Vintage 1997 Looney Tunes Mini Pinball 🍎 Orange Playfield Bugs Bunny Taz and Sylvester Sealed

Remember Looney Tunes Mini Pinball? 🍊 Vintage 1997 Orange Playfield, Bugs Bunny, Taz and Sylvester, Sealed

Size: 5" x 3 1/4" pinball game ~ factory sealed, never opened.

🍊 The Solid-Orange Board

This is the orange one: a flat, bright orange playfield under clear plastic, the Looney Tunes wordmark arched across the top in blue, and a teal spring plunger down the right-hand channel. It's a Looney Tunes Mini Pinball, still sealed in its bag and stapled to the original blue Taz header card. If you're sorting these little games, the quickest tell is the background color and the plunger color together. Orange and teal means you're looking at this board.

The cast is bigger than it looks. Porky Pig stands at the upper left, Taz spins at the top, Sylvester scowls on the right with his hands on his hips, Tweety is dead center with his arms flung wide, Daffy is down at the lower left, and Bugs Bunny comes laughing up out of a hole at the bottom. Then look by the plunger and there's Wile E. Coyote peeking in, easy to miss. The scoring loops are marked 100 and 200, and five pockets run across the bottom, 400, 200, 500, 200, 400, with the 500 right in the middle where you'll never land it.

🌪️ A Card Full of Old Friends

Every one of those characters was an old pro by the time this card was printed. Porky Pig goes back to 1935 and Daffy Duck to 1937. Tweety first showed up in Bob Clampett's "A Tale of Two Kitties" in 1942, Sylvester in Friz Freleng's "Life with Feathers" in 1945, and Wile E. Coyote in Chuck Jones's "Fast and Furry-ous" in 1949. Taz is the baby of the bunch, spinning onto the screen in Robert McKimson's "Devil May Hare" in 1954. And they were riding high in the '90s: Space Jam put Bugs next to Michael Jordan in November 1996 and made $250.2 million worldwide, the biggest Looney Tunes movie ever, with Warner Bros. merchandise boutiques in the department stores to match. Bugs even has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He got it in 1985, only the second cartoon character ever to get one, right after Mickey Mouse. And if you grew up on Saturday-morning Looney Tunes, you're in good company: ABC moved The Bugs Bunny Show to Saturday mornings in 1962, and in one form or another the gang stayed on network Saturday-morning TV right up until 2000. In 1997 that meant The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show on ABC, and Taz had already had four seasons of his very own show, Taz-Mania, on Fox Kids from 1991 to 1995.

🎯 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 started with Arturo Torres, a Cuban refugee who began as a supplier of vending-machine prizes in San Antonio, and he and Jay Foreman built it into a toy company that went public on NASDAQ in 1995. In 1996 it bought Ace Novelty of Bellevue, Washington for $44 million, and Ace held the Warner Bros. licenses for Looney Tunes and Space Jam. That's how Bugs and the gang ended up on a Play-By-Play card. By 1997 the company's sales had reached $137 million. It moved its headquarters to Valencia, Spain in 2002, so these San Antonio cards date from 1997 to about then. One more tip if you collect the whole line: the barcode on the back, 0 19717 10146 7, is the same on every color, so the playfield is the only way to tell which one you've got.