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Silver Ball Century ep. 9 - 1967 - Launch the Ball

Image listing the tables in this episode: Magic City, Shangri-La, Rocket III, Apollo, The Wiggler, Beat Time, Melody, Touchdown

Apollo 1 met with tragedy early in 1967. The unmanned Apollo 4 launched later that year. Pinball designs are caught up in the moment, and there's two pinball tables specifically about rockets: Williams' "Apollo" and Bally's lovably terrible "Rocket III".

Apollo has a mechanism where your goal is to hit a line of rollover targets, in sequence, going up the middle of the table, then hit a standup target. When you're playing this, it often feels like you're so close to being able to do this in one shot. You can't, unless maybe your ball gets deflected in a really lucky way by crud on the playfield. The flippers cannot actually make the ball go straight up the middle the whole way, only close to it.

Realistically, you achieve the table goal with several shots that cross over the center line, but the impossible single shot is tantalizing to go for. It's like the machine is daring you to lick your elbow and laughing as you fail to do it.

Three pinball playfields side by side, all of which have sequences of rollovers that go up the middle.

I think Williams must have been really happy with this effect on players, because they used it again in the same year, on "Touchdown" and "Jolly Roger", shown above.

Meanwhile, the Beatles are bigger than Jesus. Are the Fab Four going to appear on a pinball table? Not legitimately. Licensing deals aren't even a thing pinball companies were doing at the time. So instead, here's "The Bootles".

The backglass of Williams' "Beat Time", featuring Jerry Kelley's semi-cubist artwork of a rock band of four men with distinctive short haircuts singing and playing instruments, with a drum set labeled "The Bootles". Sexy women are grabbing them.

I have just noticed, for the first time, the text "LUV DINGO" written backwards in one of these boxes.

Tables in this episode

Edit: Though I mentioned it above, I've removed Williams' "Jolly Roger" from the lineup because the VPX is not working correctly.

Here are the downloads for the tables we see recreated in VPX this episode. (As usual, you need free accounts on VPForums and VPUniverse to be able to download, which is a bit of a pain, but it's the only community-approved way to get tables for VPX.)

#pinball #silver ball century