This is the end, my little friend This is the end of my life Tuning in to the Loser Kid Pinball Players Podcast A special one I know I'm drunk This blasted The following is an And now, ladies and gentlemen, time for the show. Sit down, kick your feet up, grab a cold one, get ready for... The Super Awesome Pinball Show! That's right, it's time for everybody's favorite pinball show! With your host, pinball artist Christopher Franchi. Texas Pinball Festival's Ed Vanderbeek. And Dr. Pin himself, Christian Jim Weisz. Sponsored by Chicago Gaming Company, the home of your favorite top quality pinball remakes like Medieval Madness, Monster Bash, and more. Visit ChicagoGaming.com. And by Cointaker, distributors of new in-box pinball machines, mods, accessories, and Franchi pinball wear. That's Cointaker.com. Also by BackAlleyCreations.com, creators of the most badass pinball mods, black pearl pinballs, and the easy slide play field support bracket set. That's BackAlleyCreations.com. I like Franchi. I like Franchi. I like Franchi. He's a great guy. How do you like that? Thanks. Hello, pinball quarantiners, and welcome to episode number seven of the Super Awesome Pinball Show. We are very excited to have Ed back, Christian, and I. How you doing, guys? I'm back, baby! Yeah. We're great, man. We are great. We're ready for the show. All right, we've got a great show this week. We've got Mr. Jack Guarnieri from Jersey Jack, and he's filling some secrets. We already recorded the interview. Plus, we've got our weeks in pinball. We've got the pinball news. And then I've got one more brand-new feature, our super-awesome mailbag, where we're going to answer your questions live on tape. We also have our winner from the Spooky Trivia Contest, and we have a new contest to announce. All right, so let's kick it off with our last two weeks in pinball. Our last two weeks in pinball. Ed, you should kick this off, considering we missed you last week, and tell us what you've been up to, man. Nothing. It's been so chill lately. I didn't have nothing going on. So, obviously, TPF was the big thing. So, can you talk us through that? Like, what's it been like? I'll tell you, it was one of the most stressful, well, I shouldn't say it was one of the most stressful things. It was stressful for me, for Tim, for Paul, for all the people that helped put on TPF. It was devastating. It was, you know, heart-wrenching. You know, we cried. We were angry. We were trying so hard to save the show or I should say make, you know, have the show go on. But there was just no way to do that. It just, the COVID-19 thing just got progressively worse and worse and more, you know, news talking about it. I was getting emails and phone calls in the days leading up to when we canceled the show. Just, you know, is the show going to go on and you guys need to cancel? And it just got... Did vendors start dropping out too before you made the choice? Yeah, it was, you know, we were watching it pretty closely. And, of course, we were getting the people emailing and calling on the TPF phone line asking, you know, is the show canceled? And, of course, my first thought was, well, I would say something on the website or on Facebook if the show was canceled. well, why does everybody keep asking me if the show's canceled? Do they think we're just not going to say anything to anybody and just let everybody show up at the front doors and we're just not there? But, sorry, Chris. I'm going to catch my breath. I'm getting all emotional right now. No. Are you serious or are you joking? No. So as people started inquiring and we were paying attention to the CDC and the president's making speeches and we're watching the city of Frisco and the county that Frisco is in, Collin County, were watching what their recommendations are. And for the longest time, Collin County and the city of Frisco, they just kept going on like nothing was wrong and business as usual. And we would ask them, and they'd say, no, I think you're going to be fine. And the rest of the world is going into a full-on panic. And yes, vendors started calling, and one by one, they just started canceling the exhibitors, which are really the most important part of the show. We were starting to get notices from exhibitors. International travel got shut down. We have Jonathan Houston and Martin Ayoub and, of course, our guest, Sebastian McCoy from Robert Englunds. Haggis Pinball, that all stopped. They weren't able to come. And I just started seeing the show unravel right before us. So finally, we made the hard decision before being forced to shut down by the government to cancel the show. And then, of course, it was just within a day or two that the city and the county put in there no events over 10 people. So we would have been shut down anyway if we hadn't have done it ourselves. So, I mean, it was just a lot of shock and, oh, my God, because you get all these things. Because we spent so much money leading up to the show. And for people that don't know, I mean, I haven't really paid attention to Pinside or a lot of the forums. But, of course, the trolls that don't know, they think, well, all that money should still be there. Well, no, it's not. The money's spent. I mean, we spend so much money on advertising and airfare for our special guests and lanyards and printing and banners and you name it. I mean, that money gets spent, and then the money from the show itself over the weekend, that goes to pay for the venue. And, you know, we have to guarantee so many hotel rooms. And, I mean, it's what was once a small little show has now grown into this, you know, in the world of pinball. I mean, it's one of the biggest shows. I mean, we're still small as far as conventions go compared to, like, Comic-Con or some of these other shows. We're very tiny, but, you know, in our little world, I mean, it's a big, big thing, and it's very expensive. So, you know, people want to talk about insurance, and, well, yeah, we carry insurance, but we carry insurance that covers, you know, people getting hurt or damage to the building and damage, you know, we carry that kind of insurance. We don't carry pandemic insurance. It's anti-viral insurance. Yeah, that's just, I'm not saying that I'm sure there might be something like that out there, but that's not anything we had. I mean, so that's not something that was covered. Well, another thing is, though, is that you've been very open about this, too, is you have said that you take the money that comes in and roll it back into the event. Right. And that's exactly right. Now, not all of it. I mean, we have some money. Obviously, all the tournament money, that's prize money, so that goes in the escrow. And there is some operating capital, but that's because we have other things that we need to purchase. Like, literally, right up to the show, we have to have money for cash registers and things like that. But, yeah, we pump the money right back in. I mean, you know, Chris, you know, we've got you airfare, and I have airfare for Steve Ritchie and Mark Ritchie and Dennis Nordman. And, you know, we fly all those people in. I mean, I wish all the manufacturers would send everybody in, but, you know, they just can't do that. So we pick up the tab on a lot of that. And there's a lot of expenses that, you know, people don't even think about. I mean, we have storage for everything all year long, all the cash registers and all the equipment that is involved in putting on the show. You know, I was helping Jeff with the Twippy Awards, and, you know, a lot of money goes out. So when the show ended, it was just like, oh, my goodness, this is going to be the end of the Texas Pinball Festival. But the pinball community is awesome. So after a couple of days of just sheer we're in shock and trying not to panic and trying to figure out what are we going to do, I got more emails and phone calls of support, people asking what can we do. Melissa at Cointaker, they called and said, hey, we'd like to set up a GoFundMe. That was very nice of them. That wasn't something we expected. So they set that up, and, of course, I think it got up to almost $10,000 right now. Yeah. And then somebody had the great idea, and I don't even know why I didn't think of this. Somebody said, well, open up the online store. So what happens is leading up to the show, we had a couple hundred orders of people that had bought merchandise to be picked up at the show. And, well, of course, our knee jerk was, well, we'll just ship everybody their stuff, and we'll eat that shipping cost. Well, so I go right before the show and I get with our screen printer and I say, okay, I need all of this printed, all of these shirts and, you know, whatever the stuff that needs to get printed for the people that are picking up their stuff at the show. And I'm going to order X number of extra to sell at the show. Well, when we canceled the show, I called my screen printer and I said, hey, have you started printing yet? And he said, well, we haven't started printing, but I have all of your, we have all your raw product. We have all the shirts and the hoodies and the hats and everything. And they said, well, just stand by a second because we're going to have to adjust our order a little bit. And he said, okay. So then we start trying to go through, well, you know, we have these orders that have already been made. We're going to go and ship the stuff. And then somebody said, well, open the store back up. I want to buy a shirt or I want to buy whatever and help support the show. And we're like, well, that's a good idea. So we opened up the store. And I got to tell you, you guys were awesome. You know, the orders have come in. I think we're pretty close to being sold out of everything that we had, you know, told our screen printer we were going to order. Wow. So I called the screen printer back, and I said, okay. I didn't want to order any more than that. I wasn't trying to be over the top with it, so I called the screen printer, and I said, okay, go ahead with the order. We'll take it. And so he said, okay. Well, then our screen printer's in Dallas County. Well, the very next day or two days after that, Dallas County issued a shelter-in-place order and closed all nonessential businesses. Well, guess what a screen printer's considered? Nonessential. So they called, and they said, well, we can't complete your order. until all this is over or until we come up with a plan or figure out what we're going to do. And I was like, shit, can this get just any worse for me? So we emailed all the people that had orders coming that we were waiting for the screen printer, and we explained to them, and everybody's been super, super cool about it. And so as soon as the screen printer gets back online, we'll get your stuff and we'll get it shipped to you. Now, as far as all of the pass holders and the vendors for 2020, we reached out to them, And we sent an email and said, hey, you know, we're going to roll over your pass to 2021. And I was really kind of expecting a run on the bank. But to my surprise, the overwhelming majority of people said, you know what, that's cool. Roll myself over to 2021. You know, the overwhelming majority of the vendors said, you know what, just, you know, keep my money as a donation. We're not going to do that. We're going to roll it all over to 2021. But, you know, we want to help you guys. And I'm telling you, the love and support has been so overwhelming. I've gotten, you know, cigars. Christian, you sent me some cigars. Jeff Patterson, you know, he sent me some cigars, which was very nice. Jeff, poor Jeff, he didn't. I got this box of cigars, and it didn't say who it was from. It just said, cigars. You know, from Jeff. And I know, like, 20 Jeffs. There's a million Jeffs in pinball. Yeah, and that's all it said. And so I'm like, well, this was nice. And so I was talking to Jeff afterwards. They were getting ready to talk about the online Twippies. And he goes, so did you get a box of cigars by chance in the mail? I was like, oh, thank you so much, Jeff. That was, you didn't say who it was from. But, yeah, so where was I going with all that? But, yeah, the community has been awesome. So right now the plan is for everybody that rolled their weekend Passover, we haven't quite decided what yet, but I'm telling you, you're going to be so glad that you did. We're going to do something very special for the vendors and the pass holders that rolled their pass over to 2021 for us, so we can have a 2021. And lunch with Christopher Franchi. You're buying. I don't have, in fact, I'll tell you the tentative dates. It's March, so here's an exclusive. Actually, it's the same dates. We told people this before because we already had a contract in place with the embassy. March 26th through the 28th, 2021 is going to be the Texas Pinball Festival. But I'm going to ask people don't run out and get a hotel room or buy airfare or any of that kind of stuff yet because we still have to work everything out with the embassy for 2020. I'm very confident that the embassy is going to work with us and kind of forgive our contract, so to speak, just because every event is canceled. The City of Frisco, they love us. They've offered to go to bat for us and work with the embassy or a number of other hotels that have, new hotels that have the same amount of space. So I'm pretty confident that TPF will be at the embassy again. If it's not there, it'll be across the street at one of the other hotels that have the same amount of space and are able to accommodate us. But don't worry, we're going to get it worked out. I just don't have all the details yet, so I can't, you know, until all this mess is over, it's going to be a month until I know all the final details. But for the people that did, you know, Carl Weathers the storm with me, so to speak, you know, we're going to have something special for you, and you're going to be very happy that you did. roll that over. The Grinch's small heart grew three-sides its best day. Oh, well, you know, so here's the thing about pinball people, and Chris, you know this, and you see it all the time. It's times like this, you know, bleeding up to the show itself before the show is canceled, you deal with, it doesn't take very many unhappy people to make you go, God damn, why do I do this? You know, this is, I'm not doing this anymore. It's not worth my time. It's kind of like, Bunch of fuckers! If you sit on your front porch in the morning and you drink coffee and you get nine neighbors that walk by and they wave at you and say hello, and then you get that one neighbor that is just a jerk to you, well, pretty soon you aren't going to sit on your front porch anymore. And that's kind of how I was starting to feel. But, you know, once the show was truly, you know, we felt like it was in trouble, it just really reminded me that how awesome the pinball community is. And I'm telling you, the love was just unbelievable. I've got cards and people calling and people, you know, I can't even get into it. It was just so amazing. So you guys put on the biggest show in the world, really, for pinball. And you guys do a ton for the hobby. And people notice that. And the vast majority of people are not going to give you a hard time about, you know, the difficulties that you've had and that extend to the people coming to the show. And everyone wants a TTF 2021. And they're willing to support you in any way they can to make sure that that happens. And we're going to work our asses off to make sure that that happens because we want a 2021, too, and a 2022 and a 2023. and so on and so on and so on. But for those of you that reached out and, you know, contributed in some way or helped or offered to help, you have no idea how much that means to us. And even you two guys, you know, you are both very nice about it. Did I leave anything out as far as canceling of Texas Pinball Festival? Any other questions? Yeah, you covered it, man. I know it's got to be really hard for you to talk about it even, even though it's been some time, and that's going to make it better. But you've been through a shit ton through all of this, and you've maintained sanity, which is a huge plus considering how long it's been. Well, I didn't. I mean, I know last year, I'm sorry, a couple weeks ago, y'all were telling us, saying, well, we're going to record an episode. We're going to do episode six, and we're going to interview Charlie. And I know Charlie was locked in for an interview, and I initially said, yeah, I'm good. I'm good to go. Let's go ahead and do it. And as that deadline kind of got closer and closer and I was still kind of dealing with the fallout from TPF, I finally said, guys, my heart's not in it right now. I've got so much going on. I just haven't paid attention to anything that's happening outside of my little world of the Texas Pinball Festival, and I'm just not feeling it. You guys are more than welcome to go on. And so this is what I kind of learned. So you ever watch a war movie and, you know, you've got a bunch of buddies going along and then one buddy gets, you know, hurt or shot or injured and he goes down. And when he's down, he tells his buddies, you guys go ahead and save yourself. And the buddies go, no, no, no man left behind. We're all in this together. Well, in my war movie, when I go down and I tell you guys, you guys go ahead. You guys are like, deuces, we're going to go ahead. Come on. So, listen, to be fair, I texted you multiple times, and I said, hey, listen, are you sure you don't want to be part of this? And if I had known you weren't fully invested in your decision to not join us, we would not have done that, man. I mean, you know you are the third amigo to the Super Awesome Pinball Show, and I apologize if you have any bad feelings about it. I did think you were just going to do the Charlie view. I didn't realize there was a whole show, but that's okay. We didn't care about you. Chris didn't care. Chris was like, I got fans. I got fans. I got to get out there. I need to please my minions. I know that when you were making that decision, it was not easy to not do the show. But it's got to feel good in retrospect to look back and say, you know, we definitely made the right decision. I mean, Sarah and I were ready to jump on a plane despite the risks. And then, you know, now when the TPF show is actually supposed to go on, the world has changed. I mean, it changed so rapidly that there was no chance that it would have happened. Absolutely. It wasn't just TPF. It was other companies. I mean, American Pinball, and I'm going to spoil this for them because, you know, obviously Hot Wheels is officially out and everything, but American Pinball spent a ton of cash planning to come to TPF. They actually contracted two life-size, full-work, you know, full Hot Wheels cars, you know, real cars that were kind of made up to look like some of the retro Hot Wheels that they were going to bring into the show. We were going to have them brought into the showroom, kind of like we had the Munsters cars in 2019. But they were going to have these two big, giant Hot Wheels cars. You know, Deep Root had their big, you know, they sunk a bunch of money into their, you know, unveilings, and they were going to have a big showing. Multimorphic was going to unveil their new game And they had all kinds of things planned So it wasn't just us I mean, a lot of companies, you know I don't even know what word to use But, you know, everybody is feeling, you know The effects of this COVID-19 thing So, you know, I feel bad for everybody How do you feel like a lot of these companies will I know you clearly don't know the answer But, I mean, what do you expect these companies to do? Do you think they're going to delay, you know Their big reveals indefinitely? Or do you think that, I don't know Like, what are your thoughts? You know, Deeproot did such a good job of, other than Raza, I really don't know what they were planning. Robert did, I mean, they locked it down, so I don't know what their plan is. I mean, I don't think, I don't see any of them going under. A lot of that's going to have to do with the coming months in the market, you know, whether or not any of them, I hope none of them do. But I have not had any indication that any of them are financially in trouble yet. but I don't know how long they can go without sales. I mean, do we think sales are going to stall a little bit? I haven't seen like a whole bunch of anything for sale. It's not like I've seen a flooding on the market of people selling their games or anything. Rental has gone up. Rental has gone up. And spoiler alert for the coming interview, I mean, when we talked to Jack, he said that he's had a lot of requests to buy games because people are now indoors and they have nothing to do, and a new pin would be great for them. So who knows how this is going to impact the industry. But you would have to think that the majority of people are trying to pinch pennies at this point more than the average. Well, of course. Sure they are. And when you're in a hobby like this, when really it's just a big expensive toy is really all pinball is, I mean, as much as we love it. But not a lot of people can keep throwing, you know, six grand at a toy every six months to get a new one or rotate them around. The other company that I think is going to take a big hit is Haggis Pinball. They were just trying to get their feet on the ground, and Damien called, and I felt really bad for them because they were really investing and betting on bringing Celts to TPF and to MGC. They were going to leave from TPF and rent a truck and take Celts to MGC, and that all fell apart. So, you know, they're just getting hit, you know, hit after hit. Their country burns on fire, and then they get hit with COVID-19, and, I mean, Australia just can't catch a break right now. Well, I've got money burning a hole in my pocket, so to speak, to replace my Beatles. And even I'm kind of like holding on to my acorns right now. Replace your Beatles? What are you doing with that? Didn't Gomez say he was going to replace that for you? Did you not get a replacement game? Gomez meant he will allow me to purchase another one. They're not just going to give me another one. I paid for them. I thought they were. No, no, no, no, no. This is still my time. It's your turn, Franchi. Oh, we'll go back into it. Steal my sunshine. It's right. All right, so moving on from TPF being canceled, on a good note, god damn it, sorry. On a good note, about seven months ago, Kim and I had ordered an Alice Cooper from Spooky Pinball, and they shipped it to me. Now, originally, they were going to bring it to TPF to have in their booth, and that was kind of the agreement that we made. But in light of recent events, Charlie and KT shipped it to us, and it arrived just this past Monday. Apparently, delivering pinball machines is an essential job. Excellent. All of my neighbors got to watch this big-ass semi-truck pull up down my street with a lift gate, and I run out there and unload a pinball machine and drag it into the house. So Alice Cooper Nightmare Castle is currently the only game set up in my living room right now because Kim didn't want to wait for me to make room in the garage or in the game room for it. So aside from that, the only other thing that I did was I finished my Batman Forever. From previous episodes, you know I had a Batman, a Dead East Batman done, but I restored a Batman Forever. And that's all finished and super excited about it. And it's all set up and playing nice. I've never played that game. It looks fun, though. Is it fun? It is fun. It's got some fun stuff on it. Of course, it's got the super DMD on it, you know, the big giant display on it. But it does have some fun shots on it. And, you know, I hate the, it's probably the worst movie of the Batman trilogy. But it's a fun game. It's got some neat stuff on it. Does it prominently display the nipples on the Batsuit and Robin suit? You know what? I have to go back and look at that now. I don't remember. That's the one thing I remember being. Yeah, everyone shat on that movie because of the nipples. That's all I remember. And remember the gratuitous crotch and ass shots? Yes. When they're putting their costumes on, it's like, and here's my ass. And here's your crotch. And now I have all four Batman pinball machines. That's awesome. Oh, you've got the Dark Knight one, too? I do. I have all of them. I'm jelly. You rehabbed that pinball machine so fast, man. I mean, I think it was only a couple episodes ago you said you had just gotten it, and you had some issue with the play field, and now it's done? Well, it took longer than what you think is super fast. It was actually more like six weeks, maybe, since I started taking it apart. And my poor wife, I left the play field on our dining room table for weeks. And I had the game set up in the living room as I was doing the cabinet and stuff in there. And so she was thrilled to death when I finally finished it. And what was so funny is the day I finished it was the same day the Alice Cooper arrived. So I literally put the Batman Forever on my pinball skates, pushed it out the front door, around into the garage. and two hours later the delivery truck showed up with the Alice Cooper and another pinball machine right back into the living room. But since that's her game, it's okay because it's her game. So, yeah, two new pinball machines on any day is a freaking awesome day. I think for the listeners' benefits, we need to back up a minute. What are pinball skates? You get them at Marco Specialty. Yeah, they're pretty much roller skates. It's a neat – Marco Specialty sells them. If you just type in pinball skates, you could probably pull them up. But it's an adjustable skate with two wheels and a bar, and then it has like a lever that you can lock them into the bottom by the leg levelers, and then you can hoist it up and lock it in place where it actually puts the pinball machine on wheels. So you can roll it around and then take them off when you get it to where you want it to go. I was not aware of this product. Pinball skates. Nice. Okay. Is there anything else? In your six weeks? We've got six weeks to cover for you. Well, not pinball related, of course. My kids got evicted from college from their dorm rooms, so they're taking their classes online. So that was on top of TPF being shut down, I had to drive two hours to the kids' college with a trailer and move them back home. The bedrooms were – I had pinball machines in their bedrooms because once they went to college, I thought, well, man, I've got all this extra space. So I set up, you know, two pinball machines in my daughter's room and four pinball machines in the boy's room. And I had to move all that shit out of there, you know, put those in the garage. First world problems. Well, you had, I mean, you had the joy of an empty nest for a little bit. And you retired and you were ready to live the good life. And then it all came back to, you know, full house. All those three-minute midnight rendezvous are all over now. No, they're not. We just have to go. There you go. So, Christian, what have you been up to? Well, man, it's been a crazy two weeks, mostly professionally for me because of the coronavirus. There are 50 to 100 emails I go through every day from my partners just to keep up with what's going on. And I'm on the executive committee for my group, so we have a number of emergency meetings, trying to restructure our call schedule and cover for physicians who are sick, making sure we take care of our office staff and that sort of thing. So there's been a lot of stuff behind the scenes that have taken up a lot of my free time, even though I'm working a lot less because there's many fewer cases in the operating room than have been done in the past. And so far, even though I'm dealing with a lot of patients in the operating room and in the hospital in general, I've avoided the coronavirus. So that's a plus. We've about 20 to 30 patients across our hospital system that have it and have tested positive. So I'm doing everything I can to keep myself and the family safe from that. But I haven't really had a ton of time for pinball, believe it or not, even with all the time that I should be having. Flash, fever! That is my home. That's better, man. But I've been having a lot of fun with my kids. They've been home, which has been actually good for me. They're really fun ages. They're 7 and 9, so we've been doing some homeschooling with them, which is exciting. I mean, my wife is a teacher, so she takes the brunt of that. But I've been doing science stuff with them, and we had like a human body that we dissected that had like obviously not a real body, guys, just like a squishy human body that I got. You can take out the organs and stuff, so that's been pretty fun. Like a life size? No, it's like a little tiny, it's like a foot long. Superstar's hot dog. But what I really need is a pinball class. I mean, I'd love to, I need to incorporate that into it. I need to bring him downstairs and teach him about pinball. That would be fun. But the biggest event last week and over the last two weeks was the Twippies, and you guys obviously had big moments in that show. But we had everyone downstairs on the couch down here, and we set up our command central with a gin and tonic and multiple screens, watching the streams, and freaking loved that show. It was great. You know, Carrie and Emoto did a great job. Of course, Jeff Patterson was amazing. But that was really, really fun. We had a great time with that. And I just found out a couple days ago that, speaking of Twip, that I won their drawing for the month and won a $30 Super Bowl swag gift card for March. So that was pretty awesome. Ooh. All right. Well, I'm not going to send you our shirt, and you can just get it in there. That's exactly right. I was going to say, I'm going to get a Super Bowl pinball shirt. Hell, yeah. That's hilarious if you ordered a Super Bowl pinball shirt. Oh, I'm definitely going to do that. I'm using my money for that. I'm just waiting until it's up there on the site so I can get it. Yeah, we've got to sign the deal with Jeff. Yeah. I'll take care of that. But that was my two weeks. It wasn't all that exciting. How about you, Chris? Well, I'd like to take a moment, first of all, to offer up a round of applause to our frontline Dr. Ken for doing this. Thank you. Thank you. One of many people who are out there on the front lines. Yeah, and we love you all, but not so much you because you're a ginger, but whatever. Thanks for that. So sweet. Boy, my couple of weeks in pinball haven't really changed much. Like I said in the last episode, I've been really focusing on I'm not going to say changing my game, but giving myself a game in pinball. I was just one of those guys that smacked the ball around. I could catch the ball if I wanted and I could pass it. I had basic skills. I just didn't always use them. I'm just like, ball's coming down the flip or just whack it. Don't care about the rules of the game or the modes and whatnot. and ever since I've been cooped up, like, I know my interest is no longer to get in a quick game before I go to work or whatever. It's like, look, I've got to kill time, and I need to play this as long as I possibly can. So what do these things do? You know, so I'm watching tutorials, and, yeah, my game has gotten, like, way better. You guys are in trouble next time I see you. All right. So, yeah, I've gotten real good. And then on top of that, all the Jaws Translator signed. And I sold. That was an ordeal. No, no, I had to. I had to kind of reformulate all of that because TPF being canceled. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Damn it. Yeah, so fuck you, Ed. What's your plan with that, Chris? Give us a scoop on how to order one of those. Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to do what I usually do, and that's offer it up through Facebook. but I don't want to do that just yet because I sold Jaws art prints, not translights, but art prints prior to the translights. And now everybody's sitting around going, where's my print? And I'm like, uh, and everyone's being really nice and patient to understand, but I'm like, I, you know, I can't even get tubes sent to me for crying out loud. So I'm trying to resolve that and get that taken care of. So in the meantime, I don't want to jump the gun. I'm not taking anybody's money, you know, until I know that these things are like, you know, I got tubes and everything packed up and ready to be shipped. So that'll probably happen within the next week or so. But it was quite an ordeal because they're so big. And I was signing them with this, like, chrome paint pen. So it's like a really shiny silver. And you've got to really let that stuff set up before you can stack them. So I could only sign five at a time. And then I'd just sit there and watch TV or play with Barlow. And then after about a good 10, 15 minutes, I'd slide them together, move them over, do the next five. So it took a long time to do. But I had, this time around, I had the people who print Stern's translights print the Jaws translights, and they came out fantastic. When you see these things in a, I should make a rule that nobody is allowed to buy one unless they buy a lit frame to put them in, because all translights look like shit when they're not backlit. And this thing just looks so amazing. It looks so shitty when it's not lit, all dark, and you can't see what's going on. But when you light this thing up, man, it's really cool. What were you going to say, Ed? I can't wait to get ours. Oh, my God, I can't wait. I already have a spot to cut on the wall. So thank you, Chris, in advance. That's going to be awesome. I got artist proofs for you guys. Yeah, buddy. Fuck yeah. Artist proof means free. Yeah. So, yeah, I've been doing that. My next project, I'm actually, you know, as much as it sucks being single and being quarantined, You know, because, like, I mean, how much can you talk to a dog who just, the only thing he answers back is, you know, fill up my food bowl. I'm starting to get shit done around the house, you know. Or you're going to see movies, right? Yeah, organized volume movies. I got a bazillion. I know anybody's seen the pictures. I got a bazillion, like, Blu-rays and DVDs and shit. And so I've had this giant mound of new movies on the floor that, because I have them all alphabetical. So when you add one, you've got to, like, pull one out and move it over a shelf and then go all the way down to the end. And then you freeze yourself up a space. Well, times that by about, like, 40 movies. So it was a huge pain in the ass. But I got that taken care of. And then I've had for the longest time a wall safe, like a digital wall safe that you put in the wall and, you know, you get the little code and all that. Because is this the one you put a picture on Facebook showing everybody where it was? First? Yeah, ever. Yeah, we'll be talking about this on our podcast. It may not be the smartest call, Chris. I'm just throwing it out there. Because you can't get into it. You don't know the secret code. You can rip that shit out of the wall, man. And why not just have it sitting in the middle of the living room if you're just going to tell anybody where it is? The only thing that's in it are my TPF collector coins. Those are very valuable. Yeah, right. Lie, lie, there's a lot of cash in there, too. One, you'll never know. No one will ever know. But anyway, so yeah, I got that in. Now, I have to go to the store and get hinges and a magnet because I want to hinge the artwork that's hanging over it. So that it opens, got to open like a door like they did in all the old Batman shows and stuff. Yeah, man, you need a secret button and a statue head or something to have that swing. Yeah, but that's not pinball related. You need a replica of whatever that picture was. You need to go back and watch an episode and see what the picture is. Batman didn't actually have a wall save. but a lot of the shows at that time period, like Get Smart, there was probably a ton of those. It seemed like every show that you watched where there was a burglar, he always went in and, like, you know, everyone was looking behind picture frames, and then they found the one that was hinged, and they opened it up, and they had the little. That was the bummer, though. I wanted to get the dial, you know, like the dial safe that goes in the wall. They don't make them anymore. Damn it. Yeah. But whatever, so that's fun. That was my. Oh, and my daughter came over yesterday, and we actually got to sit down and play Munsters with her. Nice. Because usually she comes over and she drops off groceries, she washes my dishes, takes out my trash, and then she has to go home to her dogs and whatnot. But her boyfriend was watching the dogs and stuff yesterday, so she got to stay a little bit, and we got to play some Munsters. So that was actually nice. First time, I've had a game, I think, for about a year. It's the first time I actually got to sit down and play with my daughter. Now, how is she playing pinball? I know she's been to a lot of conventions, and she's learned to appreciate the hobby to a point. Has she played a lot? She's good at the skills, you know, like the passing and the cradle and the ball and all that, but she's like me. She's never really paid attention to the rules. So when we were playing the Munsters, I'm like, okay, you hit Herman and now it's all green. You want to hit it again and the ball's going to get another ball and you want to hit that ball with the ball. So I'm explaining all that to her and she did well. She did well. So she's graduated in three short years from the double flipper hitter, you know, where you hit both at the same time, to a girl with some skill. And then on top of that, she's in the market for a new house, and she's making sure one of the priorities is that it has space for my Data East Batman game because she's going to take that, and she's very excited about that. Fuck yeah, man. That should make a father proud to have a girl who is thinking about that when she's buying a new house. Well, it is. Actually, I was going to sell the game because I just needed to make space for the Beatles, and she swooped in, and she's like, you are not selling that game. I grew up with that pinball machine, and I'm keeping it. Cool. So, yeah, that made me very happy. But that's it for my week in pinball, and I guess now we're going to go into the special quarantine pinball news. And now, special coverage of Pindemic 2020 with your super awesome pinball news crew. All right. Yeah, obviously, like everybody knows, there's not a whole lot going on in pinball news right now with the pandemic and all of that. A few things, a few bright spots, I suppose. The Twippies happened. Oh, yeah. Yes, they did. I won a Twippy. Yes, you did. And so did I, dude. I got that Twippy. You know, I feel like a dope because I'm the only one, I think I'm the only one, who wasn't aware that when we were making those videos that we actually won. because I was told, can you make a video assuming that you won? Because we're asking all the nominees to make a video, and I guess everybody else saw through that or something. I don't know because I'm the only one in the video that says, well, I'm being asked to make a video assuming that I won, and I don't know that I won or not, so I feel kind of awkward. No, because like Todd Tuck, he made like a losing video or a didn't win video, and I think he had a losing video. He did. He was very funny about it. I loved his video. I think most people were told to either make two videos or that they may or may not have won. And I think that was a genius way of doing that. Now I was told when Jeff he did tell us that we won I kind of feel like he did that because we had canceled the show and he was trying to throw a little bit of sunshine my way rather than telling me you know you might have won You know, I think he was just like, okay, we've got to throw out a bone here. And, you know, so he did tell us that we had won and we did our video. But I do think several people were asked to, you know, go either way with it. The things that were said about your video, Ed. I didn't see any of the commentary. I thought it was well done, but tell me what people said. It was that Ed just looked like he had lost his parents in a plane crash or something until the last minute, and then he smiles and goes, thanks, or says whatever he did. But the whole time you were just sitting there, you did not look happy at all. Ed doesn't strike me as an overly wear-his-emotions-on-his-sleeve kind of guy. I could be wrong about that. No, you're not. I'm pretty thick-skinned. And I get, most I get emotional if I do, and it has to do like with my family and my friends. People that I don't know, I don't give two shits about what people I don't know think about me or say or whatever. That's just from years and years of my prior career. But when things affect my family or my friends or things that I truly care about, you know, I get upset about those kind of things. But, yeah, we were told to do the video or asked to do the video. And people always refer to TPF as my show. And I truly try to share the spotlight with Paul and Kim. And Kim never wants to be, you know, she never wants to be in any of the videos and stuff. But Paul does sometimes. So I had Paul come over and we did the video together. And I let Paul do the acceptance speech, which was nice. I mean, he hit the nail on the head. It's really not an award for me or for Paul or for Kim or for, you know, but it's really for the community that won that award. And it's true. I mean, everyone refers to the Texas Pinball Festival as their show. It's my show or our show. And so that award, we share that with everybody. And we'll bring it to TPF 2021, and we'll have it. We'll let people take pictures with it. And I don't know. We'll do something. Well, yeah, because you could put on the best show in the world. But if there's nobody there, there's no party. Yeah, if there's no buy-in, exactly. Yeah, it's the people who are there who are having the fun that make it a good time and make it a good show. So, yeah, they're just as important. I completely understand that. Not to underscore, though, the amount of effort that you guys put into that show every year. I mean, you are well-deserving of that Twippy. And, you know, it's great that you're sharing it with everybody. And I know the show is a huge undertaking that you guys have every year. So the fact that it is as big as it is is a direct result of how much work you guys have put in. So, you know, kudos on that award, and you've definitely earned it. I didn't clear the way for you to talk so you could suck his dick. I'm not trying to suck dick, man. I'm trying to give him the kudos that he deserves. Guys, I'm right here. I'm right here. Ed kudos. Yeah. Okay, so let's try and pick. Let's talk about the important Twippy, the big Twippy, the best. Oh, the big Twippy. We had another member of the Super Awesome Pinball Show who won a trophy, and I know this is something that you've wanted for a while, Chris, so congratulations, man. Congratulations. You won the best art for the Munsters, And that's fucking awesome because that pin, hands down, had the best start last year. Thank you, boys. Yeah, that was awesome. Was I nervous up to the announcement or after I won? Yeah, we ever reported that you didn't win? I was nervous after I won. Was I nervous? Yeah, I was definitely nervous because you never know what people are going to like. You know, I even wasn't 100% sold that my art was the best start. And, you know, listening to the podcast where people were making their picks and all that, you know, it wasn't definitely a lock. You know, there were people, you know, bringing up other games. They were bringing up Black Knight. They were bringing up the Star Wars comic book edition. And, you know, so, yeah, I was definitely worried. Nothing's ever a shoo-in. Even after making that video, I wasn't like, oh, cool. You know, I was still like, I don't know if I won, you know. But, you know, like I said in the last show, I was like, I was praying that I won this year because there was no Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti) game. So I had a better chance without any zombie idiot. And so, yeah, I mean, people, some people don't give a shit and it shows, you know, they just don't care. I'm not going to name names, but there are people that really could give a crap that they get this award. And I think that's a shame, especially when it's voted on by people. When I know that the pinball fans out there were the people who picked my article, you know, overall, that means a shit ton to me. And, you know, that's why I made an acceptance video with myself on it because, you know, I wanted to thank everybody, you know, including the team that worked on the game. You know, if there wasn't a Munsters game there that John did and Dwight and everybody, you know, there'd be nothing for me to celebrate because it'd just be like artwork floating on an empty box. So, yeah, it was very cool. It means the world to me because, honestly, I've not won an award since, like, high school. So there's certainly nothing wrong with putting something up in your mantle that says everybody likes what you do, or at least a good portion. The bigger percentage, I suppose. It was well-deserved. Yeah. And, you know, I think everything, the majority of the awards, most of them, I think, were right along where I was feeling. At least if I had, you know, a say in it or whatever. There's some awards. I don't know how you how do you guys feel about one's like best pinball league? My opinion on that is like, how can you pick a favorite? It's more how many people can you get to vote for you? Because like, I'm sure I know bells and chimes one and I'm not trying to take away from their award at all. But like when I'm voting, I looked at the list and like none of them meant anything to me. If there was one in Michigan, I might have voted for it because, OK, well, that's home. That's what I know. Even though I don't know these people, I'll vote for it. I totally get your point there. You skip that one. Because you don't have to vote in every category. You just skip it. Exactly. And you're right, though. It does make it very hard to vote for, like, best pinball location, because there's just no way that everybody could visit everything. And so, but it is, like, Carrie and Emoto explained it. It is, you know, it's the people's choice. So, you know, if Bells and Chimes or Logan's, was it Logan's Arcade that won? No, that's the league we're talking about. Oh, I know, I know. Oh, yeah, location, yeah. Best location. And, yeah, they got the most votes. Congratulations to them. So they got the most votes, and that's what the awards is. Absolutely. I feel weird when I don't fill in the slot, you know. It's like I'm cheating or skipping something. But there's some things I just didn't know. I had to pick a lot of them because I just didn't know. I just, when I say a lot, there's, you know, four or five that I just had no idea. I mean, I saw, you know, I can't, and I don't vote on something I don't know about. So you pass over that one. You let the people that are into that category vote for those things. That's a great point. Yeah, I mean, I think the competitive people, the competitive pinball scene, are going to be much more tuned into the pinball leagues out there. And even the ones that are, I mean, they're going to vote for the ones that are close to home, I would think. But I'm really happy that Bells and Chimes won, not only because, you know, the San Antonio, Texas chapter is awesome, But, dude, I don't fucking know. All I know is that the San Antonio chapter has Lauren Gray in it and a bunch of other people who are really cool people in pinball. But the Bells and Chimes in general, I think people voted for that just because you could represent a lot of different chapters with that vote. It wasn't just one. But it underscores why this vote is tough, because there's so many different people out there that only know a few things. Would Wonka win if more people were exposed to that for best game of the year? I mean, Jersey Jacks are less commonly found on location than Stern games. So are they going to have an edge just at baseline? I think that's been a three-year-long debate. Would Jersey Jack do better if there were more games en route? Right. All right, so what else about the Twippies? Oh, well, you know, of course I had to have my moment, you know, of controversy. Yeah. You know, I just can't win. I've decided that my sense of humor is not normal. It's Abby normal. You just now figured that out. Yes. Yeah, I did. I honestly did just now figure it out. We were talking about this before the show, and I said, you know, I don't understand if I think something is funny, I think that everyone should think it's funny. But for those who might have missed it or don't know what I'm talking about, I introduced nominees for best streamer. And my joke was, thank God we have streamers, because otherwise I'd be sitting around in my underwear having a webcam chat with your sister. Which, you know, that wasn't necessarily the joke. It was then there was a pause, and then I made this kind of ew face, like I was trying to identify with the crowd listening, like that sounds disgusting. So all in all, at the end of the bit, I thought the bit was funny. But I got called a fucking pervert. And I'm just like, you know what, you know, we're all just trying to entertain and have a good time, especially in this time where we have to unfortunately have these awards all in the comfort of our own home rather than celebrating it all together in a big room. You know, I was just trying to have a good time, just trying to make a funny joke. I'm just going to throw it out there. I'm going to throw it out there for you. From now on, before you do anything like that, let Christian and I screen it first. That's right. Just let us screen it. I know you will, Chris. And there are times when I don't know if you were truly just trying to make a joke or if you were trying to push the envelope and be provocative just to be provocative. But from talking to you after the awards, it seems like you truly were just trying to make a joke that you thought that everyone would buy into and chuckle with and just say, you know, that that was funny and move on and not see any potential for controversy from that statement. I guess that's why everybody has their own sort of favorite comedian, because there's different flavors of comedy out there. And, you know, like I, for one, you know, never understood why Sam Kinison was funny. But, you know, I could think about 80 people who would beat me up for saying that. So I guess I have to think of it that way. It's like, you know, I may think it's funny, but somebody else may not think it's funny. So I'll just say if I offended you, I am truly sorry. It was not my intention. I was hoping to entertain you, bring a little light into your quarantine and have a little chuckle. But apparently my brand of chuckle is not everybody's. So if I tarnished your night with grossness and Everson butthead humor, I apologize. Just say I'm sorry and let's move on. I'm sorry. Let's move on. No. This is the common thread, man. Whenever you are out there putting stuff out to the masses, you really have to shoot for the 80%, right? The 80% of people who are going to appreciate what you're doing because you're always going to have haters. And there's always going to be a chunk of that population that thinks you suck. and you just have to roll with the punches. If you're true to yourself, that's all that matters. You know, I'm sure plenty of people thought that that was off-color and, you know, weren't crazy about it. But, you know, it is what it is. Now I want to go back and do more jokes like that. Thanks. Oh, shit, I'm sorry, man. I fucked that up for everybody. No, no, don't. If you're representing an organization like This Week in Pinball, do not be yourself and make funny jokes that only you think are funny. right try to think of the brand and be a little more generic i think that might be a good uh a good rule to live by even though you you know people love you for your individuality so there's got to be a balance man well yeah there were some people that thought it was funny chris you're more of an in-person comic you're not a you know he doesn't always transcribe well on video or on video so you know in person you know you because you have it yeah you're just an in-person comic See, this particular person who made this comment that I was a fucking pervert probably never met me. Because whenever people meet me, I get the same crap. Oh, you're just a big teddy bear. Well, I'm sure if this person knew that I was just a big teddy bear and I said that, but I obviously wasn't trying to be gross. I was just making a joke and I wasn't really imagining your sister naked. Let's move on, shall we? Yeah, sure. Let's do that. So, overall impressions of the awards, I think that Carrie and Emoto did a great job, you know, considering there's a lot of critics out there, which is a shame. You know, God damn it. At the last minute, they had to pull this thing together. The whole thing that everybody was talking about leading up to this show was it's going to be nice to reconnect with all of our pinball pals. It's the only thing we have and probably the only thing we're going to have for a long time. Right. And everyone's got to come out and shit on it. It's like, come on, really? You know, like, and I shouldn't say everybody. Like, especially, you know, I know Carrie and Imoto listen to the show, and, you know, it's not everybody. But even if it's a handful of people, like, why, you know, didn't your parents bring you up right? You know, they say, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. Just talk about what you thought was good, you know. There's obviously something bad to everything. But why discuss it? Why shine a light on it? I've got to say, man, the majority of people, I feel like the majority of people who watch the show felt positive about it. I felt like Jeff needs to get a ton of kudos for what he did because his ability to kind of roll with the punches over the last few, finding new hosts, TPF canceling, making it an all-digital show, all of those hurdles he kind of got through, and that's freaking awesome. I've thanked him a few times personally, and I think that other people out there who appreciated the show should let Jeff know because he doesn't do this for any sort of profit. it he just does it because he loves the hobby and um he he did a really amazing thing making this actually happen this year yeah he did it it's tough i can i can tell you from my perspective of you know like having a game come out and having people go it's so it looks like shit like there's there's been times over the past three years that i've considered bailing right out of pinball like i'll still keep my games and play them but not be a part of the community not do podcasts not do art packages, like just remove myself from it. And you just got to let that stuff roll. There's always going to be some shithead out there that's got to say some crappy stuff. And I can honestly say, thankfully, the majority of the comments on my work have been positive. And that's just what I focus on. And I don't, you know, listen, I'm not going to let people rain on my parade, you know. And Jeff's actually doing a good job of doing that, too. I'm sure, you know, those little people nipping at his ankles and saying shitty stuff, you know, it stings a bit. But he knows he did a good job. For sure. Absolutely did a good job. And I was a little worried after watching it that he might decide that was the best way to do it every year moving forward. But on the Monday this week in pinball at the end when he kind of talked about it, he says that he's looking forward to doing it live at TPF 2021, which I was like, yes. Yeah, definitely. Nothing beats a room, you know, the electricity, you know, of a room full of pinball people celebrating. the best of pinball. You know, that's just, you know, we only had that one so far. But, I mean, nothing, you know, and that's not to take away from what happened this year because it was a series of unfortunate, you know, incidents. Oh, they did awesome for what they had. I mean, they really did. Yeah. They really did. I've got to say, I didn't know that Carrie and Emoto weren't in the same room until late in the show when there was some obvious arm motion that was cut off by the game scheme. I thought that they were together. And, I mean, that just speaks volumes. you can say what you want about the presentation, but given the hurdles that they had, I mean, they did a phenomenal job of presenting each category and just going with it throughout the whole show. Well, everybody, too. You know, there's all the people like Kristen, you and Sarah, and myself, and all the people who got together and made these videos, you know, the nominees. You know, we all got contacted at the last minute. It's not like we had months and months to prepare for stuff like, you know, Jeff relied on some people. And also, speaking of relying on people, I forget his name now, but Cary's brother did all of that animation. Oh, yeah, with the trophy and stuff? He did that? Yeah, all the transition animations and all of that stuff. And I don't think he got, he was in the credits, but I don't know if anybody mentioned him, but that was a huge undertaking. you know that was wow that was really professional looking yeah definitely i was really impressed i made when i sent my mom a text message that said i had won i'd send her screenshots of like you know where it said you know best art and then where it said my name and it had the the artwork in the background like i i sent her like five or six screenshots of the whole process of winning the award because i i liked that you know it was all so nice but man yeah she printed that shit out and put it on the fridge. That's on the fridge right now. Probably. Probably. That's the first thing she does whenever anything good happens. Yeah, she goes on her Facebook, oh, look what my son did, you know. So, yeah, that was awesome. But, you know, we didn't talk about Dr. Penn and Mrs. Penn presenting their awards. Sheh. Yeah. I mean, we all are dressed up and formal. It looks like you all had formal wear on, and we did not mess around. I told Sarah. I mean, Sarah's the kind of person who is just like, if I tell her we have something to do, she's like, all right, let's do this and let's get it done. So we went downstairs. I kind of said, you know, we have to do this like we would do it at the show. We have to put on, you know, the formal clothing and do it up. I had my twippy tie on that Kaneda freaking called out as lame on the chat, which I took offense to Kaneda. I think it's freaking awesome. You know what? Fuck you. I'm so fucked. But my twippy tie with Canada, Voldemort, pinball Voldemort, he who must not be named. But yeah, he said he couldn't condone my tie. So I threw it on. It had the pinball logo on it. And it took us, I would say it took us 13 attempts to make that happen. And on the 12th attempt, I was like, you know what, fuck this. I am going to get in the right mindset here. So I took a fireball shot and that was all it took to get us ready to rock. No, it was exactly what I needed. I picture Sarah not wearing a dress, but she's wearing, like, a nice top and then, like, jogging pants, like, down where you can't see. Oh, that's totally her style. I do, 100%. But, no, she had a legit dress on. She had her. Oh, because you were dressed up for the anniversary, right? Yeah, man. Well, we decided to do it right because it was our anniversary, and we were like, let's just get dressed up and do the twippies. And, anyway, it was fun. It was fun to do. Yeah, it was so much fun. We had a great time. we're really happy that Jeff asked us to do it and we love the toy piece in general so hopefully next year will be even better I was talking to Jack, Jersey Jack Jack Lanieri prior to the interview today and he asked me what are you going to do next year for an encore for your shenanigans, I said I'm going to sit in front of a fireplace with some starfish oh poor Jack took a lot of heat for that he was on there a lot And I think he had four or five segments on that. Yeah. All right. Moving on to the next thing in the news. The hobby gives back during this pandemic, specifically talking about Mezel Mods and Titan Pinball helping make face shields for medical personnel. And this is awesome. Really, really awesome. Super awesome. As might have seen. Yeah, super awesome. The people who are in the medical field and are dealing with coronavirus patients, they have to put a ton of gear on. I don't know if you've seen videos of people gowning up before taking care of these patients, but it's a huge process. And when we get called for intubations in the ICU, it can be intense because you have a lot of precautions to take, obviously, and that takes time. There's gowns and two sets of gloves and N95 mask, which is like a super impermeable mask for viruses and often another mask on top of that. And it's a lot of stuff. And it's part of the reason why supplies are in short supply, because there's so many things that you need to take care of these patients. So, you know, we all know the pinball community is awesome. And I saw this post on Facebook that said that Titan Pinball and Mezzomods are making this equipment to donate to hospital workers. And it's basically a face shield that is cut out. They have these, they're using their machines to actually cut out, you know, an impermeable kind of, it's not glass, but it's like a moldable plastic face shield that you can put over your face with an elastic band around your head and keep you from any sort of coughing or droplets, really. So this shield can keep you from getting any sort of droplets on you that you might get while you're in a patient or in very close contact with them. I believe the technical term isn't the technical term airborne cooties? Airborne cooties, yes. If you look up in the medical textbook, it's there. Yeah, I mean, this is a huge thing because people are trying to protect themselves any way they can, And hospitals aren't immune to these shortages. So we have a lot of stuff left at our hospital, the face masks and gowns and that sort of thing. But if a, quote, surge were to happen where a lot of patients were to get sick all at once and present, then it would be difficult to keep that supply going. So people like the Mezzalong community, Titan Pinball, you know, thank you guys for doing whatever you can do. I saw Taylor James Rees from this podcast had posted something about trying to make intubation shields with his equipment, which is basically a clear box that helps you intubate a patient without the risk of having particulates or any sort of virus exposure there. So there's been a lot of help from the pinball community and all medical personnel really appreciate that. Anything anyone can do is a huge help. So thank you guys for stepping up to the plate. And even at the local level, we've got people here, and I'm sure in your area too, but our local Facebook groups for the pinball community, we've got a gentleman named Chris Kling. He's making caps with the little buttons on the side so the little elastic hoops don't have to go over your ears. They can go up on the little buttons on your hat. And my mother-in-law is making some of those too and donating them. And it is amazing just to see the community coming together and making these things. I can't make anything. Drawing doesn't really help in this situation. Well, let me draw you a nice picture to maybe help you relax when you're not working. You're creating podcasts to entertain people when they're stuck at home. That's your contribution. Yeah, but this is to help the medical people out. Yeah. You know me. I want to help. Yeah, that's super cool. So, Tim and Kristen and whoever from Titan, way to go. Eric, for sure. Eric from Titan? Okay. All right, so that does it for our pandemic news report. Now we're going to move on to let you know who won the big spooky pinball contest. That would be our wall plaque from Brad Brad Albright, albrightillustration.com. This is a very cool thing. We described it in our last show. It's like a build-up 3D wooden plaque that was actually lifted. The artwork is from another TPF collector's item because the artwork was lifted off the poster for this year's TPF poster, which was a cowboy playing pinball with his lady sitting side saddle next to the game. And the winner is Trey Cruz, who got the correct answer of what was the original name of the Rob Zombie pinball machine before Spooky got the license for Rob Zombie, and that was Pinball Zombies from Beyond the Grave. Congratulations, Trey. Hey. Good job. Okay, and now we have a new contest. And this is kind of a weird one. We're taking a different approach here. I talked to Chris from Cointaker, and he said, Hey, let's give some of your pinball shirts away because they don't sell. Oh. If you guys aren't aware of this, there is a collection of four T-shirt designs that Cointaker sells exclusively that I designed for them, and they're available on their website. So here's what we're going to do. So go to Cointaker.com and go to apparel and go to Franchi Apparel. And under there, you will find four t-shirts that have my name at the beginning of the title. Buy one of those shirts and you are entered to win the other three that you didn't buy. So what they're going to do is they're going to keep this contest open for two weeks from the time that this airs. So you'll have two weeks to buy one shirt. By doing so, you will be entered to win the other three. And I don't know how many winners he's going to have. I forgot to ask, but there is going to be more than one. Let's just say there's going to be 20. Sorry, Chris, if this gave away a 60-shirt, I told you you don't mind. Yeah, so there's going to be more than one winner. So that's basically what we're doing now. So go over to Cointaker.com right now and buy one of my T-shirt designs and a bunch of other stuff. Because let's face it, we're all bored and it's fun to get a package in the mail. And you're entered to win. So there we go. Very cool. We'll be right back. Guess what? I got a fever. And the only prescription is the super awesome pinball show. Oh, yeah! Super. Yeah. This show is sponsored by Cointaker, distributor of brand new, full-size, authentic Stern pinball. Chicago gaming, raw thrills, arcade games, and much more. Also, a full line of dramatic pinball mods, LED flipper kits, speaker lights, custom laser LED toppers, playfield protectors, Valley Williams parts, pinball apparel, and much more. Get the latest releases and glam out your game room with Cointaker. Everything at your fingertips at Cointaker.com. Get your game on. Let's face it, being sick is better than being in school. But it does get a little boring. I mean, how many Laverne and Shirley reruns can a guy watch? That's why this pocket pinball game is just what the doctor ordered. It's lots of fun, and it's small enough to play anywhere. And the built-in alarm tells you when it's time to get more sympathy. Mom, I need something to drink. You gotta milk a good thing for all it's worth. Pinball, the unboard game by Nintendo. Well, hey there, pinheads. This is international pinball sensation Jack Danger. when I'm not polishing my numerous streaming awards, I'm listening to the Super Awesome Pinball Show. Well, actually, I have it running in the bathroom, but it's on, you know, to help boost their numbers. Flippers are both up for my pals here at the Super Awesome Pinball Show, and let my dudes know that you appreciate the work that they put in, and, I don't know, shoot them a sexy message or two on the Facebooks. Okay. Now, back to our program. Well, it's about frickin' time. I am the Dog of Hellfire, And I bring you the Super Awesome Pinball Show. It's the coolest show. Welcome back, everybody. And now we're going to take you to a brand new interview we just did with Jack Lenary of Jersey Jack Pinball on April 3rd. Jack shared with us a lot of secrets about the future of Jersey Jack. So we're sure you'll really enjoy it. Check it out. All right, so our guest tonight is none other than Jersey Jack. Jack and Mary founded the Jersey Jack Pinball Company in 2011 after a number of years as a game distributor. And Jersey Jack is coming up on 10 years of making games now. In that time, they've made five great games. They made Wizard of Oz, Hobbit, Dialed In, Pirates of the Caribbean, and most recently Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which is my greatest of all time, I think. And Jack and J.J.P. have won a number of awards, and most recently three Twippies at the 2019 Twippy Awards for Best Theme, Best Animation and Display, and Best Light Show for Willy Wonka. So congratulations for that, Jack. That was cool. Thank you very much. And on behalf of the group, I hope we passed the audition. A little jump. I think so. It was, well, yeah, you know, it's a team and group effort, and all those things really, they go to the passionate people in the company. It's very cool to be recognized, but, you know, our players that just shoot our games around and have fun and all the pictures and all the comments. It's really very humbling. It's very nice to see. Were you watching the show, Jack? What did you think of the Twippies this year? I was watching, yeah. I thought maybe I should have stood up instead of sat by the fireplace when I watched it. You know, I see for Steve it looked like he needed a training bra or something when he stood up. Other than that, I think. I think it was great. I think they did a great job, Moto and her partner. Carrie Hardy. Yep. I think they did a great job under the circumstances, and I liked the outtakes. It was very, very cool, a lot of fun. It was great. You know, and hopefully next year we're all there hugging each other, and, you know, it goes back to how it was. I'm looking forward to that, but it was very cool. Absolutely. You guys have done pretty well with the Twippies last year with Pirates and this year with Wonka. Nobody was booing us from the back of the room anyway. That's right. Nobody stepped on my Twippy and broke it. He'll never let that down. Without telling the poor bastard that it was a joke. This is the one thing we left out. Didn't anybody tell Mike? Nope. Well, you know what? It was priceless, and, you know, it was one of those things that will go down in twippy history. Absolutely. Well, yeah, you know, speaking of that, everybody was asking me what I was going to do next year for an encore, basically, and I said, I'm going to sit next to a fireplace with some starfish. there was one of your one of your acceptance speeches was out in like the on a boardwalk somewhere by a beach where was that yeah so uh you know i went down the jersey shore i had this great idea i said uh you know i'm missing my camera person which is my daughter so my wife had to step in because she's who i'm quarantined with and so um you know the day i was doing that It was just this big windstorm and raining and cruddy. And I said, okay. You know, I knew who the winner was of the best show. We know it's Texas. So kudos. Yay. Yeah. So everybody involved, I mean. And, you know, it was really cool that I got to announce that last year and I got to announce that this year. And I hope I get to announce the same thing next year, really. So after I did that one and there was no like take one, take two, take three, like Jen would do, Jen would say something like, you know, maybe we try this again. So my wife was like, okay, are we done now or what? Can I go back and do my puzzle or whatever the hell she was doing? I'd give her photo credits. I said, all right, let me go. One of the suggestions was maybe sit by the fireplace and be like Ozzy. I could warm my butt by the fireplace. So that's where I went. Oh, that's good. Yeah, that's where I went. It was okay. And the day before, it was a beautiful, sunny day, and the day after, it was a beautiful, sunny day. Oh, no. Well, getting into the interview, so I know you've done a million pinball podcasts in the past, and you've answered all these questions, so we won't go too much into the past, but for people who may not be overly familiar with you, tell us a little bit about your backstory and how you started Jersey Jack Pinball, what you did before that, and what made you want to start a pinball company? So, you know, I'm 46 years old now. I'm in the industry 45 years somehow. In 1975, I started repairing electromechanical pinball machines. I thought I would do that for a couple of months before I was accepted to go to school to be an electrical engineer, and I decided to take a few months off, and I got this job, you know, fixing pinball machines. I was a pinball mechanic at major colleges and universities in New York City metropolitan area, and I just fell in love with it. And, you know, I morphed to become an operator. Then later on, I started pinballsales.com further down the road. You know, I had amusement centers, and I had a lot of games on location. I must have repaired thousands of games. I mean, thousands of games over all the years. You know, my electronics training was kind of like from CB, a bunch of my friends. We were all self-taught, and all of us went and got our second-class FCC licenses. When we were like 14, 15, 16 years old, we thought we would work like at radio stations or stuff like that. So we got our FCC licenses. So I had to learn all the theory and all of everything that went with the whole license process, which probably I forgot most of it. So about 1999, I started pinballsales.com to sell really commercial games to the home. And it's hard to believe nobody was doing it at the time. You know, full-line distributors would sell games around the holidays, and you'd get the taillight warranty as soon as the truck pulled out of the driveway. That was it. And they didn't want to go back and take care of the customers. And even though I'm Jersey Jack, you know, I'm born and bred in Brooklyn, so I'm a New Yorker. So, again, going back to what's going on in New York right now really hurts a lot. You know, and really, pinball sales, my first big customer was FAO Schwarz. In the first year I was in business, we seamlessly delivered and sold $1.4 million worth of games that went to the home for FAO Schwarz. Wow. And that was in 2000. That was just through FAO Schwarz? Just through FAO, right. My distributor friends in the industry thought I was out of my mind. They said, you know, nobody wants to play these games at home all year. You're going to be out of business, and that's a ridiculous thing to do. And, you know, selling games to home customers was a lot different because they were a lot more demanding. I remember I sold Christmas in 1999. I sold Star Wars Episode I. I delivered it to a lady's house, and those days I would go out on deliveries and stuff like that. And the lady, you know, she bought the game from FAO for like $7,500, which was a lot of money at the time for a game. You know, they cost us about $4,200. And I would make about $1,000 and they'd make the rest. And the lady said, hey, what's that? What's that? And I'm like, what's what? And she's pointing to like when lights blink in the back of the game, there were these wires that you could see. And I said, oh, those are the wires that connect the head of the game to the body of the game. And she said, well, I don't want to see that. Well, I'm sorry. I was in the Hamptons. Lady had plenty of money. I could probably remember her name if I thought another minute, and I don't want to do that because then she'll call me telling me the game's busted. I'm sure she listens. I said, you know, I didn't make the game. That's how the game is built. What do I know? And she gave me a wrath voice. She said, well, this is not a commercial game anymore. This is for home. And if I have to see those wires, you take this back. I don't want it. And I said, okay, I'll be right back. You know, I left with my helper, Dave, and we went to town. We found the store. We bought black construction paper and a staple gun. I came back. I stapled the black construction paper around the wires. I colored in the staples with the black magic marker. And I learned that, you know what, selling games to home customers is different than putting games on a location. I just learned that Jack Guarnieri created the first pinball mod. There you go. Cord concealer, TM. Wire. I think so. Yeah, wire hider. There you go. Call it what you want. That's the first pinball mod right there. Yeah, so, you know, then we were importing a lot of pinball machines from Europe at the time. my friends at Mondial who owned Premier Gottlieb my friends at Mondial distributing Dick's Arkesian Rest in Peace actually went to Europe and bought container loads of pinball machines for me from a lot of the countries that he sold pinball machines to in the years before and we bought Adam's Families for $400 and Tails and I'm talking like games like Creature from the Black Lagoon, I might have like 15 of them in the building, and you can come and pick. Well, I like the head of that game and the body of that game, because they have the right kind of colors, and they only cost us $400 anyway, so yeah, we'll take the head off that one and put it on that body, and do all that stuff. So after selling hundreds and hundreds of those games, all through 2000, and to the beginning of 2000, somewhere in there, I guess it was still 2000, I became a distributor for Stern Pinball And the first game we really sold was still in a Sega box that was you know it was Holly Davidson And that was the first games we sold for Stern And we sold thousands of Stern games I mean I was their number one distributor for many many years We came up with the Platinum Edition Monopoly game where I had an idea. We'll make 40 games. We'll donate one to charity. We made gold Austin Powers. We had an idea to take Family Guy and turn it into Shrek. You know, Plax the Spider-Man, gold Lord of the Rings. all those kind of games you know I was involved with all of those games different themes they were doing I mean we worked very very closely together and I still today have a lot of respect for Gary Stern and all those people a lot of people in the building are friends of ours and you know we kept them all going when Pat Lawler designed Monopoly I knew that was an important game we got behind it, Stern didn't have a marketing budget and we did all we could to push it and promote it and get those games out there to operators and to home customers. And, you know, Sopranos, geez, we probably sold, I don't know, 500 or 600 Sopranos. I probably sold 500 or 600 Pirates of the Caribbean, which is why I wanted to do that license again because of the appeal of it. And, you know, we got into 2008 in the last big recession. I don't know what this recession will be called or depression. But when we got into 2008 and 2009 and 2010, those were not good years for pinball. They weren't good years for the economy. A lot of people felt that, you know, the economy was the reason that pinball wasn't doing anything. And I felt a little different. I felt that, you know, maybe we could make something that's more full-featured featured and bring in new technology that hasn't been introduced to pinball in, you know, 10 or 12 or 14, 15 years. And, you know, I had a choice to make. I really did. My choice was, do I stop selling brand-new pinball machines, or do I create a brand-new company that designs and builds brand-new pinball machines with the latest technology? And I like to joke that I chose the easier of the two by starting Jersey Jack Pinball. Well, certainly the better. Yeah. Well, it was, you know, it was started by our customers who believed in us. We all know about the whole pre-order thing and how that works and doesn't work for certain people and works for other people. And, you know, I put everything into Wizard of Oz. I mean, we didn't put the kitchen sink in the game. We put the whole plumbing department in there. That's right. That's what we did. Yeah. When Woz came out, I mean, it blew everyone away, and you've since then kind of set yourself apart from the pack by being more of like a high-end pinball experience. Was that what you were trying to do initially going out? Yeah, I mean, I think in the short thought process, I believe, you know, look, since I was a technician and operator, distributor, and I had the knowledge of being a lover of playing pinball, I wanted to keep the most beloved things in the game, but I wanted to introduce the new technology that wasn't introduced yet. And that was really important to all of us. And, you know, we joked that we were making the greatest game in the world when we were doing Wizard of Oz. And then after we were done with Wizard of Oz, we said, well, we want Wizard of Oz to be the worst game we ever made. Well, that kind of leads into my next question, which is, you said before that you want to make games that have things in there that people don't even know they want yet. So how hard is it to keep pushing that envelope and coming up with new ideas to innovate? We have some brilliant people in the company. They're very passionate. They live and breathe, eat, sleep, pinball. They love it. They're not just getting paid and going to work and doing a job and going home. So I think the innovation of what we do and the invention of new and different things will continue with every single game that we do. We're going to blow people away with every game we do. That's the idea. Like, so to speak, has any of the wind come out of your sails from the time you started until now because you, you know, like you said, you had set out to make games that people didn't even know they wanted yet. but then over the past few years you've realized how critical a lot of the pinball fans can be, and has that sucked any of your motivation out, or are you just doing a good job overlooking that and still trying to stay the course? No, I love it. We're not staying the course. We're stepping on the gas. We're setting up a brand-new factory right now in Illinois. We're hiring great people. If anybody wants to join the team, send me an email. We're hiring great people right now. We need everybody. We need people that are on the line. We need people in the parts department, people in all kinds of areas of the company. So, you know, when people say things, whether they're good, good things you take in stride and it humbles you, and it's really nice to hear those things. The naysayers, the people that say, oh, you're never going to do it, you're never going to build it, you're never going to ship it, it's not going to happen. those people just energized me even more. So, you know, tell us we can't do it, okay? Just tell us we can't do it. And at this stage, it's a little different because, you know, people came to work with me at a time when we didn't prove anything, where it was just my big mouth saying, we're going to make this great game, and people believed that and trusted me and our team. And, you know, they left places where they were told, well if you go to work for Jack you know you're never going to work for this company anymore and they were like okay fine and I told those people if you come to work you know with us you won't really need another job if that's your choice and I'm happy to say that that's that's what's happened you know when you're an entrepreneurial thinker if I could put myself in that category and you want to do something I didn't I didn't do this for me I just set out I wanted to make great games. I didn't realize the commentary and the negative and the positive and the celebrity or the, you know, I didn't think about all of that part of it. I really put my rose glasses on and tricked myself and sold myself that I knew it was going to be really hard. I didn't think it would be that hard. And you get through it. You keep going. You know how you don't lose guys, you just don't give up. So that's how you don't lose. And now that you mentioned that you've got the new building in Chicago and you're hiring people, you've kept a pretty steady pace as far as your releases have gone. With a larger building and a larger staff, do you hope to accelerate your offerings? You know, hope is good when I'm in the pew on Sunday. It's not about hope. It's the plan, okay? The plan is to do more, to feel more of what our customers want, and to step up a little bit more. You know, we outgrew the building in Jersey. We outgrew the building in Chicago. We talked about it a lot. You know, we get another building in Jersey. We get another building in Chicago. We do this. We do that. And, you know, I had to think about it when I first started the company, if I was moving everybody from Chicago to Jersey, you know, how it was going to work. And, you know, we came to the conclusion right now is the right time to do what we're doing. And that's what we're doing. And, you know, the expectation is there, and, you know, everybody's really excited, and they're all motivated to do the best job. So what parts of the company were in Jersey, and what parts were in Chicago? So in Jersey, we built what Chicago designed. Okay. So you were the manufacturing piece in Jersey itself. Right. Okay. So, I mean, New Jersey is kind of part of the DNA of the company. Is it personally difficult? for you to have to leave and move to Chicago, or is it just the next big adventure? I'm not moving, personally. Okay. But I will say this, you know, Jersey Mike's is a company that was founded in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, a few miles away from where we are. Right. And you know the owner of that company. You know, Jersey Mike's makes subs in New Jersey, and Jersey Mike's makes subs in Illinois. Right. So. And Texas. And Texas. I've been to one in Texas, I think, too, you know, and Wisconsin. Johnson. So they're all over the place. So I don't, I don't have a, you know, again, when you have a business, you do what's best for the business. You don't do what's best for you. Okay. You don't, you don't take it personal. People that, you know, that old saying, you know, it's not personal, it's business, right? So think about the business first, when you, when you lead something, when you start something, when you operate something, The business is a living, breathing entity, and it needs to get sunshine and water, and it needs to grow, and you need to give it the right things it needs. And this is probably the best thing it needs right now is to be all under one roof in Illinois with everybody there. What do you see as the primary benefit of moving out there? What do you see as the pros of that big move? I mean, this is a big move for you guys and a joining of two different components of the company. I think the thing about it is that people that design something, they can walk a few feet away and see how it's going together or how it's not going together. And they could be right there. True, you know, they used to do Zoom calls and FaceTime and things like that. But there's nothing like being able to put your hands on it. You know, if people want to stay late, they want to come in early, they want to be there on a weekend or something like that, it just makes it easier. Jack, you said that you're staying put, basically. So with everything under one roof in Chicago and you still in Jersey, is your role going to change at all or modify slightly? Well, you know, I've been on many, many flights all over the world. none lately obviously but I expect to be you know in Chicago I expect to be at the factory I expect to still be connected to everything the things I work on and the things I do most days there were a lot of days where I went to a building in Lakewood and I never got into the factory at all I would hear banging and clopping and knocking and things like that and drilling and all that kind of stuff but some days I was just piled under in my office doing what I'm doing and I never even got back to the factory, sad to say. You know, it'll be different, but it'll be better. And I think it's part of an evolution of the company and it's good for the growth of the company and good for the future of the company. So sometimes, you know, what they say about making a cake, you know, you have to break some eggs to bake a cake. So, you know, it's all good. I think it's a good thing. Well, it's a shame because Elks Grove Jack has such a nice ring to it. You know, when I got that name, it was from writing a magazine article in Replay Magazine, the industry's premier trade magazine, and Eddie Adlam wanted some kind of pen name for me, and, you know, he picked Jersey Jack, which I hated, you know, because I'm not from Jersey originally. And I'm like, I called him up and I said, you know, I don't like that name. And he says, well, we thought of some names that are worse than that, so now you're jerking it down. Well, it could be worse. You know Bob Ross, the guy who would paint all the landscapes on TV? The little trees? Yeah, he wanted to change that fro hairdo that he had. And they wouldn't let him because all of his branded paints and paintbrushes and all that had this little logo of him with this little fro hairdo. and they said you can't change it because people won't recognize you anymore. So he had to live the rest of his life with that big round fro hairdo. So it couldn't work. He taught a lot of people. Is that how you learn how to paint, Chris? No, no. But you know what? I watched it a few times growing up as a kid, maybe just a handful of times. But under quarantine, I've been watching it like crazy and now I want to paint. I think some of your artwork has some of his influence in it. He did paint a lot of hexagons, if I remember correctly. Oh. Who's the dude at Williams that made everybody with the pointy elbows? What was his name again? Remember all those Williams games where everybody had pointy elbows? I've never heard that, but I want to look now. Oh, yeah, come on. Look at all those old Williams games. Go back to a lot of the Williams EM games. Go through your book. I should really know the artist's name if I brought it up, but everybody had, like, pointy elbows. They were just pointy. That's for our next contest now. Who is the pointy elbow artist? All those guys with the EMs are looking at their games right now. Pointy elbow artist on Williams pinball machines. We'll wait while you go look. Yeah, exactly. Go ahead. All right, man. So with the new factory, you've got this. Are you expanding production? Is this going to give you new abilities in terms of the amount of games you can make? Or do you have multiple lines here? or is it about the same size as it was before? No, it's bigger. The building's significantly bigger and has more office space and has room for everything we want to do right now. And who knows? Maybe in a few years we outgrow that building too. All right. So one of the most popular events in Chicago is the Expo, and some other companies have tours. Are you guys going to open your doors and maybe have a Jersey Jack tour during Expo season? It's possible. It's possible. Okay. How long do you think it'll be until you're up and running and fully functional out there, especially with, you know, everything that's happening now potentially causing delays? Well, I'm going to give the silliest answer. I'm going to say as soon as possible because, you know, there are circumstances and things that we need to comply with, and we don't want to put anybody at risk, and we want to do everything the right way. So, you know, some of these things are beyond our control, certainly. But as soon as possible is when we'll get everything together and get going. And it's, you know, it's an exciting time. It really is. Like, in some ways, for me, it's like starting the company over again, you know, because now we get to add some other people to the mix and some other synergies. And, you know, it's an interesting thing that happens as the tree grows, right? The bark comes off of it, and it grows new bark, and, you know, it's a good thing. It's a good thing. Well, I can tell you for myself personally and selfishly, I'm excited about the move because I go to Chicago quite frequently. My father lives there, so I'm up there quite a bit, and I'm very excited to come see the new place as soon as y'all are up and running. Yeah, it's a great town. I've always had fun there. I mean, I remember going to shows way back when the Conrad Hilton would have a big amusement center, shows with thousands and thousands of people at it, and the Hyatt Regency had shows. It was always a hub of everything for amusement, not just pinball, but it was always a hub of our whole industry, you know, the video game industry, too, video game pod industry as well. And it's the center of the country. some of our distributors will be happy because they're closer some of our distributors they're a little less happy because they can't come to jersey to pick something up so you know some guys will stock more things now some you know they'll be they'll be more um uh better prepared and better stocked sure i'm just saying you know i could take a ride for an hour or two to the factory you know so uh it has a lot of different it has a lot of different facets to it but i i don't see anything negative. I see it all positive. With a much larger facility and accessibility to parts being probably, you know, much better and even to, you know, seasoned workers and whatnot and expanding your staff, I think it's fair to say that you're probably currently at about an 18-month switch over from one title to the next. What do you hope to change that to? What's your ideal, like, you you know, per games per year or whatever, do you hope to achieve with this move? Well, I think I said a while ago we're looking to do one game every nine months, you know, to release one game every nine months. I think that might be good for us. We'll have to adjust it if it's something that we're building a lot more of, be able to have a second line, build other games. There are some games we've built in the past that people keep demanding in a good way. They're looking for, and those are always possibilities to go back and build things like that, like we did with Wizard of Oz. And, you know, so the market is there for us. Our customers, they certainly can and have weathered storms before, whether they were financial or drought or products. And we feel very confident about the future. So you had just mentioned, you know, you said something that raised an eyebrow, which was possibly revisiting older games. And one of the biggest questions that people have is, is there ever going to be a rerun of Jersey Jacks Pirates? I know you've said in the past there's no plans, but what you just said sounds like there may be hope. Well, listen, you know, there's always hope. There's always hope. It's possible. It's possible. But, you know, we'll see. We'll see what it is. And, you know, it's those kind of things. When Stern did Simpsons, you know, for four or five different runs, or they did Lord of the Rings three or four times, or they made other things like that, I was pretty much behind those because I would call up Jolly Backer and I would say, listen, go tell Gary I want 200 more Simpsons. And then Jolly would have something to do and he'd spend the rest of the day calling every other distributor to try to get it up to 300 or 350 or 400. So, you know, runs and different product things like that happen because of the demand, right? So when you build something really great, something that people want, It's not something that you leave the people wanting more of. It always leaves the door open to the possibility of doing it again. That's great. So, you know, with your new facility and your new environment, and you mentioned earlier that you're adding to your workforce, do you have specific goals in terms of what areas you're trying to fill, or do you have a dream team of designers that you could, you know, if you could pick any designer out there or any pinball team member out there, your company or otherwise to hire, who do you think would be on that dream team for Jersey Jack? I would hire Pat and I would hire Eric. I did both of those things. And, you know, I'm very proud of them. I'm very proud that they work for the company. Eric, you know, I saw something in him when he was still in college that made me believe he could be a really good designer and I'm happy that it's so far so good. With that, I'd like to see more young people become designers, new ideas, you know, a real hunger for pinball wear and a passion. And we want really great people. We just don't want people that want a paycheck. I never wanted that. You know, if I go try to find somebody that's already happy and I try to pull somebody out of a job somewhere or whatever just because maybe I'm going to pay them more money, I don't know that I'm really going to get a great game out of that person. I really don't know. But, I mean, we need mechanical people. We need electronic people. We need, you know, art people probably. We need... I know an art guy. Yeah, I heard about that guy. He's pretty good. All right. He draws like that guy, like that guy Ross with the TV show. That's right. Yeah, he's great. We would have to put him through a test and see if he could draw pointy elbows. We'll have to find out. I guarantee you on our Facebook page by tomorrow, there'll be some painting or drawing with pointy elbows on it. Somebody right now, find me some of those games with pointy elbows, some of those Williams Electromechanical games, or people with old pool games or card games, all those old games like that. So one last question about the move before we move on. I know that other companies have kind of branched out to do things outside of making their own games, like Spooky and Stern, American Pinball. They've done some contract manufacturing or at least trying to do more of that. Is that anything that Jersey Jack has ever thought of doing? Is that something you might do in the future? Hey, you don't ask a guy from Jersey about contracts. Pork chops and apple shards. I don't see it personally, but again, I would say never say never kind of thing. I don't see it because it would really have to be something special, and it's possible, but it's not on the table right at this moment. I mean, people come to us all the time with all kinds of ideas and all kinds of things they want to do. And it was always like, to me, that line from Officer and the Gentleman, you know, my grandmother wants to fly jets. Everybody wants to build a pinball machine. Everybody wants to design a pinball machine. Everybody, you know, I never had that. I never had, like, in my mind, in the industry all these years, I never had a dream. Oh, I'm going to start a pinball company. And I'm going to, you know, like, that was not even a thing. Right. I guess if the right opportunity came along, we would look at it. But so far, that hasn't happened. You obviously don't have to name companies, but has anyone ever approached you and said, hey, would you contract out for this specific game? Oh, yeah. Okay. Nothing that anybody came to us with that I said no, we said no, was built. It's not like I said no to some great, amazing game. It's not like somebody came to me with Harry Potter and I said no, and then somebody went and built Harry Potter. No regrets. No, no regrets. Right, no regrets. No regrets. No regrets. As far as themes go, I've lately have been, obviously we've all had a lot of free time on our hands. I've personally been thinking of themes of games that I'd like to redo without any restraint on whether it's available, whether somebody else has the license, whether a game has already been made. Do you have any dream themes that you may not ever make, but it's just something that you would, you know, if you could erase pinball history and start at zero, a theme that you would just love to make a game of? Say Jaws. Say Jaws. Say Jaws. Beetlejuice. Yeah, I mean, I think so. But so far the things, and I'm going to say this in a very selfish way, okay, which is not characteristic for me typically. The things that I wanted to make, I've been able to get the license for so far. And, you know, it's a team effort too. So if there was something that the team wanted and they said, you know, we'd really like to make XYZ, do you think you can get that? That's been the case sometimes and sometimes the stars don't line up and the property isn't available or you're just really getting like a movie poster with no assets and you have to create a lot of different things and it's not what we all wanted to do. So I just feel that opportunities, you need to knock. You can't just sit around waiting for the door to, you know, get a knock on it and you go answer it. You've got to create your own opportunities. So that's what we try to do with those things. Yeah. I mean, you had mentioned that some of the themes you made were, you know, games that you saw in the past do really well when you were a distributor and an operator. Do you gravitate towards those themes? I mean, Pirates, Hobbit. Pirates was an exception to that. Hobbit, I wanted Hobbit because it was going to be this amazing continuation of Lord of the Rings, and Lord of the Rings was a favorite, so I wanted Hobbit. And there were other people bidding on these things, and it wasn't always a money thing why we won the bid. It was because the person who held on to the license believed that we could make a better product or we could better represent the license than somebody else. So it wasn't always a money auction competition kind of thing. It was who was on the team, how it could be done, and how we could really integrate things to the best level that we can integrate them. Was that the case with Wonka? Because I heard that that license was sort of getting smacked around by a lot of hands before it landed in yours. Was that the case? Was that how you ended up with it, because of Warner Brothers feeling that you could deliver the best product? Well, you must know some inside information. You must have some friends that, you know, might know some inside information. I wouldn't say I wound up with it. You know, I fought hard to get it, and I wanted it, and we were able to secure the license. All of these things, as probably a lot of other people have said before, some are easier than others. Some have more strings attached. Some have more approvals that you have to go through, and some have more hoops to jump through. But, you know, we cut our teeth on Wizard of Oz, and that was not an easy one to do because Warner Brothers was very protective of it, and there were a lot of approvals and different things like that. So we kind of learned in the beginning what we really need to do to make something be acceptable by the people that own the intellectual property and at the same time be exciting and fresh and original. even a 75, 80 year old license to make it like people have seen her for the first time so that's not an easy thing to do and when we show our games off to people that have licenses and they compare them to other games that are out there no disrespect to anybody at all because everybody makes great games we usually win that battle well to your point I think that a lot of people would say if they have a dream theme I've seen on the forums all the time And I say, man, I would love this game to get made, but I really want Jersey Jack to make it because you guys have, you know, you've shown that you can do justice to these properties and make them special. So that's pretty awesome. I appreciate that, and thank you on behalf of everybody in the company because they all work really, really hard. And they think and they think and they have won out of races on pencils in a proverbial sense about how they're going to do things, how they're going to integrate rules, how they're going to integrate animation, how they're going to do sound, how they're going to do artwork. I mean, it just doesn't get tossed up in the air and stuck on the thing and put lipstick on it and push it out the door. I mean, it just doesn't happen that way in the company. What is your average time for development to release of a game? Would you say it takes? Too long. You know, sorry, guys, but that's what our customers say. You know, depending on what, we've been getting better at it. And that's the hope when everybody is, and I use the word hope, that's the hope. And the plan is that when everybody's under one roof, we'll be able to better get our moms around things and collaborate a little bit better and get things down the road a little bit faster. Right. Up until now, your IP selections have been very classic. I mean, of course, Wizard of Oz, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Even Pirates, I guess, the first Pirates movie would be considered that. There are other genres that you could do. Like, you know, for example, music pins are very popular. Do you see yourself ever getting, you know, moving into the realm of a music pin? I do. Anytime soon. This is my favorite question of the questions that we had gone through. I mean, you know, music pins are great. You know, if you have the right, you know, it was said years ago, even back in stern days when music pin themes were kicked around that, you know, it kind of polarizes a little bit of the audience, you know, who may love a certain band or genre or artist. I remember when, you know, they did Elvis because, you know, who's going to say anything bad about Elvis? But yet, when I was telling Elvis, there were plenty of people that liked the game, and then there were plenty of people that didn't buy the game because it was Elvis. I don't like Elvis. How could you not like Elvis? I don't like Elvis. So, you know, it's, everybody has different ideas. But, you know, if you play the game and it's got nothing on it, almost no theme on it, It's still a great game. You can still make a great game with barely any theme on it, and you can make a really terrible game with the greatest theme in the world on it. So it's all got to come together. It's like preparing a meal. All the different parts of it have to come together and make something really fun and enjoyable. Well, regardless of what the next theme is, the rumor is that Eric Menear is designing this game. Is there any truth to that? Is that to confirm? It's either him or Pat. That's right. One of those guys. So, you know, let's flip a coin. Now, let's see. Pat just did one game. Right. Maybe Pat's game is next, and then Eric is later. So, I don't know. It's one of those guys. Probably one of those guys. Right. There's been rumblings that it's probably Village People or maybe Kiki D. Can you confirm either of those? It was, you know, I was working on Steve Ritchie's Dream Team with My Little Pony, but I couldn't tell what it was. Yeah, right. So I know you're clearly not going to tell us what the next game is, but in all seriousness, there's a lot of interest in what the next game is. Do you have any idea when that might be revealed? In due time. Okay. You know, at the right time, hopefully. There's a shit ton going on right now. We're in the middle of a pandemic, and he's moving factories, and, you know, there's a lot going on. I probably won't announce it tonight if that's what you think. Quit high-pressuring the guests, Chris. That's right. Well, I mean, how is, let me put it this way, how is the coronavirus and the move and all of these things, you know, all of these curveballs, how have they affected your plans moving forward? Have they delayed them? Are your, obviously your capabilities of making games, I have to imagine, has been reduced. Well, we live on the same planet you do. Right. So unfortunately, all of the above said is true. We're not exempt from any certain things, and we'd like to all believe that we're very special and that we're above a lot of things that can happen, but we're just ordinary mortal human beings, and we have to, as I said earlier, we have to abide by different laws, different rules, and different common sense where you take care of your employees, you pay your employees, You do the best job you can do. That's what you manage for. I'm very proud of all the people in our company. And I tell you the truth, really, the reaction from the entire industry, other factories, pinball and video game and everybody in the industry, everybody's trying to rally around together and think about the future and see what's going on. If you're on the barcade right now and you have 35 pinball machines in that barcade, or you had a family entertainment center with $5 to $6 million worth of games and rides in it, you're probably wondering when this is going to be over and when people are going to feel comfortable to jam into a packed Yankee Stadium, or when they're going to jam into a packed concert hall again, or when they're going to be able to, you know, go see your grandchildren that you haven't seen in four weeks, things like that. You know, so it's very difficult. It's a very difficult time right now. We're going to all get through it, and we'll laugh about it. I know that. Not that any of us have been through this before. Some of us have been through other bad times before, like starting a pinball company, you know, for two or three years of sheer hell. Right. But again, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. And hopefully people listen to common sense and they do what the suggestions are and they stay home and they don't expose themselves to other people that might have it. And everything works itself out one way or the other. Right. Moving forward, I know we can't necessarily talk about the themes that are coming, but, I mean, do you have, how many themes would you say you have in the pipeline at any given time? Is it something that you're constantly pursuing, or do you lock in a bunch of different themes and then just say, okay, this is what we're making for the next five, ten years? No, I can't think about five to ten years in advance. I can think about five years in advance, and that's pretty much what we have going on with titles at this point. You know, it's several games that, you know, are, you know, in different stages of development. And, again, we need some more people, some really great people, to take some more of these things over the finish line. Well, I'm all about the cash, so what do you got? Money, money, money, money! What kind of carrot you got out there, Dangler? That's right. We used to have a couple of guys like that. Well, you know, that's interesting you bring that up, actually. David Field was on your first three games. I love David, yeah. Was there a dangling carrot? Did the relationship fall apart? How did he end up over at Deep Root? Well, you know, David is a great talent, and if David wants to come work for Jersey Jack Pinball, the door is wide open for him to come work for Jersey Jack Pinball. But at the moment, from what I read in the funny papers, is that he works for a different company right now. And I think he was given an opportunity probably better than what I was giving him at the time. And the grass on the other side of the fence was greener at the time. And I don't hold that against anybody. I think everybody's free to do whatever they want to do and pursue whatever they want to pursue. to the best of their ability. Are you saying the stand-up answer, Jack? I'm going to go ahead and say that was a good answer. As most of his answers are. No, I mean, that was a heartfelt, that was an awesome response to that hard question. And you're saying the door is still open for him to return it if he chooses to do so? Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he's a talented guy. People work well with him, and he'd be welcome back. You know, sure. I'd even throw a party. I wish you were my dad. Well, you know, I tell you what, I'm really proud of my daughter, Jen, who works for the company and my son, Jack. You know, I get kind of corny, but, you know, luckily for them, they're not locked up quarantined with me. They have to deal with me all the time. So, you know, my poor wife of 37 years, she's the best one for me to be locked up with, that's for sure. You know, Jack, my wife has a podcast, and she focuses a lot on women in pinball. And she had done some research a while ago about if there were any women who were actually in the front lines of these pinball companies. You hear a lot about you know the people who work in programming and game design Very few of those are women And the one that she kept coming back to was Jen because she one of the few that are kind of front and center in a major pinball company So that pretty cool Jen's right in there, and she's really great. She's very dedicated. I can't say enough great things about her, but it's really very humbling, again, when we get the emails from our distributors and customers that compliment her, how she does things and how she goes out of her way and how she represents the company. And she gets it. She gets it. And so many other people in the company, they get it. And that's why we have the loyalty that we do with our customer base. They're just the best. They really are. I love them. I'm going to ask the question that everybody wants to know the answer to, and that is, It's fair to say that you're not in your 30s, not in your 40s. Might be getting up there a little bit, but you have started a tradition years ago of doing a cartwheel every time you complete a game, the first game ships. How many more cartwheels do you think you got in there? Wonka, I don't think, got a cartwheel, right? Wonka was more of a weight loss. Wonka didn't get a cartwheel. I was going golfing that day with my son. It was his birthday, June 24th. So I had a golf club, and I needed to do this. The truck driver was there, and Jay Marnell, who, you know, has been our driver for, like, 15 or 18 years in Lakewood Industrial Park. You can go back to football sales. He was there. And I said, okay, we're going to do a Johnny Carson thing, and I'm definitely not doing, you know, my half-assed, um, hot whip. So I had people that sent me Facebook messages and stuff, people I went to, like, junior high school with. Barry Zwieben from Replay Magazine, who I went to high school with, he's at Replay, and they said, listen, you know, you're in good shape and all that stuff, but you might bust a hip or something. Maybe you should stop doing that. Maybe that would be a smart thing to do since it is kind of a joke anyway that you do it. You know, I could have, Jen was the cheerleader, and she could certainly teach me how to do it the right way. But, you know, I always felt if I did it the right way, it wouldn't be funny. That's right. The whole part about it that makes it funny is that I can't really do it. So, I don't know. The struggle is real. Yes. The struggle is real. I'm just, you know, flesh and blood, and I can't do a cartwheel. But it was fun. I don't know that I'll do it. You know, maybe I'll do a handstand or a backflip or wave goodbye, you know. You broke the cycle with Wonka, so you might as well use that as a way out. I know. I see. Right. It is true. It is true. And it was good also. You can't imagine how many people, just to add this, talking about Wonka, you can't imagine how many people call every day, every day, right now, that want to buy a game and have us arrange to ship it to them because they want another game for their house because they're stuck in the house. You just can't imagine that. I can. I can imagine that. I got five games in my house, and I wouldn't mind snacking a Wonka around right now. Send one over. Call Jen. Hey, Jack. Call Jen. She'll get it over there. George Gomez has been talking lately about how the next big thing that Stern's going to do is the Internet connectivity. Is that something that Jersey Jack is working on? I can already answer that because I'm part of the Internet beta program. So I know you guys are working on that at least. That's awesome. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, you know. What if he didn't want that out, Christian? that's already been talked about I love people that answer their own questions I do like that I thought that was pretty cool like you guys planned it all out all these things are really great how you implement different things and where you take it you know I was talking to one of my friends in France the other day long time customer so he's a friend and he said Jack would it be really good now everybody could be playing pinball we were all stuck at home If you don't speak French, by the way, all that was fucking funny, all right? I said, listen, I don't trust you anyway. You'd be playing with the glass off. How do I know? That's right. What the hell are you doing with the thing? You know, I'm going to trust you. You know, just you I'm going to trust. Well, that brings up a great question because you obviously code updates are a no-brainer, but what else do you see as the benefit of Internet connectivity? Like, what do you see the future of that? Ah, this is the proprietary information. Ah, yes, yes. This is 50 of my songs. We either answer his questions for him or he doesn't answer them. That's right, that's right. All right, all right, give you a really honest, heartfelt answer. That's one of the other choices, too. So this is something that you don't necessarily, you have plans, obviously, because you already have this beta program. We have plans. We already have plans. We have plans. Now, let me ask you some generalities then. Do the plans go beyond code updates? Yes. Okay. And would you ever, as a company, get behind something that a lot of people are worried about with Internet connectivity, which is pay-to-play, kind of download, you know, pay to download the next update, or if you want X or Y feature, you'd have to pay. You mean like if you want to activate a color artwork or something like that? Yes. Is that something you would ever think to do? I mean, I'm not doing that. You know, it's a hard one. That's what she said. It would really depend what it is. If somehow you could push a button and your whole game becomes like a transformer and it really, like, turns into, like, this really cool vehicle or something like that, maybe we would charge extra to do something like that. But not for code updates. For clue around or something like that. Code updates, for goodness sakes. We're still releasing code updates for Wizard of Oz. I mean, code updates. I mean, you know, our guys, they never say never. You know, back in the day, there was a time where I sold Lyman Sheets a Spider-Man game for $2,100. And Lyman took the game home, and he finished coding it, and he made it into a great game. That's why I like Spider-Man. Because he felt so attached to the game and his name was on it and he wanted it not to be a toaster. He wanted it to be a really great, great game. Okay. And, you know, Keith P. Johnson and Joe Katz and all, you know, the people that are in our company that do amazing, amazing things. You know, they're not eclipsed by any of that. You know, they want to see the best product. You know, Ted Estes. The guy is always hammering away on his keyboard. We must buy the guy a new keyboard every month. He's banging away on the thing all the time now. You know, the first thing Ted told me when I hired him, he says, one thing I want. Okay, I guess I, what do I have a choice to have? I want to hire this guy. I want a really good chair. Okay, no problem. You got a really good chair. You're going to be sitting there in the lot. Of course you need a good chair. You know, I didn't know what he was going to ask me, but, you know, another great guy. Worthwhile investment, I think, considering what you got out of the deal. Worthwhile investment. You know, if you're going to sit in a chair, you better get some good chairs for these guys. You better take care of your people. You know, it's more important than anything, really. Company is its products, true, but I believe the real company is its people. I've been sold. I don't even want a paycheck. I'm coming to Jersey Jack. Nice. Yeah, but if I tell you to draw something, I don't want the whole earth to know what you're drawing. Zing. Zing. Oh, that's not fair. That's not fair at all. God damn it. Yeah, that's the NDA right there, Franchi. That fucking Canada bastard is coming back to haunt me again. Jack, that was once. I was a rookie. I was stupid. I don't even know what I'm talking about. I just threw that out there. I don't know. You're a big fat liar. Oh, no. Everybody knows about that. Everybody knows. But ever since that happened, I got blamed for everything. I didn't get a chance to talk to you. Congratulations. I know it won an award, right? Oh, yes. Right. That's funny. Yeah, the big leak turns into an award at the end of the day. You know, you can't believe everything you hear, really. And you can, what is that saying? You believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear or whatever it is. I don't know. Today with all the fake news going around, I don't even know. I think those percentages have changed, actually. I was kind of like I appreciated that end of the scale when those images got leaked because a lot of people were going yeah but do we know if this is real and I'm like I'm not going to step in and say anything just go ahead and keep thinking it's not I love your artwork I think your artwork is great I love it thank you very much and I love your games I'm going to get one one of these days just call Jen you can email her anytime Jen jn at jerseyjackmanbowl.com she'd be happy You know, push the game right on the truck for you, and it'll be out there. The amazing essential workers, all these truckers bringing all our fruits and vegetables and pinball machines all over the country and all over the world. I'll be sure to tell her I get the Friends of Jack discount. Yeah, you know, we used to do an RGP discount years ago for the guys at Pinball Sales, their RGP discount. I don't remember what it was, but I used to get in a lot of trouble. I used to be sending games all over the world, and people would call me up and say, God damn it, why is there this game with the serial number and friends? You know, we tracked it down to you. I have no clue. The guy came to my building. He picked it up. He paid cash. I don't know where it went. How do I know where it went? I have no clue where it went. What do I have to leave my building? I don't know where it went. The clue might have been that he was buying that power conversion kit. That's right. That was before the 50 Hertz deal. There you go. But then a really good German customer figured out a clock chip to just stick on there, and he stuck them on there, and it tricked the game to think that it had 60 hertz instead of 50 hertz, and that was the end of that. That doesn't sound safe. Oh, it's safe. It's just how many gigahertz, how many hertz volts. Well, it really hurts me. It doesn't hurt me at all, but it was 50 in Europe and 60 in America, so they used the clock chip to tell the game where the game was, And if you plugged it in in the wrong part of the world, the game didn't go on. So, you know, necessity is the mother of all invention, and pinball people are the greatest inventors of anything that mother would possibly need. And they figured out a way around it, and they got their pinball machines wherever they wanted them. So whenever the next game comes out and it's revealed, I know you guys have done different marketing strategies, different approaches to reveals and then releases. Do you feel like, you know, you said in the past that as soon as the next game comes out, and is revealed, it's going to be ready to ship, do you feel like that will hold true for your next title? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Awesome. It's the pre-order model. I don't know if I could pronounce it dead, but it's pretty dead. You know, people want their toys when they want them, and they don't want to wait for them, and you can't blame them. It's a hard thing, and it's hard for distributors, and it's hard for us, and the better thing is to be like, how about you like a real company then? Gee, I want to pull up and get my gas tank filled. I don't want to hear the guy say, well, you know, give me $10 now and come back in a few days and I'll fill my tank with gas or something like that. It just doesn't, you know, if you try to apply that to any other thing that you're going to buy, I mean, it's just, you get a laugh. It's laughable, but people are different people. That's right. They want to believe. God bless them. You're right, Jack. And I think that, you know, you were the pioneer with Wizard of Oz and getting the deposits. I think that, you know, I don't think you can do that anymore just because so many other companies or people have, they've burned that bridge to the ground. And so people are very cautious about doing that these days. And you're right. They want to get their game and they want it now. They don't want to wait for it anymore. I want it now, Daddy. I want it now. I want it now. What's the matter with those twats? Exactly right. And where's Ken? Where did Ken go? Where did he go this time? Ken? Yes. Who the fuck is that? I'm sorry. Ed. Am I here? He's there. That's Ed talking. No, no, I know. I know. We all sound alike. I sound just like this. I just, you know, not having the video, I just wanted to make sure. Okay. I'm listening. Jack, you know, obviously there's a lot of parody. Well, there's a lot of parody in everything. There's a lot of parody in sports and everything. Of course, there's parody in pinball and how people do things. You have been known to use expos to release games, games and that's sort of going by the wayside with a lot of the other people. Are you going to continue to do that or are you going to start making your own plans for how to release things? Because a lot of people, a lot of the manufacturers say that they don't think it's useful to release a game at an expo, which I don't believe to be true, but they do. Are you going to follow suit or are you going to try and use those events to springboard your new game still? Well, we'll see. We may have a different way of doing the next game and the next game and the next game, but I think of You know, Chris, you make me think of the first time I brought Wizard of Oz to a show, and it was E3 in June of 2013, I guess it was. 12, 12, I think. Yeah, maybe 12. And we brought it to Keith P. Johnson, and I did, and Keith had to start the game with a keyboard. And then we drove it up to Seattle, to the Emerald City, and we showed it to everybody at the Northwest show, and it was what I coined the phrase, the box of lights. and it just blew everybody away what it was because nobody ever saw anything like that. The people almost didn't even care if it played. They just wanted to stand there and look at it with their mouth open. So I think today it's more important. I think that sometimes people don't want to get the criticism where if they introduce something in a very controlled way, then nobody can rush to the Internet and say, hey, you know, this shot doesn't work right, or this rule isn't done, this light doesn't light up, or this doesn't do this, this doesn't do that. And it gives a lot more time to finish something that might not be finished. We have been shipping everything finished. It's finished when we ship it. The code is complete. Would we add more of something to it, and have we? Yes. So depending on when we feel the market is right for our product, that's when we're going to release it, and we'll be able to ship a whole bunch of them. That's what I'd like to see. That's awesome. I know that my wife is a big fan of Wonka, as am I. It's kind of our dream theme. We've always wanted to have the game made, and when you guys made it, we were over the moon excited, and we have an Ellie in our basement, and she was on the Twippies the other night. I don't know if you saw her do her Mrs. Augustus gloop impersonation. I asked her if she had any questions for you, and she said no questions. Just tell him that I am available if he wants any future call-outs in games. Well, that's great. That's good to know. I'm just going to throw that out there so that she'll be very happy that I relayed that to you. You know, I'm so thrilled when I hear that the wives, the girlfriends, the daughters are into pinball. This was one of my goals. I've said it many times. I can't say it enough. It was one of my goals at Wizard of Oz. It was really important to me to pick the first theme that the company was going to do that would have acceptance by women. And really, when I had some operators in the very beginning, since I'm an operator, you know, I'm kind of in that same mindset, say to me, you know, that's a terrible theme for a pinball machine. That's not something that I could put in the bar and nobody would want that in the bar. And I said, no, quite the contrary. If you put that in the bar, all the girls are going to be playing it and all the guys are going to be right there. And that's kind of what happened. And over the years, so many wives, girlfriends, daughters have said to me, you know, it's the only game I play. It's the only game my wife plays. It's the only game my wife let me buy. It's the, you know, all those kind of things. Yes. You know, variety is the spice of life. We can't make every game be Wizard of Oz, but I really love hearing that. I never get tired of hearing that from all the old ladies, and it's so great. You know, the shows, which we'll start again to see all the families, all the girls, all the wives, all the girlfriends that are there loving pinball. And, you know, the Bells and Chimes group and all the other people that are involved, Ant and Ed, I can't wait to see what hair she comes up with, what colors, what styles. I mean, you know, Emoto. And, you know, it's just such a great community. It's not just the guys anymore, which is great. Yes. It's everybody. And we all have that common thing that we love, the symbol. And I think that Waz was a great theme to underscore the fact that you can come out with themes that have mass appeal. It doesn't have to be, you know, a theme that's just for guys. It can be for anyone, kids, you know, women and men, and Woz is universally loved. I saw Kim Kardashian got a Yellow Brick Road edition for her birthday. She did. We had to teach her how to play the game, though. That's funny. But she did, and she plays it, and people that go over there play it, and it's kind of cool. You know, when we originally showed the flip-flippers on the game, There was an uproar with some guys that actually called up and said, Hey, I don't want that on my game. You know, take that off. Right. And, you know, because we were showing everything every week. We had to show something. It was like a tease every single week because we had your money, so we got to show you something going on. And everything, a lot of things were taken out of context. But when you put it all together and you saw what it was, people said immediately, oh, no, no, no, you know, you better make sure the slippers are on there. That's my favorite thing on the game, and how they click three times, and this and that, and all of that stuff. And really, all of our games do things that were never done before. I mean, putting the camera on dialed in was something that we thought about in the early 70s, mid-70s. I said, I'd love to have a game that takes your picture. Well, you guys did LED lights, right? You guys were the big, you know. Yeah, I've said the story many times. I'll say it again. You know, when I first went to meet some vendors in the Chicagoland area, I went to a company that made, at the time, a lot of the inserts for other companies. And the guy greeted me by saying, oh, you're the idiot that's going to go out of business. Nice to meet you. So how do you do to the pinball industry? And he took me to a big area of his building that had all these boxes. You know, he had all these machines that make all kinds of things. And they had, it was like Lucky Charms. Each box had like, you know, a pink circle or red square or this or that. You know, all these different color inserts. He said to me, you know, I'll tell you what. He said, design your game around all of this stuff and I'll give you a good price. You can use this stuff up. And, you know, I got stuck with a lot of this stuff. And since you didn't design anything, you know, I'll make you a deal on a lot of this. And I said, Steve, I got to tell you something. And all of the inserts on the game are clear. They're not any colors at all. They're clear. And before I could explain anymore, he said to me, well, you're a real idiot. You're dumber than I thought. Every light on your game is going to be white. What the hell kind of game is that going to be, you know? So I got to tell you, when you have an idea or let's call it a vision or a plan to something and it's really more far-reaching than what people are used to, you better educate all those people around you and bring them along and let them buy into it. And even after I explained it to him and gave him a check to do business with him, he didn't understand what I was talking about. You guys have managed to innovate in a way that a lot of other companies are trying to do. They're trying to push the pinball envelope, and you have innovated beyond the normal pinball game, game, but you've also kept it within the realm of pinball enough to make it still feel like the original thing. And that's not easy to do with your LED screens and your multicolor LEDs and the camera, so on and so forth. Do you have a lot of other innovations, or do you have other innovations that are yet to be seen that you feel are in that same vein that are coming? Yes, yes. Excellent. And I could tell you this, a lot of those things were done not only out of necessity, but they were done to attract a younger audience to pinball. You know, a static image on a back glass, on a backbox. It's great if I want to look at, you know, if I go up to Kings and Queens and I look at it and I see the lady up there with a rolling pin coming in the door and she's going to clonk this guy in the head and, you know, who's got a mirror and they're showing somebody else's cards to somebody cheating. and I can lean into it and look at it. Pointy elbows. You know, the things that I look at. You know, exactly. You got it. So, you know, those things were really cool at the time. I mean, when we had nothing to do when we were kids, we read the cereal box. You know, I can tell you that my 15-month-old grandson is on his iPad doing stuff. That's right. So if you want to entertain and amuse, you really need to bring in technology. And that's what we felt we needed to do to help revive people a little bit. I don't say that we saved it. I don't say that we turned it around. You know, we did what we did, and other people did what they did. And, you know, it's a collective effort by everybody. That LED screen, you were the first to do that, weren't you? You kind of pushed other companies into the modern age who were still in the dot phase. Were there any other companies that did that? Right. No, not that I know of. That was one of the innovations that we did. And at IAPA in 2012, we won second place, a brass ring award for innovation. I don't think a pinball machine ever won any kind of award at IAPA. They always give those things to these amazing companies that make a squirt gun or something like that. It's a really highly technically advanced way to fill up a water balloon and make it break or something like that. And then one of those companies beat us out for a political reason because they gave, no, I don't know. I really don't know. But we were happy to win the award. And, you know, I joke, why was there a 27-inch monitor in the game? It's the biggest one we could put in there. And it was, you know, and there were people that thought it was great. I think most of the people when they saw it, the, and I don't want to go by age, but the people that were more traditional were like, okay, how am I going to look at this thing, and I'm going to look at the ball, and how am I going to do all of this? And I knew I joked about it even at shows before there was any game, and we talked about the monitor. I said, well, kids today, they text and drive even though it's not safe, so they walk up to the game. They can get the whole view of the whole game, the monitor and the play field. They don't have any bad pinball habits yet, and they're going to learn to play pinball on a Jersey Jack game. And that's what they did. You know, it's funny. The players that are more traditional players, they'll sometimes have a helper tell them on the screen, hey, do this, do this, do that. They're like the extra call-out person on the game, telling them what to shoot for and what to do. But it draws them into the game. I mean, everybody gets drawn to one of our games like it's one of those bug lights and everybody has to go over to it and see what's going on. You have a lot of games that are basically all very deep. I mean, you don't really have any games that aren't, you know, superficial and can get to the end quickly. Most of them you really have to work for, play for a long time before you ever get to see all of the game. And I know that's something that you've done intentionally. Do you ever think that there will be a, you know, a simpler game that comes out in the future or based on the fact that most of these games are going in the home, do you want that experience to be, you know, as diverse as possible? You know, listen, on Harry Potter, we're going to have... Whoops, I'm sorry. Oh, hey-o, exclusive. Oh, oh, oh, oh! Jeff Patterson's writing this down for his website right now. Oh, my God, he's having a seizure. If you ever do Harry Potter, Jack, as an aside, you need to have multiple games. I think lots of people say that. Multiple different versions because it's so much content to pack into one game. It's just too easy with you guys. it's just too easy you leave yourselves wide open but you know I could see that and we do have that to an extent with the operator selections on our games teaching people a lot of what we have incorporated in the games that still remains something of a challenge because operators a lot of times they don't upgrade their games so That's why we're happy when we ship the game, it's code complete. You know, there's nothing worse than going to a location, perhaps. And, you know, you want to play a game and it's got, you know, some kind of code in there from, it's .000021. When you know the company released the later code and you're playing this game and it's just a box of lights, really, you know. But then again, if it was 1992, I guess, and the game just made money and it was a box of lights, I guess that was good enough at that time to make money on the location. But today you have more educated players, social media, all the tournaments, all the players that are out there. They know all the rules back and forth. They know how to, you know, get the high scores on games, what they can do to, you know, really take advantage of the game if they can, just to get the scores. So it's a different world. How do you balance that, Jack? I mean, how do you know a lot of your games end up in homes, and I know that you've made a lot of moves in the past to try and get more games on location. You've got the pendemption system. You've set up Wonka at a lower price point than previous games, which might encourage distributors or, I should say, operators to put them into gaming locations. How do you approach every game, and has your strategy changed in terms of how much to put in for operators versus home players? Well, it has, and I think on Wonka was the first time we changed the features on it and change the pricing at the same time. So the standard game was very popular for the route guys, and that's something that was near and dear to many of our hearts, mine and Pat's and Keith's and Joe's and everybody's, to get more games on location. A lot of times, and being an operator for so many years, a lot of times the philosophy is always, you know, what does the game cost? Where the focus really needs to be, what does the game make? And, you know, a lot of games, whether they're football machines or redemption games or certain video games, especially deluxe video games, VR games, things like that, that are going into big FECs right now. You know, the games aren't cheap that earn a lot of money and that have longevity and have what we call legs and have a good resale value at the end of everything. So if something costs less, there's a reason it costs less. There's probably less that went into it. There might be less, you know, effort, let's say, in the game. And if it's not really a good game, and this is held true since the first game I ever bought, which was a Wizard in 1978, if it wasn't really a good game and it didn't earn money, it's not going to hold its value. So those two things are still true. the plot, if it doesn't make money, that's going to hold true for an operator. It's not going to hold its value. And if it's not a good game, it's not going to be desirable for a home customer. It's not going to hold its value or appreciate it. And for the most part, I don't see many Jersey Jack games for sale. I saw some Tyrus for sale that, you know, they went up for a lot. They were better investments than the Dow Jones Industrial Average, I can tell you, in the last 30 days. For sure. Well, that's probably the perfect spot to wrap this up. Jack, thanks very much for taking the time to join us. We really appreciate it, and we're glad that you're staying healthy and staying safe. Wish you great success on your move, and looking forward to seeing what you've got coming in the future, because you make it sound very exciting. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you, guys. This was awesome. It really was. It was super awesome. It was super, duper awesome. I really enjoy it you guys have a lot of passion and you know I just think that everybody needs to remain positive, hopeful and at the same time be vigilant, don't be careless don't go out in big crowds right now and don't go where you really don't belong we don't need to lose any we don't need to lose anybody we love everybody, we want to keep everybody and we want to see everybody at all the shows coming up So thank you guys. I really appreciate it. Jack, thank you so much. Thank you. All right. Good day, Steve. Will do. Have a good night, Jack. Take care. That was a lot of time that you've given us, Jack, so thank you so much. It didn't seem like it was that long to me. That's what she said. Post office time for kids. And now it's time for the super awesome mailbag. Hello, guys and gals. This is Christopher Franchi, and I'm answering the latest piece of mail in the super awesome mailbag. Sean Ledgerwood from Canada writes, Hi, love the show, and I really enjoy listening to Christopher. I guess the other guys are okay, too. Winky face. God, what a dick. After listening to the last episode, my question I would like to know revolves around licensing for art. I have heard Christopher talking about creating a Jaws Translight and was wondering whether copyright issues get in the way of creating art. Might be an interesting discussion for listeners. Ignore if you've discussed this on the show before. Thanks, Sean, a devoted Canadian listener. Well, Sean, you've asked the mother of all questions. This topic certainly has a lot of controversy swirling around it in the art field. You've got companies like Mondo who recreate movie posters, and when they started out, they did not license their products, but then shortly after, they did. You've got other movie poster makers who do the same thing, but they don't get a license for their art. If you go to Etsy and you search Batman or Superman or Star Trek, you will come up with hundreds and hundreds of products, all which are bootlegged and not licensed. Most of these people are writing on a fine line, basically, of why they justify doing what they do. To get right down to it and answer your question as boldly as I can, anything created based on a character that is not licensed would be considered a bootleg and illegal. Now, there are many, many gray areas that apply to this, such as if you are a comic book artist. You would make prints of your art and you would sell them at conventions, so you have something to sign for people that come to buy your work. And the comic companies will just look the other way. They don't say anything. This actually applies in most fields of art because you're basically selling art, not a product where you're using a character to try and sell it, such as a Superman skateboard. If you're a skateboard manufacturer and you get a license to put Superman on it, you're using that character to sell your product. Whereas if you're just selling artwork, that's like the most basic boiled down thing you can get. I'm selling artwork, not my artwork on something to help sell it. A pinball machine is a game that you apply a character to to help sell it. Therefore, you need a license. And like I said, if you want to get super technical, you need a license to make anything with a character on it if you're going to mass produce it. But let's say I take a skateboard and I hand paint a painting of Superman on it. That is not a bootleg. That's a one-off handmade item, and that's okay to do. Making multiples of a product and using a character or a movie or a band to help sell it, that's bootleg merchandise. The people who stand out front of your arenas during concerts and they're selling those kind of cheap shirts that don't look as good as the ones that are inside, those are bootlegs. But just to finish, like I said, artists usually get leeway because they're not selling a product with their artwork on it. They're just selling their artwork. So the product is basically an art print. And if they created the art, then they're just selling it as an example of their artwork. It's a gray area, I know, but that's as good as I can explain it. I hope that answers your question. Thanks for writing in, Sean. And you too can send us a question that either myself, Ed, or Christian can answer by writing to the super awesome mailbag at superawesomepinball at gmail.com. Until next show, send us emails because we're really, really bored. Hey. So that's going to wrap it up for this week, boys. Thanks to Jack Guarnieri for a fantastic interview. And glad to have you back, Ed. It's nice to be back. Good to have you. It's nice to be wanted. Aww. He's such a tender fiddle. All right. And we're going to be back much sooner than three weeks. and we've got a great interview lined up that I am not going to spoil here and now. But stay tuned and stick around. Everybody stay healthy, stay safe. Don't go out if you don't have to. Don't think you're bulletproof. I know we're all Americans. We're Americans. I'm not American. The wires can't take me down. But it can take you down, and it will. So just stay in, stay safe. Take it from the doctor. Maintain your social distance. That's right. Maintain your social distance. That's all you got? Come on, doctor. All right, let's hear it. Yeah, maintain your social distance. Stay safe. Wash your hands. And everyone stay healthy. We'll see you next week. And take your flask. And take your flask. Don't chewables. Goodbye, everybody. And goodbye. See you later. If you'd like to drop us a line or ask a question, we can be reached at superawesomepinball at gmail.com. Questions or comments may be read on the air. The original content of this podcast is copyright 2020 ASAP Radio Productions. The commentary and opinions shared by the cast and guests do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the sponsors, Cointaker, Chicago Gaming Company, and Back Alley Creations. Their sponsorships of this show only serve to add to their continuing support of the pinball community. Because we're going to be legendary. I'm going to take their attention. What you and you ain't just hearing is about to be legendary. Well, I'm the dude to you fair Spanish ladies. It's the bathroom. It's the bathroom. Okay, bye-bye now. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye-bye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Later, Dez. Goodbye. Goodbye. Good friends, goodbye. Is this an over or no idea? It's over! Bye, bye, bye! Bye, bye, bye! Bye, bye, bye! Bye! Good day, sir! Get the fuck out of here! I gotta go. I'll see you later. Wait a minute. Okay, okay. Bye, bye. Bye, bye. Hasta la vista, baby. Hey, your fucking chalupa sucks, dude! You guys get it. You know, the three of you really on so many different parts of the industry and the hobby part and everything. And, you know, Ed, I just, you know, we haven't spoken spoken, but, you know, just know we're going to be there for you next year. I didn't want to say thank you. You were one of the first, you know, when everything started to unravel, you were one of the first people to call me personally and kind of chat about it. And I do appreciate that so much. It's a hard thing. Look, we've all been there where we have our heart into something and on a pocketbook into something, and, you know, it's not going the right direction. Believe me, you don't have to tell me about that. I learned that. Okay, you know that. And it's really hard, especially when it's not something you can control, and it wasn't anything you can control. And, you know, just look forward to next year, and hopefully it's bigger and better. I don't know how the hell you're going to do that, but bigger and better than it always was. And, you know, we'll be right there with you. We'll be there to help you and support you and do anything we can to make it be successful. All right, awesome. I love to hear that, and I do appreciate it. Yeah. Chris, go look for the elbows with the points, okay? If you can incorporate that in whatever you're drawing next, you know, you want to draw me with pointed elbows, I'll take it. I'll send you a picture of Axl Rose with pointy elbows. How about that? Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?