I reproduced the artwork for Merf's and sent it to him a while ago. Like around the time when the TOTAN apron was underway. I know he's got it and I'm sure there are issues with licensing and whatever else through PPS. Every time I mention a new TAF apron, I get a PM from PPS it seems, so I don't know where everything is as far as rights and licensing. But I do know that a replacement TAF apron is badly needed as it seems B/W used a Sharpie to apply the graphics on these aprons since they are so easily damaged by any number of cleaning agents.

I even did a full color, full featured one that I sent them as well, as a premium option or just to have something different, something nicer than factory but still retaining that factory look.

Apron-FullArtwork-1 (resized).jpg
Apron-FullArtwork-2 (resized).jpg

Over the years, I've heard many reasons for this. The most popular one has been issues with Raul Julia's estate/lawyers. Could be anything these days, really.

CPR/PPS is running the remainder of the allotment licensed under the original IPB agreement with Paramount, et al, to remake playfields years ago. In plainer english and using random numbers only as an example: IPB got the ok from the TAF rights/license holders to remake 1000 playfields. They only ended up producing 726, so since PPS acquired IPB and all of its belongings and holdings, under that original agreement, they still have the right to produce 274 TAF reproduction playfields, which they are.

Also, with respect to the apron, it may not be so stated in the contracts of the actors and/or production companies that ONLY those items that contain an actor's likeness require any legal approval by said actors. Sometimes actors sign movie deals that include a certain percentage of the movie's revenue from memorabilia, toys, and any retail store items associated with the movie. It's a way for the movie house to pay the actors less up front and get them to do the movie. An apron for a pinball machine with the specific logo that associates it with that particular movie falls into that category. There's a very good chance that one of the main actors signed a contract that gets them a piece of the pie even this many years after the movie was released, and that could be one of the many various things that holds up reproduction of TAF parts with logos and images on them.

Repro TAF aprons would sell like hotcakes. I don't think I've ever seen one that didn't have some sort of "wiped away" look to it's artwork.

I should be pretty high up on the list for the Addams as I put in for it years ago. I sent merfeldma the vector artwork for it a couple years ago. If not, put me down for an Addams. If you need the artwork again, let me know.

This is just sad to me, as a graphic designer. These kinds of details are immediately noticed by even the untrained human eye/brain and need to be as close to perfect as possible so as not to distract from or "sour" the whole piece. It should be also said that they can be some of the easiest things to do in graphics. People will notice that long before they ever notice how the upper right chevron is thinner than it is the left side. In fact, it looks like the black screen's registration is slightly off, too.

This early stuff is pretty easy, too. It's just sad. If there was a job available in it and someone could get me nice scans and overall dimensions, I'd remake the apron artwork for every pin ever made up through 2000-ish. And I don't use tracing programs... TAF took me well over 40 hours to perfect. I don't mess around.

If you have access to it, I'd actually recommend using Illustrator for this kind of stuff. As you can see in your picture, the edges aren't sharp as Photoshop uses raster images while Illustrator uses vector art. How they're different is that vector art is scalable with no loss in resolution. The same can't be said for raster images. Photoshop's print quality is determinant on many different settings being maxed out to ensure crisper lines, but that also means huge file sizes.

If you start learning Illustrator, you'll be learning by drawing with lines and shapes that will stay nice and clean regardless of who prints them, as long as they print them as vector files and not raster images. PDF's retain vector image integrity perfectly, and most all printers can print PDF files just fine. Here's a quick copy of the graphic you did in PS, but done in Illustrator. It's saved as a PDF to retain its clarity. Took me about 10 minutes to do. It's not 100% accurate since I was just working from your screenshot. Once you get good at Illustrator, you'll be able to churn out stuff this fast, too. A lot of EM stuff is nice and easy like this. Untitled-1.pdf

Once you have a finished artwork file, and it's sized correctly, you'll save it to a PDF. I would clean the old artwork off the apron as best you can and leave just the main color on it. Depending on how the artwork was printed on the apron, it could just wipe off with some light solvent(I know it does on some 90's B/W games!) or if you have to sand it off, you can repaint it or you could even possibly have it powder coated, if you want. Then, depending on what kind of printer you have, you should buy home-printable waterslide decal paper. Yes, the stuff they use on model cars; you can make whatever you want, for yourself! They make it in white and clear, but I'm guessing your apron is white, so the clear paper should suffice. However, the white would be fine to use as well. You could even get a sheet of both and see which ones work better, if you'd like.

Here's a decent page describing most of the brands and their pros and cons:
https://www.tomostudio.com/best-waterslide-decal-paper/

Once you have settled on the proper decal paper type, printed them, and applied them, you'll shoot a couple coats of clear over the whole apron and once that's settled and cured, it should look damn near factory!

What a lot of lazy graphic artists do is either use a website or special software to find a font that matches as close as possible to the letters they're trying to reproduce. But, in doing so, they typically fail to check every single letter to be sure they're all accurate. They find one that's about 90% correct and call it good. Well what happens over time is as all the original examples go away either by people restoring and using the readily available bad artwork, by trying to fix the artwork they've got(which can result in minor errors here and there), or by games that just "leave the earth"(get thrown away, parted out, or left in a barn for decades and slowly wither away), the original version of the artwork can get lost. As people just keep making copies of copies, you get what I call "design drift". An effort needs to be made to get it right the first time. Sure, your final product is fairly cheap and you don't make as much on each sale compared to the man hours spent recreating the graphics, but at least you've made them correctly and preserved said art for posterity. What's really sad is a lot of times when you're laying out artwork you're reproducing, you put the new stuff on top of the scanned image of the old stuff. Things like the leg on the R of "FOR" should've stuck out like a sore thumb to the guy working on that artwork. Of course, so should have the "S, INC.", but you get what I'm saying.

Or, you could be like PPS and just simply OWN all the factory original screens for all the artwork. I know he's got the screens for most all the B/W playfields, but I don't know if that includes apron art.

The real problem comes from how close the artwork gets to the edges of the apron. It can be difficult to align the screen placements in between colors to make sure they're registered correctly when real estate is at a premium. A pretty serious jig would have to be built. Not saying it can't be done, though. The other side of it that would be tough is finding enough nice original examples of games with aprons in good enough shape to be considered accurate representations of the colors used for the artwork. The B/W stuff would be easy as all it would take is a call to Rick @PPS, who should have all that info. It's the Gottlieb and all the other manufacturers' artwork that would have to be color matched as well as scanned to reproduce their artwork.

Again, not a difficult task, it's just a huge undertaking that would require a lot of time and money upfront as it would be a while before any kind of real profit would be seen from this kind of venture. I almost wonder if that's what happened after one of the guys who were doing the first runs of these reproduction aprons moved to another state; it got to a point where it wasn't going to be cost effective, regardless of how many they could sell. It also kind of fits with how they did their run of aprons. It was actually an era of games that all used the same apron shape and the same artwork, just in different colors, making it way more affordable to do as your "installed base" is massive compared to doing it for just one game at a time.

Like I've said before in this thread and a couple others, if there was a job with a major pinball parts company that wants to start doing this, I would gladly be their graphic artist for it. I love reproducing pinball/arcade artwork and this would be a blast to do for a living! (I don't have the funds or the shop space to start something like this on my own, otherwise I would have by now.)

I'd agree that any and all part numbers or other little details like that should be on a repro decal set for any apron. Especially since the part numbers might be different from game to game. I know Stern used this artwork on a lot of games in that era, but the colors are different between games of course.

Kinda looks like Photoshop. I'd suggest doing this in Illustrator, or some other vector-based program. Vector images will always have nice sharp edges, regardless of scale/size. Raster images, as PS uses, don't typically have crisp clean edges and don't translate well passing from source to source. Plus, it's easy to have the resolution change between people as some use different dpi's for their systems. Like, if you did the artwork in 600dpi, but the printer you send the file to uses 75dpi, and you don't catch it, your artwork suffers greatly.