And while I'm uploading pictures, what the heck, why not some from the Silverball Museum in Asbury Park:
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This is a detail from the backdrop to the ``Flicker'' pinball game, manufactured by Bally in 1974-75. I assume the blackface figure to be Al Jolson, but the surprise (and, really, crudeness) of finding the detail is the sort of thing for which Tom Servo aptly said, ``What the heck, white people? I mean, seriously, what the heck?'' (Could they at least have made it look a little less like really bad blackface? I mean, by 1974 it had been about thirty years since you could use blackface in the United States except while making The Al Jolson Story, but a drawing can have the skin coloring be not hideous and unnatural.) |
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In the more clean-spirited 1995 Bally pinball 'Theater of Magic' details show devilbunnies crawl around the playing field. They're also all over the cabinet. |
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This is the backdrop to Williams's 1974 pinball Spacelab, also manufactured as Skylab, the difference being that Spacelab awarded extra balls rather than replays. These add-a-ball versions were made for areas where replays were counted as things-of-value and thus made pinball machines qualify as gambling devices. I'd had a fairly successful game of this one, and besides, how many Skylab-themed items have you ever seen? (The museum also has a Space Mission, based on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program.) |
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This 1978 Gottlieb Rock Star pinball game was unusual at the Silverball Museum for being subtly out of order: it never reduced the number of balls in play, allowing one to achieve all five (and more) ``Wow!'' hits. However, it also never rolled the score above 200,000. |
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This is part of the coin slot for the 1979 Bally pinball Xenon, and provides evidence of how the pinball industry did its part to support the Susan B Anthony dollar coin. (Pinballs at the Silverball Museum are on free play, so I do not know how it would work with the new-issue dollar coins that nobody uses.) |
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This is the backglass for the 1963 Gottlieb pinball 'Slick Chick', which adds to its vaguely bunny-dressed chicks the Guys From The Background Of Mary Worth Singing Quartet. |
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Gottlieb's 1963 pinball Slick Chick looks peculiar from the backglass display, but when you look at the playing field it's ... at least as baffling. Sorry. |
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Well, somebody had a good day playing Williams's 1994 pinball Road Show. (Note this was the daily high score table, not the all-time one and certainly not a record worthy of commemoration on the Silverball Museum's machine-attached cards.) |
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This is just one row and the crossing row of some games at the Silverball Museum, which should give some sense of how the place is laid out. Note that most games include a sign on top describing the game's make and history, as well as a card showing the record scores. |
Trivia: Ronald Evans, night shift capsule commander, woke up the Apollo 11 Lunar Module crew at 9:32 am Central Time, 21 July 1969, for a liftoff set for shortly after noon. Source: First Man: The Life Of Neil A Armstrong, James R Hansen.
Currently Reading: The Toothpick: Technology and Culture, Henry Petroski.