Looney Bird's (Johnsonverse)

Mitzi's Pizza was an American chain of restaurants and family entertainment centers founded by then-Johnson Industries CEO Phil Stacker and Creative Engineering in July 1990. The brand emerged in the chaos that ensued between Creative Engineering CEO Aaron Fechter and ShowBiz Pizza Time, Inc. (owners of the Chuck E. Cheese's and ShowBiz Pizza Place franchises) when the latter tried to force Fechter to hand the rights to his animatronic band, The Rock-afire Explosion, for little-to-no monetary compensation.

Despite a slow start, Mitzi's Pizza soon became a primary competitor to Chuck E. Cheese's, using an updated version of the Rock-afire Explosion, named The New Rock-afire Explosion, which used more articulated animatronics dubbed "miijins", with the vast majority of their locations being former ShowBiz locations. Once Johnson acquired ShowBiz Pizza Time, Inc. (which had been renamed to CEC Entertainment, Inc. in 1998), the company began rebranding all Mitzi's Pizza locations to ShowBiz Pizza Place, and the final Mitzi's Pizza location (in Chemung, New York) was rebranded to ShowBiz Pizza Place on March 29, 2018. Despite this, the Mitzi's Pizza name was retained for the newly-formed ShowBiz express unit, as Mitzi's Pizza by ShowBiz.

Beginnings
In the mid-1980s, tensions between Creative Engineering, Inc. and ShowBiz Pizza Time, Inc. began to rise as the latter company attempted to take control of the Rock-afire Explosion from CEI. In 1990, the two companies began to cut ties once the latter began a process known as "Concept Unification", which rebranded all ShowBiz Pizza locations to Chuck E. Cheese's by replacing the Rock-afire Explosion with a new band known as Munch's Make-Believe Band, which used the characters from the latter brand's previous animatronic band, the Pizza Time Players.

Noticing this, Johnson CEO Phil Stacker, in a bid to improve Johnson after a decline in the 1980s, discovered Fechter and contacted him about starting a new restaurant chain that would compete with ShowBiz. In July 1990, the first Mitzi's Pizza location opened in Jacksonville, Florida. Five additional locations were opened, before Stacker and Fechter got into a royalties dispute, halting further expansion.

Expansion
Once Stacker resigned from Johnson on October 22, 1991, his replacement, Sheldon Johnson, Jr., resolved those disputes, and made an aggressive push for expansion. Between 1992 and 1996, 103 locations opened in the United States and Mexico, some of which having been ShowBiz locations previously. In 1992, Fechter began working on an update on the Rock-afire Explosion, dubbed The New Rock-afire Explosion, which used more articulated animatronics dubbed "miijins". The new band was completed in 1994, and was installed in 108 locations between 1994 and 2000, being used in tandem with the original version.