known for their animatronic band, but he didn’t own the intellectual property. So the band couldn’t play.

He did what all bands do when they hit a snag: reinvent. The rubber and fur and clothing that made Rock-afire come to life were skinned off. What remained was their mechanical skeletons. But then Munch and Pasqually and Cheese and the rest came to life, as artisans placed their new skins on the metallic frames.

Munch’s Make-Believe Band was born from the ashes of Rock-afire Explosion and the Pizza Time Players. It featured most of the members of the latter group.

People were mad.

“I remember going in there and seeing this bastardized version of the Rock-afire Explosion onstage and being completely appalled by it,” Travis Schafer, who was identified in the documentary as the webmaster of the fan site showbizpizza.com.

The ShowBiz name died in 1998 when the company became CEC Entertainment. (Another blow was dealt in 2013, when an explosion at the Rock-afire Explosion warehouse mangled many of the animatronics.)

Munch’s Make-Believe Band kept playing but lost its ability to draw new fans. McKillips told The Post that the company is now building the stores through the “eyes of today’s 5-year-old.”

Today’s 5-year-olds aren’t impressed by clunky animatronics whose movements are lifted by air and gears.

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McKillips said the band now plays for the parents.

“As an important part of the legacy of the brand, we know that the animatronic band holds a special place for many fans in their childhood memories,” he said in a news release this week. “We want our fans to know that the decision to keep the band here is meant as a gesture of love and gratitude as our legacy continues to evolve in new ways.”

During the news conference, Henny seemed to hint that they may decamp: “Oh, we’ll still be jamming in other places, too, but we’ll be jamming in Northridge regularly.” She did not elaborate.

A voice off-screen asked the band members what they would do with their time near Los Angeles. Cheese said he was going to learn to surf. Jowls wanted to see the Hollywood sign. Munch said he was going to go to the Griffith Observatory to look for his home planet — but gave no further details.

With the questions over, the group played a song. It was that old magic: The band members play, barely moving at all. Pasqually keeps time with his impossibly light touch. (Is he even touching the drums?) Munch makes the ivory sing despite only moving his hands up and down in the same position. Henny doesn’t even seem to be inhaling.

They sang their first big hit “Together We’ve Got It,” which helped unify the two brands more than three decades ago.

“We’ve got it, together we’ve got it!

We’ve got it, together with you! (YEAH!)

We’ve got it, together, forever!

The fun has just begun.”

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