Vintage 1997 Looney Tunes Mini Pinball 📌 Pink Playfield Reclining Bugs Bunny Road Runner and Marvin

Why Did New York Ban Pinball? 🚨 New York's 34-Year Pinball Ban

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

In January 1942, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia declared pinball a form of gambling and had confiscated machines smashed with a sledgehammer in front of reporters. The story goes the wreckage was then dumped into the city's rivers, though one account has it dumped in Long Island Sound instead — either way, it stayed illegal in New York City for the next 34 years, until April 2, 1976, when a young writer named Roger Sharpe stood before the City Council, called his shot on a demonstration machine, and made it, right there in front of the lawmakers who'd have to vote on the ban. This little bagged game runs on the same flipperless idea Montague Redgrave patented back in 1871: an English immigrant working in Cincinnati, Ohio, who swapped a bagatelle table's cue for a coiled spring and plunger.

🐰 A Reclining Rabbit and Seven Friends

The playfield here is pink, with LOONEY TUNES stacked in two lines of yellow lettering. Bugs Bunny lies across the upper left, carrot at his mouth, head propped on one hand. Taz, at the upper right, holds a twisted branch up over his head with both arms, tongue out. Sylvester peers in from the left edge, the Road Runner cranes his neck up the middle, and Marvin the Martian stands finger raised beside the plunger lane. Tweety, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig crowd the bottom. The score loops read 200 in five places and 100 in one; the pockets across the base read 400, 200, 500, 200, 400; a green spring plunger with its bare coil sits at the bottom of the lane, and loose steel balls rest inside the case. It's sealed exactly as it left the factory — a poly bag stapled to a blue Looney Tunes header card with Taz on the front and Play-By-Play's own name on the back, next to the UPC and the choking-hazard warning. A little tip if you collect these: Play-By-Play put several different playfields out on this very same blue Taz card, with the same Warner Bros. © 1997 line and the same barcode, 0 19717 10146 7, on the back, so the card won't tell you which board you've got. The board does, and this one is the pink board with LOONEY TUNES in two lines of yellow.

🧸 Play-By-Play's Own Taz Year

The distributor named on the card, Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties, grew out of Arturo Torres's vending-machine prize business in San Antonio. It went public in 1995, then bought Ace Novelty of Bellevue, Washington for $44 million in 1996, a deal that brought in the Warner Bros. licenses for Looney Tunes and Space Jam; by September 1997 the company had signed on for Baby Looney Tunes too. That same 1997-98 run, Play-By-Play also sold a "Tornado Taz" plush that shook, spun and spoke in the voice of the late Mel Blanc — which may be exactly why Taz gets the biggest single illustration on this card's own front.

🎬 Where the Rest of the Cast Came From

Porky Pig first stuttered onto the screen in 1935, and Sylvester arrived a decade later, in 1945. The Road Runner made his debut in 1949 alongside Wile E. Coyote in "Fast and Furry-ous," a short that introduced the pair with mock-Latin names — Accelleratii Incredibus for the Road Runner, Carnivorous Vulgaris for the coyote who never quite catches him. Marvin the Martian showed up the year before that, in 1948, without a name at all; he wasn't actually called "Marvin" until 1979. Taz himself nearly didn't survive his first cartoon in 1954 — the studio's producer thought him too violent and had him shelved, until Jack Warner asked what had become of him after the studio received boxes of fan letters asking for his return. And Bugs, reclining across the top of this board, is the only Looney Tunes character with his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, awarded in 1985.