Farewell, Chuck E. Cheese Animatronic Band

For decades, Munch’s Make Believe Band at Chuck E. Cheese has performed for countless birthdays, end-of-season Little League parties and other celebrations. There’s been Chuck E. Cheese and Helen Henny on vocals, Mr. Munch on keys, Jasper T. Jowls on guitar, and Pasqually on drums.

The band of robot puppets has been a mainstay at the colorful pizzeria-arcade chain where children run amok and play games for prizes in between bites of pizza slices.

Their final curtain call is coming soon.

By the end of 2024, the animatronic performances — endearing and nostalgia-inducing, if perhaps slightly creepy to their audiences — will be phased out at all but two of the chain’s more than 400 locations in the United States: one in Los Angeles and another in Nanuet, N.Y. The departure of the band comes as Chuck E. Cheese undergoes what its chief executive, David McKillips, recently described as its largest and “most aggressive transformation.”

Out: Animatronic bands.

In: More screens, digital dance floors and trampoline gyms.

The coronavirus pandemic forced hundreds of Chuck E. Cheese locations to shutter, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the summer of 2020. Since then, its leaders have tried to adapt Chuck E. Cheese to a modern era — and children who might be more excited by screens than an old animatronic band with limited movement and shifty eyes.

“Kids are consuming entertainment differently than they were 10, 20 years ago,” Mr. McKillips said sitting in a booth at the Chuck E. Cheese in Hicksville, N.Y., on Long Island. “Kids, really of all ages, are consuming their entertainment on a screen.”