Silver Ball Century for 1975 starts soon, at 8pm Eastern!
There are some tables I'm really looking forward to here, and one of them is Wizard, the first of at least three pinball tables inspired by The Who's rock opera "Tommy", known for having the only famous song about pinball.
I mean I've listened to the musical soundtrack and I'm looking at the backglass, and I find myself unsure at what point in the plot Tommy went to hell and got three girlfriends, but it's definitely Tommy. And it's a banger of a table.
Once again, ending with a multiplayer segment!
There were some really great tables in there! El Dorado in particular had a high enough skill cap that I understand why players liked it and Gottlieb remade it over and over for the next seven years.
I want to talk about a problem with one of the tables that I see now in the video. The playfield of Bally's "Flicker" contains a bunch of faces representing characters from the dawn of the movie industry, and one of them is a blackface caricature that is really not okay.
You could say "oh come on, the table artist probably didn't mean any harm to Black people, this was a character archetype in early movies, it was a different time, etc." You could say that if you wanted to be wrong, because I've looked up the artist, and all indications are that pinball artist Dave Christensen did mean it.
I first learned about Dave Christensen from the Silverball Chronicles podcast, which called him out on a lot of things I'm about to recap, in an episode about Bally's pinball art.
A page on a shitty Fandom wiki credits his "NO HOLES BARED RULE BREAKING", which -- okay I'll give you a moment to giggle at their spelling -- which is that shitty wiki's way of admiring that he was a fucking edgelord neo-Nazi.
Bally knew this because they had to keep removing Nazi references from his table artwork. In a few cases, by re-releasing the table after they released it without noticing. "Come on Dave", I can imagine a Bally boss saying, "please stop putting sneaky Nazi references into your pinball art, we mean it this time, it's bad for business," and they wouldn't fire him for some reason, and he'd nod and then sneak another Nazi reference into the next pinball table.
The original backglass of "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy" has Hitler in the audience for no reason. "Mata Hari" had a Nazi SS motto written in German on a dagger, and Germans could easily read the dagger, and so the table was obviously banned in Germany. I hear that Dave defended the decision as being part of the theme. The theme was related to World War One. Shut up, Dave.
I am giving him absolutely no benefit of the doubt for the blackface caricature on Flicker.
I've been trying to skip tables with bad racial caricatures. I've skipped many of Gottlieb's tables from the '60s and '70s depicting Native Americans, and I would have skipped Flicker too if I'd known. The funnysad part is that I had skipped over Bally's Boomerang, which has caricatures of Australian Aboriginal people on it, and thought "oh good they re-used the table layout as Flicker, now I can put it on the stream!"
Fuck.
