(WWJ) – In the ‘80s and ‘90s many Metro Detroit kids attended birthday parties and other occasions featuring pizza, games and singing animatronics.
We must be talking about Chuck E. Cheese’s, right? Well, not exactly. While our area had its fair share of the national entertainment chain’s locations, many Metro Detroiters remember a different name: Major Magic’s.
For about three decades, Major Magic’s All Star Pizza Revue locations across Metro Detroit — and Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania — were the epicenter of childhood fun. But these days, the part pizzeria-part arcade-part concert venues are just a memory.
On a new Daily J podcast, WWJ’s Zach Clark went on a mission to recapture his youth, paying a visit to Premier Lanes in New Baltimore, which is also home to Sparks Pinball Museum — which saw the brief reboot of Major Magic’s in 2020 before COVID-19 shut the world down.
There, he was hit with a blast from the past — Major Magic’s costumes and memorabilia. But why does owner Mike Bradley have all this nostalgia?
“When they closed, they were liquidating. They liquidated the actual show as well; we weren’t able to acquire that, but they had some of these pieces, since we worked together, that they saved for me to display. They wanted it to be put back on display,” Bradley said.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to get his hands on an actual animatronic show, though he certainly tried.
“It was just a thing, trying to preserve it and trying to acquire it first and then think of how to utilize it, just to make sure it was secured,” he said.
Bradley says many kids who come into Sparks think Major Magic is actually Captain Crunch — but people of a certain age know exactly what they’re looking at, and they “get really excited.”
So what made Major Magic’s so special, compared to the likes of Chuck E. Cheese’s and other venues? Bradley says it’s because it was ours.
“It definitely was a Detroit thing. It was based in the Metro Detroit area and it just kinda seems like something we kinda owned,” he said. “It was just our little local thing at that time. Chuck E. Cheese was changing and I think Major Magic’s was holding onto that same core format.”
Major Magic's -- and the halcyon days of '80s and '90s nostalgia -- may be gone, but a piece of Metro Detroit history lives on.
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