FOUND FOOTAGE: Captain Carnival Television Segment
- alexcrewac
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Animatronics fans rejoice. Footage of the elusive Captain Carnival, the homegrown Canadian response to Chuck E. Cheese's, has been found. For the uninitiated, Captain Carnival Pizza Theatre was a short lived chain of family entertainment centres that operated in Southwestern Ontario for only 18 months. Founded in 1983 by Joe Sorgi and
Phil Jakobi, the chain only expanded to two locations, the original in Windsor and a second location in London, Ontario. There were ambitious plans to expand into American markets, with planned locations in Atlanta, Pittsburg, New Jersey, two in Massachusetts, and five more Canadian stores; two in Toronto and three in Vancouver. Despite these ambitious plans, the 1984 over-saturation of animatronic pizza restaurants caused a market crash from which not even Chuck E. Cheese's was safe (their original company folded in 1984), resulting in Captain Carnival topping out at the two locations before falling into obscurity.
The animatronics for the stores were provided by Elnicky Enterprises, who also provided the rare "Family Album" human band animatronic shows to a small handful of Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theaters in the early 80's, as well as "The Hot Fudge Show" to the Clawson, Michigan location, which was based on characters from a local children's TV show. The stage consisted of Captain Carnival's ship containing the Captain at the helm, his parrot named Pinza, and a pizza chef (who it turns out sounded more like the Swedish Chef than a stereotypical Italian chef). Located to the left of the boat was a small island containing Davey Jones and the Beach Bones, a loudmouthed, surf-rock skeleton band that served as the comic relief. After the chain's abrupt closure, The Beach Bones from the Windsor location ended up at legendary local arcade Fast Eddy's on Riverside Dr., where they spent their final days. The characters had a gimmick that set them apart from other animatronic pizza chains at the time, that being that they could be controlled/voiced live like puppets from backstage to actually interact with guests on special occasions.
The discovery of this clip is quite interesting, as lost media has surrounded this restaurant for years. Aside from all footage and show tapes of the show being lost, there was also a 1983 TV commercial known to have been filmed at the Windsor location. This unearthed footage is not the missing ad however, instead appearing to be part of a local children's show involving a wizard (calling on you Windsor locals for help ID'ing it). It was uploaded to YouTube by the channel "CPRWindsorsub", who allegedly had it recorded due to a family member providing the voices to some of Captain Carnival's animatronics. After allegedly seeing that footage of the show was lost in showbizpizza.com's fantastic research video on the chain, they uploaded their footage to the internet. The segment is a good chunk of advertising for the restaurants, showing a good chunk of the show, some closeups on food and merchandise, and some great early 80's arcade footage. We can spot Super Pacman, Galaga, Millipede, Baby Pacman and classic Skee Ball machines amongst the games.
All things considered, the fact this footage surfaced at all is incredible. While birthday party footage from the place may still surface in the future, seeing nearly seven minutes of professionally shot footage we didn't even know existed is probably a greater discovery than the lost commercial, and probably had a slimmer chance of resurfacing as well. Unlike the commercial, which may reside on a dusty VHS tape somewhere containing any Southern Ontario commercial break from 1983-1984, this likely only aired once or twice as a segment on this obscure local show. Huge thank you to CPRWindsorsub for this footage. With it, an entry in the Lost Media section of the website can be checked off. Video can be found below:
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