Vintage 1997 Looney Tunes Mini Pinball 🍎 Yellow Orange Playfield Wile E Coyote and Two Road Runners Sealed

Can Wile E. Coyote Catch Two Road Runners? 🌅 Vintage 1997 Looney Tunes Mini Pinball, Sealed

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

🌅 The Yellow-to-Orange Desert Chase

This is the sunrise board: the playfield starts yellow at the top and warms to orange at the bottom, with the Looney Tunes name in purple across the top and a red plunger down the side. It's a Looney Tunes Mini Pinball, still sealed and stapled to its blue Taz header card, and it's the Road Runner board. Yosemite Sam waves his pistol at the upper left. Up in the top right corner Wile E. Coyote stands ready with a napkin, a knife and a fork, the most hopeful dinner guest in cartoon history. Road Runner zips through the middle, a flattened Wile E. lies upside-down on the left, another Wile E. peeks in from the right, and a second Road Runner pops up down low. Count them up and it's three Coyotes, two Road Runners and two Sams. Seems about right for how those chases always went.

The scoring loops are marked 100 and 200, and the five pockets across the bottom read 400, 200, 500, 200, 400. The artwork on this design carries a © 1995 Warner Bros. line along the bottom edge of the playfield, and the card on the back is © 1997.

🐦 Beep Beep

Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote first met in Chuck Jones's "Fast and Furry-ous," released in September 1949, where the opening freeze-frames gave them mock-Latin names like Accelleratii Incredibus and Carnivorous Vulgaris. Jones kept that gag going for years, a new fake Latin name every short. Yosemite Sam came from Friz Freleng a little earlier, in "Hare Trigger" in May 1945, where he played a train robber taking on Bugs Bunny. By the mid-'90s all three were back in the spotlight, with Space Jam putting the Looney Tunes on the big screen in November 1996.

🎯 Play-By-Play of San Antonio

The card back reads © 1997 Warner Bros., MADE IN CHINA, and DISTRIBUTED BY Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties of San Antonio, Texas. Play-By-Play grew out of Arturo Torres's vending-machine prize business in San Antonio, went public in 1995, and in 1996 paid $44 million for Ace Novelty of Bellevue, Washington, which held the Warner Bros. licenses for Looney Tunes and Space Jam. The company moved its headquarters to Valencia, Spain in 2002, so these San Antonio cards run from 1997 to about then. The barcode on the back is the same on every color of this pinball, so the playfield is how you know which one you have, and this is the yellow-orange desert chase.