Previous editions of RePlay ReView can be found here
While most of this 1987 issue of RePlay Magazine has clearly defined sections like “Music” for jukeboxes and “Pinballs” for pinball games, there are some machines that don’t really fit into any particular category. So, RePlay simply put them into the “Novelties” category as kind of a catch-all to cover everything from vending machines to countertop breathalyzers, bathroom scales, payphones, countertop poker machines, and mechanical arcade games.
I’m not going to cover every machine in the Novelties category – honestly, it would get very boring, very fast – but here are some of the more interesting highlights.
Fun Chicken!
I thought it would be best to start off with a classic. I feel like the Fun Chicken! machines were everywhere when I was a kid. That repetitive clucking sound, the satisfying plunk when the egg dropped out the bottom, and then you got…usually a pretty crappy prize, like a sticker or a bouncy ball. But it was kind of like an Easter egg hunt anytime you dropped in your 25 cents, so it was still fun.
The Fun Chicken! machine was made by Movie Hut, Inc. out of Crittenden, Missouri. In a similar vein as Fun Chicken!, Movie Hut made the Star Wars-inspired rocket ship called Star Probe, that, according to the sales flyer, featured “visual animation and sound effects” to simulate the rocket blasting off before vending a space toy in a silver capsule. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything else about this machine, so I can’t really tell you what that looked/sounded like. But, man, I wish I could find a video of it…
But back to the Fun Chicken!, according to the flyer, it held 1,500 eggs! I wonder if Movie Hut offered a refill service, or if the owner of the Chicken! had to buy 1,500 empty, plastic eggs and fill them with prizes whenever they were running low. The flyer seems to imply that it was up to you to refill. Can you imagine your Monday morning at the arcade in 1987, popping open 1,500 plastic eggs and putting spider rings inside? Talk about miserable.
Here’s a video of a Fun Chicken! machine that’s till in action:
Vend-A-Sticker
Movie Hut was also responsible for this iconic vending machine found in grocery stores across the land back in the 1980s. I don’t know if they invented the machine or used an existing design, but either way, seeing one of these machines meant your day was about to get so much cooler. Especially if you found one that sold prismatic stickers, as mentioned in the RePlay blurb. Of course, because the 80s were mired in gender-specific everything, if you were a boy who wound up with a unicorn or a girl who got the skull and crossbones, you might have been disappointed. But sometimes the allure of the prism made you add the sticker to your sticker album anyway.
I tried to track down as many of the stickers from the RePlay photo as I could, so enjoy this slideshow of awesome…
Tobi Robot Sticker Machine
As iconic as the Vend-A-Sticker machine is, I would have loved to have seen one of Movie Hut’s other sticker vending machines, Tobi the Robot! The RePlay blurb says he has flashing eyes and stomach. Talk about an experience! Sadly, all I can find online about this machine is a couple pictures. And none of them are operational. But, man, what a cool design.
Fanky Malloon Balloon Vending Machine
While it’s nowhere near as cool as a prismatic sticker from the flashing belly of a robot at the mall arcade, a helium balloon is always a fun souvenir to have until you inevitably lose your grip and it floats up into the skylights near the second floor entrance to JCPenney. And thanks to the Japanese company Ikemoto Shatai Kogyo, you can get a balloon from the Fanky Malloon balloon vending machine.
Depending upon the model of machine, you could choose from a variety of colors of uninflated balloons on a spindle. Once you’ve made your choice, the balloon is lowered into a harness and it begins to fill up with helium. When it’s full, the balloon detaches and floats to the top of a plastic capsule with a hole cut in the side so you can retrieve it. The bottom of the balloon is sealed with a plastic stem and even includes the string on a ring so you can put it on your finger and (maybe) not lose it.
The best video I could find of the Fanky Malloon in action is this Korean video on YouTube. Warning – turn your speakers down, because there are a few obnoxious sounds on this one. Honestly, you really don’t even need to hear anything if you just want to see how the machine works. So, muting the video isn’t a bad idea, either.
Sex Tester
Those fountain Cokes at the arcade have finally kicked in and you have to use the bathroom now. Your Dad says it’s fine if you go by yourself, because he’s about to beat his all-time score on Galaga. As you’re washing your hands, you see a strange machine standing over in the corner by the hand dryers. Upon closer inspection you learn it is the Sex Tester, from SMS Manufacturing out of Lakewood, New Jersey, a featured “New Item” in this issue of RePlay Magazine.
The Sex Tester was a condom vending machine with a novelty twist. Instead of just spitting out a sketchy prophylactic, you put in your quarters and press one of the two buttons, depending upon if you’re a man or a woman (non-binaries didn’t exist in the 1980s, don’t you know). The machine would test your sexyness on a scale from “Wimp” to “Super Stud” if you were a guy; from “Bow Wow” to “Nympho” if you were a woman. Other possible categories include Cheater, Vamp, Barracuda, Foxy, Hot Lips, Mama’s Boy, and Needs Help, among others. Once you have your sexyness rating, a condom slides out into the dispenser chute and you’re good to go (unless you’re rated a Mama’s Boy, of course).
According to the flyer in this issue of RePlay Magazine, SMS was sure that the Sex Tester was a “concept with enhanced public acceptance” and would be “suitable for greater variety of locations” [sic] than traditional condom vending machines. Yes, because I’m sure Mom and Dad would love to give little Heather a couple of quarters to go play Pac-Man, only to have her come back and ask what “Nympho” means. The worst part is, Heather put in her 50 cents and didn’t even get a souvenir, because you could also get the Sex Tester without the condom vending option.
Trik Trak
I was always more of a video game kid growing up, so old timey mechanical games just weren’t my style. However, now that I’m an adult, I have a feeling I’d probably like playing Trik Trak today.
The game comes from Betson Enterprises out of Moonachie, New Jersey, and is a game of organizational skill. You control the engine of a train that runs on three tracks – one at the top, one that runs straight ahead, and another at the bottom of the play field. Insert a coin and a series of lights randomly illuminates, telling you which track you need to move red, yellow, and green train cars to by pulling and pushing them into place. If you can complete the challenge before the timer runs out, you get a new series of lights to try to match.
Definitely low tech, but does have its charms.
Here’s a YouTube video of someone playing Trik Trak to give you a better idea of what it’s all about:
Ninja Gun
Continuing with more mechanical arcade games is Ninja Gun from Kasco Distributing Company. Kasco specialized in two types of arcade games – shooting and driving. Some of the other titles they developed include Air Fighter (a shooting game), Clay Shooting (a shooting game), The Driver (a driving game), Indy 500 (a driving game), Gun Smoke (a shooting game), and Untouchable (you might think it’s a shooting game, but it’s actually a driving game). So what made this one different? Ninjas, of course.
I have to say, this is probably one of the coolest mechanical games I’ve ever seen. The concept is pretty common in these old shooting gallery games – objects move in the cabinet, you shoot them with your gun that sends out a beam of light and is picked up by sensors on the targets. But this time you’re not shooting tin cans and pesky crows, you’re shooting ninjas! Ninjas automatically make everything at least 40% better.
The artwork on this game is incredible. There are multiple layers to the playing field, giving you a great 3-D effect. And there are ninjas – either physical targets or projected light targets – that are climbing, running, and flipping their way across the various planes of play. The game was actually housed inside the cabinet vertically and then a mirror was angled down into the cabinet, making it appear horizontal to the player.
You have to check out this gameplay video:
Ninja Web
Keeping with the ninja theme, we have Ninja Web, from Allegro, Inc. out of Redmond, Washington. The game features a ninja warrior on a large screen filled with 64 lights that will flash one at a time at random. Your goal is to hit the screen where the light is before it goes out and appears at a different spot on the screen.
According to a blurb from the July 1986 issue of Play Meter Magazine, Ninja Web had three different types of games: “Ninja Conquest, a reaction game; Tutor, a memory-recall game; and Ninja Countdown, a test of speed”. These games could be played at four different skill levels: Rookie, Warrior, Trainer, and Grand Master. If you find that you’re more Beverly Hills Ninja than Enter the Ninja, you could also reduce the number of lights from 64 down to just the inner circle of 32 to make it a little easier on your ego.
Mr. Six Gun
If ninjas aren’t your thing, maybe you’d like a crack at Mr. Six Gun, a mechanical game of quick draw against a smart-mouthed cowboy named Johnny Rio. Produced by Vari-Tech in 1980, Mr. Six Gun features a life-sized animatronic cowboy – complete with hat, boots, and a gun in his right hand – hidden behind swinging saloon doors.
After you drop in your quarter, the doors open and the two of you stare into each other’s cold, dead eyes like a scene from a Spaghetti Western. When Johnny raises his hand, you have to pull a revolver from the holster in front of you and gun him down before he gets you. If you miss, he’ll mock you mercilessly; if you hit, he’ll challenge you again.
There were two versions of the machine available. The economy model only had arm movement and a limited vocabulary. But the deluxe model featured “lifelike” head, eye, mouth, and arm movement; a larger vocabulary; synchronized mouth movement, and a mannequin-operated water gun. Ok, I have to admit that having Johnny Rio shoot water at you would be kind of fun.
The machine also came in two different sizes – one that has you about ten feet away from Johnny and another that puts you fifteen feet back. Either way, compared to an Asteroids cabinet, this machine took up some serious real estate at the arcade.
Despite finding photos and information about the game itself online, there aren’t too many videos of the game being played. Here’s a YouTube short that isn’t quite the full Johnny Rio performance, but it gives you an idea of how the game is played:
Mr. Muscle Arm Wrestling Game
In the past, to test your strength at the arcade, you hit a lever with a sledge hammer as hard as you could in the hopes of ringing a bell at the top of a tower. But in the 80s, losing could mean dislocating your elbow!
Mr. Muscle was a mechanical arm wrestling machine released in 1980 by Zamperla out of Vicentina, Italy, with their American offices in Parsippany, New Jersey. Zamperla seemed to specialize in “tests of strength” games, because they also produced your typical punch ball game (bottom left), as well as El Toro, a game where you literally grab a bull by the horns and squeeze them together as hard as you can. Your strength is measured on the folds of a senorita’s fan.
These mechanical machismo matches are fairly harmless unless you overdo it, but with Mr. Muscle, there’s a real chance you could hurt yourself.
The first thing you do after putting in your quarter is sit down in front of Mr. Muscle’s mechanical arm. The arm rotates at the elbow and there’s a pad on your right side that senses if your arm hits it, meaning you’ve lost. You get to choose the strength level you want to try and then grab his hand. From here on out, you’re in a real arm wrestling match with a robot. If you’re strong enough, you can push his hand down. But if you’re not, he wrenches your elbow the other direction and it’s not that easy to just let go. As someone who participated in plenty of afternoon recess arm wrestling matches, I can tell you that it hurts when you lose against flesh and bone, so I can’t imagine how it feels against unyielding metal and hydraulics. No thanks!
You can see a man braver than I take on Mr. Muscle in this YouTube short:
Bimbo the Clown
Aside from the suggestive name, Bimbo the Clown has to be one of the strangest novelty arcade machines in this issue of RePlay Magazine. Bimbo was produced by United Billiards, Inc. (UBI) in Union, New Jersey, starting in 1981, and is actually a reboot of an earlier arcade machine, Peppy the Musical Clown, from 1956.
o “play” Bimbo, you drop in your quarter and music starts playing on a tape, typically an Americana favorite like “Yankee Doodle” or “Farmer in the Dell”. The four buttons on the console each control one of his limbs that are attached to the top of the machine by wires. Essentially, Bimbo is a marionette that you control. After pushing buttons to make him dance for a minute or so, that’s it, that’s the entertainment.
1956 and 1981 were simpler times, folks.
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Despite this seeming to be the most no-frills arcade machine in existence, Peppy and Bimbo have quite a following within the arcade collector community. I’m sure it has something to do with the nostalgic era when the novelty of being able to control a character was still fresh and new, but as someone raised on joysticks and electrodes, as the kids say, this is not it, fam. (Sorry, I’ll never do that again…)
UBI also made a similar machine called Luigi the Pizza Man, that features a fat, Italian chef whom you can also make dance for your amusement. I’m sure the music selections were not racist at all.
Here’s a video of Bimbo in action (which sounds dirty, but it’s not):
Daniel & the Dixie Diggers
From a marionette you control, to ones that seem to move on their own, next up we have Daniel & the Dixie Diggers, part of the Sally Industries animatronic universe.
Sally Industries has been in business since 1977. Founded by two high school friends, John Fox and John Rob Holland, the two started out by creating an animatronic President LBJ for Neiman Marcus. A few years later, in 1982, Sally introduced a lineup of animatronic musical acts, starting with Daniel and the Dixie Diggers, a Dixieland Jazz band made up of various combinations of canine musicians, depending upon which package you purchased for your amusement park, restaurant, or arcade.
The main players of the Dixie Diggers were: the piano-playing Daniel T. Bones; the sometimes-banjo-playing-sometimes-drummer, Confederate Army uniform-wearing, Southern-accented, not-at-all-problematic, Colonel Beauregard;, and the trumpet-playing, slightly-offensive, Louis Armstrong-imitating, Scratchmo (see Louis Armstrong’s nickname was Satchmo, but since this is a dog, you see they…you know what? Never mind. I think you get it.). For a little extra money, you could also round out the band with musicians like Betty B. Birthday, Clem, Huck L. Berry, Jethro P. Hogg, Sir Percival, Wally Wish, and a storytelling Mark Twain.
Of course Sally Industries was always thinking ahead. So, the entire band’s metal skeletons could be refitted with different skins (*shudder*) and play new music as Gwen and the Magical Music Makers, a Medieval band for places with a Medieval theme, like Enchanted Castle in Canada and Round Table Pizza locations across the U.S.
Although he wasn’t the star of the Dixie Diggers, Colonel Beauregard was clearly a star at Sally Industries. Not only was he part of the Diggers, but he could also be purchased as part of a duo with a guitar-playing cowboy basset hound named Hank, or on his own as a solo player. And, yes, his uniform has changed over the years to a more generic, blue and yellow color scheme and a tall captain’s hat that makes him look more like the crew of a steamboat than General Pickett leading the charge against Northern Aggression at Gettysburg.
Believe it or not, but there are still a handful of Dixie Digger bands in operation today.
There’s one at a Chuck E. Cheese-like pizza/party venue called Huckleberry Junction in Genesee, Michigan. Here’s a video with quite a bit of the band’s performance, as well as some tunes from another Sally animatronic, Jethro P. Hogg (skip to 2:25 if you just want to see the musical performances):
Perhaps the most popular venue with a Daniel and the Dixie Diggers is the Rusutsu Resort, the largest ski lodge/resort/amusement park in Hokkaido, Japan. Rusutsu is all about the Sally Industries animatronics.
Aside from the Dixie Diggers, they also operate a “Sally at the Piano”, an animatronic woman who plays an eight-hour show of lounge music standards. Here’s a promo video showing off her talents…
Rusutsu also has a Bubba and the Badland Band, a five-piece old timey Western band made up of a cow, a raccoon, a fox, a bear, and (what I think is) a mountain lion…
And finally, you can catch Ursula and the Oompapas – a four-piece, lederhosen-wearing bear polka band with a human, beer wench singer – exclusively at the Rusutsu Resort the next time you’re in Japan.
Rusutsu have revamped the Dixie Digger band over the years, changing out character faces (again, *shudder*) and clothing (like Beauregard’s makeover), and even sent the entire band back to Sally in 2022 for a total cosmetic and mechanical overhaul. The new and improved band was installed in 2023 and is currently entertaining kids and adults today.
Sally Industries eventually renamed itself to Sally Dark Rides (“dark rides” is the industry term for an indoor amusement park ride), and focused its energy on creating more all-encompassing experiences. Some of their biggest hits include the E.T. Adventure at Universal Studios Florida, the Justice League: Battle for Metropolis at numerous Six Flags locations, Lost Kingdom Adventure at a handful of Legolands, Scooby-Doo’s Haunted Mansion at Kings Dominion and Kings Island, and SpongeBob’s Crazy Carnival Ride at Circus Circus in Las Vegas. Of course they haven’t strayed too far from their roots, as all of these rides feature animatronics of some kind. If you have some time to kill, I highly recommend heading to their website to check out some of their projects; they’ve done some really cool stuff over the years…as well as a few things that will haunt your nightmares for years to come.
Next time on RePlay ReView, we’ll take a look at kiddie rides, like the pony you used to beg your mom for a quarter to ride, even though she was carrying twelve bags of groceries out of the Winn-Dixie.
