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Manufacturer | Midway |
---|---|
Release date | December 3, 1990 [1] |
System | Midway System 11C [1] |
Design | John Trudeau [1] |
Programming | Dan Lee, Dwight Sullivan [1] |
Artwork | Python Anghelo, John Youssi [1] |
Mechanics | Jack Skalon [1] |
Music | Paul Heitsch [1] |
Voices | Greg Burson, Bob Bergen, Noel Blanc, Mel Blanc, Paul Julian |
Production run | ~2,250 units [1] |
Bugs Bunny's Birthday Ball is a 1990 pinball game designed by John Trudeau and Python Anghelo and released by Midway (under the Bally name). It is based on Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. [2] This is the first of only two licensed pinball tables ever to feature the Looney Tunes characters (the second being Sega's Space Jam ).
The game is a celebration of Bugs Bunny's 50th anniversary, accompanied by his various co-stars and lots of cake. One to four players can play. The player must use the "Skill Shot" to help Wile E. Coyote chase the Road Runner, break some eggs in the reversed "Chicken Coop" playfield, then ride "Tweety's Slide" to the main playfield and score 1 million points, hit Daffy Duck for a "Big Score" of 500,000 points and light "Speedy Gonzales' Keek-Out" for 1 million points, then shoot the curving, swerving center ramp so the Tasmanian Devil and the Tasmanian She-Devil will take the player on a challenging "Tazmanian Shopping Spree" up the ramp, which will score up to 500,000 points or an extra ball. If the player helps Bugs blow out all the candles on his cake, Honey Bunny will reward him with a 50 million bonus, with the player getting their opponents' best score for a Surprise Package. [3]
The playfield includes 3 flippers, a plunger skill shot, 3 pop bumpers, 3 slingshots, 19 standup targets, a 3-bank drop target, a kick-out hole, a spinning target, a captive ball, and a left outlane kickback. In the upper left area of the playfield is a small inverted playfield having a flipper to propel the ball downfield to loop around a ramp and hit a captive ball. In multi-player operation, a unique playfield award feature exchanges scores between players. [1]
According to Python Anghelo, the game was made quickly to fill a gap in the Bally production line. When he and John Trudeau were developing the game and The Machine: Bride of Pin-Bot at the same time, they worked insanely fast on both games in a short time. They were doing so much, so fast, that one day Python gave John the nickname of "Doctor Flash". It stuck from that point. [4]
Melvin Jerome Blanc was an American voice actor and radio personality whose career spanned over 60 years. During the Golden Age of Radio, he provided character voices and vocal sound effects for comedy radio programs, including those of Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, Judy Canova, and his own short-lived sitcom.
Looney Tunes is an American animated franchise produced and distributed by Warner Bros. It began as a series of short films that originally ran from 1930 to 1969, along with its partner series Merrie Melodies, during the golden age of American animation. Following a revival in the late 1970s, new shorts were released as recently as 2014. The two series introduced a large cast of characters, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig. The term Looney Tunes has since been expanded to also refer to the characters themselves.
Daffy Duck is a fictional character created by animators Tex Avery and Bob Clampett for Leon Schlesinger Productions. Styled as an anthropomorphic black duck, he has appeared in cartoon series such as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, in which he is usually depicted as a foil for either Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig or Speedy Gonzales. He was one of the first of the new "screwball" characters that emerged in the late 1930s to replace traditional everyman characters who were more popular earlier in the decade, such as Mickey Mouse, Porky Pig, and Popeye.
Pinball games are a family of games in which a ball is propelled into a specially designed table where it bounces off various obstacles, scoring points either en route or when it comes to rest. Historically the board was studded with nails called 'pins' and had hollows or pockets which scored points if the ball came to rest in them. Today, pinball is most commonly an arcade game in which the ball is fired into a specially designed cabinet known as a pinball machine, hitting various lights, bumpers, ramps, and other targets depending on its design. The game's object is generally to score as many points as possible by hitting these targets and making various shots with flippers before the ball is lost. Most pinball machines use one ball per turn, and the game ends when the ball(s) from the last turn are lost. The biggest pinball machine manufacturers historically include Bally Manufacturing, Gottlieb, Williams Electronics and Stern Pinball.
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The Tasmanian Devil, commonly referred to as Taz, is an animated cartoon character featured in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. Though the character appeared in only five shorts before Warner Bros. Cartoons shut down in 1964, marketing and television appearances later propelled Taz to new popularity in the 1990s.
A glossary of terms, commonly used in discussing pinball machines.
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Twilight Zone is a widebody pinball machine, designed by Pat Lawlor and based on the TV series of the same name. It was first released in 1993 by Midway. This game is part of WMS' SuperPin line of widebody games alongside Star Trek: The Next Generation and Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure.
Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island is a 1983 American animated anthology film directed by Friz Freleng and Phil Monroe with a compilation of classic Warner Bros. cartoon shorts and animated bridging sequences, hosted by Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales. This was the first Looney Tunes compilation film to center on Daffy Duck, as the previous ones had centered on Bugs Bunny. The premise of the framing animation was a general parody of the popular 1970s/1980s television series Fantasy Island, with Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales playing caricatures of that series' principal characters, Mr. Roarke and Tattoo (respectively).
The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie is a 1981 American animated comedy package film with a compilation of classic Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies Warner Bros. cartoon shorts and animated bridging sequences produced and directed by Friz Freleng, hosted by Bugs Bunny. The new footage was produced by Warner Bros. Animation. It was the first Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies film with a compilation of classic cartoon comedy shorts produced by Warner Bros. Animation.
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Kids' WB Fun Zone is a themed attraction in Warner Bros. Movie World on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia based on the Looney Tunes cartoons. The attraction was originally named Looney Tunes Village and was renamed in late 2007 when two new rides were added. At the same time, the Australian Kids' WB TV show began filming at the theme park. Two similar themed attractions, Looney Tunes Land and Cartoon Village, opened at Warner Bros. Movie World Germany in Bottrop Kirchhellen, Germany in 1996 and Parque Warner Madrid in Madrid, Spain in 2002, respectively, with the latter remaining to this day.
Doctor Who is a pinball machine designed by Bill Pfutzenreuter (Pfutz) and Barry Oursler, and released by Midway in September 1992. It is based on the television series Doctor Who. As stated in the Gameplay section, the rulesheet is rather different from other pinball machines released at the time, which didn't help popularity as casual players did not understand the complex rule changes that occur during the game.
Creature from the Black Lagoon is a pinball machine designed by John Trudeau and released by Midway. It is loosely based on the movie of the same name. The game's theme is 1950s drive-in theater. The pinball game was licensed from Universal Studios by Bally so that all backglass and cabinet artwork and creature depictions would resemble those of the original movie.
The Machine: Bride of Pin-Bot is a 1991 pinball game designed by Python Anghelo and John Trudeau, and released by Williams. It is the second game in the Pin-Bot series, and is the last game produced by Williams to use a segmented score display rather than a dot-matrix screen. It is also one of the few pinball games produced that uses a variable-brightness segmented display.
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Python Vladimir Anghelo was a graphic artist best known for his work on video games and pinball machines. Anghelo was born in Transylvania, Romania, and moved to the United States when he was 17.
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