Following two decades of embarrassingly square attempts to interest children in Chuck E. Cheese, the skeeball-and-pizza-equivalent emporium has finally recognized the pressing need to rebrand its mascot for today's youngsters, whose enjoyment of arcade games and junk food depends mightily on every aspect of their hip, media-savvy identity being pandered to by an anthropomorphic mouse. And so it's out with the old—specifically, longtime mascot voice Duncan Brannan, who helped to transform the original, "joke-telling, sometime off-color New Jersey rat" into a more "mainstream" evangelist for the word of Jesus Christ, apparently, before he was recently replaced by parent company CEC Entertainment without warning. In fact, Brannan made the discovery that he'd been fired only after hearing the new promotional jingle "Chuck's Hot New Single" and realizing that, instead of his own Borscht-belt-tinged-with-the-blood-of-the-Lord lilt, he was listening to the adenoidal snarl of Bowling For Soup singer Jaret Reddick—a new Chuck E. Cheese for a new, pop-punkier day, as that is the sort of thing today's kids like, according to a boardroom of desperate pizza executives.