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Animatronics are unquestionably disturbing, and that much is common knowledge. There’s no way around it, no matter how endearing and wacky their family-friendly characters may be. Even the most benign animatronics have always seemed like nightmare material because to their Uncanny Valley-like motions and soulless eyes, but Five Nights at Freddy’s pushed that to a whole new level.
Since the Five Nights at Freddy’s video games debuted, any anxiety we might have previously had of mechanical, humanoid animals has at least doubled. And the recent film Five Nights at Freddy’s, which is based on these ferocious, malevolent animatronics, only heightens the menace.
We looked at some of the inspiration for Five Nights at Freddy’s as the video game movie brings characters like Freddy Fazbear to life. Does it have a basis in reality? The solution, however, is a little more nuanced than that.
Since the Five Nights at Freddy’s video games debuted, any anxiety we might have previously had of mechanical, humanoid animals has at least doubled. And the recent film Five Nights at Freddy’s, which is based on these ferocious, malevolent animatronics, only heightens the menace.
We looked at some of the inspiration for Five Nights at Freddy’s as the video game movie brings characters like Freddy Fazbear to life. Does it have a basis in reality? The solution, however, is a little more nuanced than that.
However, the idea of an animatronic troupe of amiable animals in a themed children’s pizza restaurant isn’t wholly fictitious. Since 1977, the well-known family pizza restaurant Chuck E. Cheese has included an animatronic band with Chuck singing lead, Jasper T. Jowels playing guitar, and Pasqually P. Pieplate, a proud moustachioed pizza guy, on drums. The robotic trio, first known as “The Pizza Makers,” quickly expanded to a five-piece ensemble when chicken cheerleader Helen Henny and purple monster Mr Munch joined the group.
After changing the name of the group to Munch’s Make Believe Band, the animatronics started providing entertainment to customers every hour and a half. This continued up until 2017, when a dancefloor and a redesign took their place, along with the group and animatronics as a whole. That is, after all, what is said. The decision to phase out these animatronics was likely influenced by the fact that they were quite frightening to look at, and let’s face it, the notion that they would be nightmare fodder isn’t exactly improbable.
Therefore, it is very clear that Scott Cawthorne had a warped version of Munch’s Make Believe Band in mind when he set out to make the first FNAF game. The parallels don’t end there, though. Thankfully, Chuck E. Cheese never had their own Bite of ’87 situation (their animatronics never had spring locks), but the FNAF fanbase has drawn comparisons because of a few unsettling instances.
A three-year-old girl’s parents were devastated to find in 2012 through the local news that she was gone. After the other members of her party had left, the little girl sneaked back inside a Chuck E. Cheese, and she remained there alone until 11 p.m. before her parents even realised she was missing.
After hours, she relaxed with the animatronics, but she wasn’t left alone with them; police and restaurant personnel waited with her as well. She was safely restored to her family. The similarities between Gregory, the protagonist of Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach, a lone youngster, and Afton, who has a history of luring children away from their parents with endearing animatronics, are obvious.
A 1993 incident at a Chuck E. Cheese in Colorado is the other event that supporters want to associate with the FNAF. Four of the five victims of the shooting in Chuck E. Cheese on December 14 died as a result of their wounds. The shooter was a disgruntled former employee who had returned to the business. Even though the victims of this real-life disaster were adults, several video studies and speculations have noted that the same number of animatronics that appeared in the original FNAF game as Missing Children were shot in this real-life catastrophe.
Nevertheless, Cawthorne has never explicitly said whether or whether his games were inspired by these two incidents, despite their apparent parallels. But it makes it reasonable that the fans would draw these comparisons, and nevertheless, it’s evident from FNAF that the Chuck E. Cheese animatronics as a whole had a significant effect.
Contrary to popular belief, Cawthorne said in an interview with Indie Game Magazine that spite served as the primary source of inspiration for Five Nights at Freddy’s. He claimed that after receiving primarily unfavourable feedback for his family-friendly game, Chipper & Sons Lumber Co., he was motivated to create the horror franchise.
“I’d made a family-friendly game about a beaver before this, but when I tried to put it online it got torn apart by a few prominent reviewers,” he recalled. “People said that the main character looked like a scary animatronic animal. I was heartbroken and was ready to give up on game-making. Then one night something just snapped in me, and I thought to myself: ‘I bet I can make something a lot scarier than that.’”