Vintage 1997 Looney Tunes Mini Pinball Amber Playfield Wile E Coyote and Bonus Road Runner Head 📌

Size: 5" x 3 1/4" pinball game ~ factory sealed, never opened. They vary a little one to the next.

🦂 The Amber Board With the Third Road Runner

This is the amber one: a warm tan-gold playfield, the Looney Tunes name in purple across the top, and a red plunger down the side, still sealed and stapled to its blue Taz header card. It has the same desert-chase cast as the yellow-orange board: Yosemite Sam with his pistol, Wile E. Coyote standing by with his napkin, knife and fork, Road Runner running through the middle, a flattened Wile E. upside-down, another Wile E. peeking in from the edge, and a Road Runner head with its tongue out down at the lower left. But this board has one more. Down at the lower right there's a third Road Runner, a grinning head that the yellow-orange board doesn't have. Three Road Runners, three Coyotes and two Sams, and the Coyote still doesn't catch him.

This amber version is a hard one to find. The scoring loops are marked 100 and 200, and the pockets across the bottom read 400, 200, 500, 200, 400.

🐦 Beep Beep

Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote first met in Chuck Jones's "Fast and Furry-ous," released in September 1949. Jones opened it with freeze-frames that gave each of them a mock-Latin name, and the joke stuck for the rest of the series. Yosemite Sam is a Friz Freleng creation, first seen in "Hare Trigger" in May 1945 as a train robber up against Bugs Bunny. The sister board in this same design carries a © 1995 Warner Bros. line on its playfield, and the card here is © 1997, right after Space Jam had put the Looney Tunes on movie screens in November 1996.

🎯 Play-By-Play of San Antonio

The back of the card reads © 1997 Warner Bros., MADE IN CHINA, and DISTRIBUTED BY Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties of San Antonio, Texas. Play-By-Play grew from Arturo Torres's vending-machine prize business into a public company by 1995, and in 1996 it paid $44 million for Ace Novelty of Bellevue, Washington, the Warner Bros. licensee for Looney Tunes and Space Jam. It moved its headquarters to Valencia, Spain in 2002. One tip for collectors: the barcode is the same on every color of these pinballs, so the playfield is the only way to know which one you're getting, and that lower-right Road Runner is what marks this amber board.