FWIW: A link to the scene.

edit: Pinside not dealing with the time stamp. FF to 5:39.

Larry: "A marble machine in a jail."
Moe: "That's where they belong."

Hmmmmm... Commentary on gambling? Pun on "marbleheads?"

On the other hand, it's a good reason to look through all the usual pinball books tonight!

Anyway, it certainly seemed like an elaborate backglass. I guess I couldn't put it past Hollywood to create something for the short, but ...

I don't know anything about cabinet creation, but it seems to me that the cabinet is very generic. There's no story on it. Just a bunch of lines in a sorta-deco style. So, I could definitely see a woodworking shop putting something together like that pretty easily. As for the play-field and the backglass? Those look like things that would be easier to get out of a real game...

Fantastic! This has gotten to be quite an interesting topic.

Does the name Keeney's provide any clues to the first game? Who is Keeney's? (Heading to Google now.)

Yeah, it's pretty clear that's a Bally logo in the upper right.

However, perhaps it's important that the ball doesn't interact with the play field. The ball never hits anything to cause a reaction on the upper box. On Curly's second plunge, the box reacts as if Curly broke it. The lights go on and off seemingly random. And the ball is shot out and hits Curly.

It's possible that the back box and the play field aren't the same machine. Is it too much of a stretch to place a Keeney glass in a Bally box and rig the lights to produce nonsense unrelated to actual play? Is this something a prop designer in 1941 could do?

I was looking through stuff on IPDB and couldn't find Bally produced games in 1942 or 1943. Did Bally not release any games during the war?

Nah. This is wrong. The play field shows the same icons (hats, clovers, award medals, stars) that are on the back glass!

This is a good point.

It's pretty clearly an earlier machine than '41 or '42. Looking at a number of flyers on IPDB, you can see that Bally was using the more well-known (albeit more loosely drawn) Bally script logo by 1941.

The sad part, at least from an Internet Sleuthing perspective, is that there just aren't that many photographs of 193x-1941 Bally machines. There are many, many listed in various places, but not many photos.

Maybe this is the kind of stuff that's collected in books?

m

Curly just doesn't look obese to me. I've seen a LOT worse. So many strokes, though.