I grew up going to both Chuck E. Cheese and FAO Schwarz, but as a little kid the FAO Schwarz animatronics scared me more (especially the tree.)
I think part of why they were scarier is because they were less humanoid, but also because they felt more real?
Chuck E. Cheese's kayfabe / artifice always had holes in it because Chuck was somehow both on stage and wandering the restaurant at the same time. (And they both looked radically different from each other.) As a result, I never really had the sense that he was real. Meanwhile, as far as I knew, that living tree was the only living tree in the whole world. (It wasn't.)
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