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Pacific Pinball Museum Presents: Jerry Kelley & Christian Marche Pointy People Art

Marco Pinball·video·52m 47s·analyzed·May 23, 2025
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TL;DR

Pacific Pinball Museum presentation on pinball women artists Jerry Kelly & George Christian Marsh history and art style evolution.

Summary

Pacific Pinball Museum executives Evan Phillippe and Michael Sheese present an educational talk on the history and artistic styles of pinball women art, focusing on two pioneering artists: Jerry Jim Kelly and George Christian Marsh. The presentation traces pinball art history from early masters like George Melenton and Roy Roy Parker through the evolution of the 'pointy people' style, explaining technical constraints of silk-screen printing and the distinct aesthetic approaches of each artist.

Key Claims

  • Pacific Pinball Museum has the largest institutional collection of pinball machines available to the public, with over 1,200 machines in the Annex plus approximately 103 playable machines in the main Alameda museum.

    high confidence · Evan Phillippe, Pacific Pinball Museum Executive Director

  • The Women of Pinball exhibit opened in fall 2020 as the museum's first post-pandemic exhibit after being closed for 14 months, and is being archived at the end of the month when the presentation was made.

    high confidence · Evan Phillippe describing museum timeline

  • George Melenton was the first artist hired for pinball advertising posters around 1933-34, starting at age 19 and earning $25 for his first piece of artwork.

    high confidence · Michael Sheese citing historical records

  • Reproduction Graphics (Roy Roy Parker's company) burned down in the 1930s, rebuilt, then burned down again in the 1950s before closing permanently.

    medium confidence · Michael Sheese describing company history

  • Jerry Jim Kelly was hired from Chicago Art Institute and came to Harry Williams from United, where he designed both Harry Williams and Bally logos.

    medium confidence · Michael Sheese on Kelly's career background

  • George Christian Marsh was hired by Advertising Posters in 1964 as a French artist and was initially tested on Chicago Coin games before being assigned to Bally pinball women machines.

    high confidence · Michael Sheese citing Marsh's employment records and memos

  • Jerry Jim Kelly created approximately 13-14 game variations during his career at Bally from approximately 1964-1969, when Bally shut down his contract.

    medium confidence · Michael Sheese estimating Kelly's output

  • George Christian Marsh was the third most prolific pinball artist after George Melenton and Roy Roy Parker, creating over 150 pinball machines including approximately 70 pinball women machines.

    medium confidence · Michael Sheese analyzing artist productivity records

Notable Quotes

  • “We are Pinball a true 501c3 nonprofit museum. We don't just have pinball games to play. We also have artwork, exhibits, information cards.”

    Evan Phillippe@ 0:45 — Establishes the museum's mission beyond casual gameplay

  • “As far as we know, we have the largest collection, an institutional collection, that's available...over 1,200 pins in addition to the roughly 100 that we have in the museum itself.”

    Evan Phillippe@ 2:09 — Describes scale of Pacific Pinball Museum's collection

  • “Jerry Jim Kelly, you had to look quite a long time to see what it was that he was portraying, whereas George Christian Marsh was basically just knocking them out, and it was a lot easier to see what was going on.”

    Michael Sheese@ 4:54 — Core distinction between the two artists' styles

  • “He came from Chicago Art Institute. So he was a bona fide artist. He's also an industrial designer. So he immediately went to work and wanted to change pinball because when he was at United, United was just cranking out very similar looking machines.”

    Michael Sheese@ 12:31 — Explains Kelly's motivation to innovate in pinball art

  • “So the first game for Bally by Jerry Jim Kelly was Surfers, and the first game that George Christian Marsh did was Shangri-La.”

    Michael Sheese@ 18:41 — Marks the beginning of each artist's tenure at Bally

  • “He could really crank out the art. He did over 150 pinball machines...he was the third most prolific pinball artist next to George Melenton and Lloyd Roy Parker.”

    Michael Sheese — Quantifies Marsh's extraordinary output and historical ranking

Entities

Pacific Pinball MuseumorganizationEvan PhillippepersonMichael SheesepersonJerry Jim KellypersonGeorge Christian MarshpersonGeorge MelentonpersonRoy Roy Parkerperson

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Pacific Pinball Museum actively extending museum presence beyond physical location through presentations at Pinball University events, engaging broader community interested in pinball history and art.

    high · Evan Phillippe: 'we see a lot of volunteers and supporters of the museum in the audience' and museum is traveling to present at Fred Marco's Pinball University event

  • ?

    community_signal: Pacific Pinball Museum actively fundraising and seeking larger facility to expand public access to collection; positioned as nonprofit seeking community connections and support.

    high · Evan Phillippe: 'As a nonprofit, we're always talking to people about fundraising...we are Pinball, as a nonprofit, able to offer tax breaks to people if they were to sell a building'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Jerry Jim Kelly's complex, abstract 'pointy people' style required extended visual examination to understand imagery, contrasting sharply with George Christian Marsh's simplified, immediately recognizable aesthetic approach.

    high · Michael Sheese: 'Jerry Jim Kelly, you had to look quite a long time to see what it was that he was portraying, whereas George Christian Marsh was basically just knocking them out, and it was a lot easier to see what was going on'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: George Christian Marsh developed distinctive 'paper cut' artistic technique suited to silk-screen printing constraints, using cut paper pieces assembled like mosaic to create simplified, immediately recognizable imagery.

    high · Michael Sheese: 'he developed the style called paper cut, where you just cut out pieces of paper and paste them up there...it really lends itself to pieces of paper being cut up and assembled to make a picture'

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.158

0:00
Well thank you for coming everybody. We are representing the Pacific Pinball Museum. My name is Evan Phillippe. I am the executive director and with me is Michael Sheese. He's one of the founders of the Pacific Pinball Museum. And we wanted to say thank you to Marco and the Pinball University for inviting us for this special talk today. We really appreciate the ability to extend our museum out to people who may not have been able to visit yet. And we see a lot of volunteers and supporters of the museum in the audience, which we really appreciate. And we'll start with our first slide. It's just a little discussion about what the Pacific Pinball Museum is.
0:45
We are a true 501c3 nonprofit museum. We don't just have pinball games to play. We also have artwork, exhibits, information cards. We have our museum laid out chronologically from oldest to newest machines and we've operated in Alameda for about 22 years so we're excited that we're entering a new decade. We had our 20th anniversary and we have a lot of dreams for the future and being able to come and talk to folks is one of the ways we could talk about the different things we can do in the future if we have support for the museum. On our next slide we can talk a little bit about what the museum has. So for the museum we have two different locations. The main museum which is in Alameda which has 103 playable pins. You'll see that on the left. That's the exterior, our history room, and our modern room. That's where we have the games arranged chronologically and it's only a small portion of our museum that we're able to bring out to folks. On the right, you'll see our Pacific Pinball Annex. That's in a old aircraft maintenance hangar on the former Alameda Naval Air Station, about a mile and a half from the museum, and that's where the bulk of our collection is. We have over 1,200 pins there, in addition to the 100 that we have in the museum itself. As far as we know, we have the largest collection, an institutional collection, that's available, And the idea is to make sure that these rotate out and they're available to the public to enjoy, no matter the age or era of the machine, whether it's from the 1940s to the 2020s. And as such, we're always fundraising and looking for a larger building. We're kind of maxed out in Alameda, our location. We can only really have about 105 games in that location. So we really do need a larger facility to bring more games to the public. And that's really our goal, is to make sure that those are available for people to play, see, and learn about. So as a nonprofit, we're always talking to people about fundraising. If people have connections with buildings, put us in connection with the right people, because we are, as a nonprofit, able to offer tax breaks to people if they were to sell a building or coordinate with us. So please keep your eyes and ears open and feel free to reach out to us at any time.

  • Jerry Jim Kelly and Gordon Rob Morrison shared the same studio at Advertising Posters and influenced each other's artistic styles.

    medium confidence · Michael Sheese noting studio arrangement

  • Marsh and Melenton were personal friends who had lunch together weekly and maintained a relationship outside of work.

    medium confidence · Michael Sheese describing their personal relationship

    • @ 28:07

  • “I mean, it's like Impressionism and Cubism. It's pretty crazy. Plus, I did have one of those motorcycles when I was a kid...the smoke, because it was a two-stroke.”

    Michael Sheese@ 33:06 — Personal connection to artwork and appreciation of artistic authenticity

  • “One, you really have to dig out the visual content in Dogies. You really have to look at that one...you have to struggle with it. And so it wouldn't always be obvious what's going on.”

    Michael Sheese@ 38:27 — Articulates the fundamental difference in accessibility between Kelly and Marsh's styles

    • Advertising Posters
    company
    Reproduction Graphicscompany
    Harry Williamscompany
    Ballycompany
    Alvin Gottliebcompany
    Chicago Coincompany
    Unitedcompany
    Gordon Rob Morrisonperson
    Ted Zaleperson
    Lynn Lynn Durantperson
    Seaboardcompany
    Valleycompany
    Women of Pinball exhibitevent
    Marco Specialtiescompany
    ?

    design_philosophy: Jerry Jim Kelly intentionally incorporated hidden jokes and Easter eggs into pinball artwork, including visual gags that carried from backglass to playfield, requiring players to examine artwork closely.

    high · Michael Sheese on Surfers: 'he always managed to get these jokes in there' and describes pelican carrying bikini top joke repeated on backglass and playfield

  • ?

    event_signal: Women of Pinball exhibit at Pacific Pinball Museum being archived and removed from display at end of presentation month, though planned to return in couple years.

    high · Evan Phillippe: 'this exhibit will be leaving the museum at the end of this month. It's going to be archived...we expect to be able to bring it out to folks again in a couple years'

  • ?

    community_signal: Jerry Jim Kelly was trained fine artist from Chicago Art Institute with industrial design background, bringing sophisticated aesthetic approach to pinball that contrasted with existing conservative manufacturer styles.

    high · Michael Sheese: 'he came from Chicago Art Institute. So he was a bona fide artist. He's also an industrial designer...he immediately went to work and wanted to change pinball'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: George Christian Marsh hired as French artist by Advertising Posters in 1964 and immediately tested on Chicago Coin machines before assignment to Bally's pinball women series.

    high · Michael Sheese: 'They hired him, according to his records, in 1964...they were trying him out with Chicago Coin first...within four games, he started doing pinball women'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Silk-screen printing technical requirements (multiple color passes requiring registration) fundamentally shaped artistic approach and constraints, influencing both Kelly and Marsh's creative decisions.

    high · Michael Sheese: 'silk screening is all about, it's you have five, six, or more screens...each one is basically a pass of color. So it really lends itself to pieces of paper being cut up and assembled'

    • 3:05
    The Pointy People exhibit that we're talking about today has been in the museum since 2020. It opened in fall. It was our first post-pandemic, post-COVID exhibit that we opened when we reopened the museum. We were closed for 14 months. This exhibit is really important to us. It's really special. No one had done it before. And we have some pictures below of people enjoying those 10 games that we have in the exhibit. It's really nice that we have this opportunity to talk to everyone about Pointy People because that exhibit will be leaving the museum at the end of this month. It's going to be archived. It's not going away forever. We expect to be able to bring it out to folks again in a couple years. But this is a great time to not only enjoy this presentation, but to come to the museum and see the exhibit while the games are still there being played.
    3:56
    I'm going to hand this over to Mike, whose real passion is pointing people. Very educated and very learned about it and very passionate about that subject. And he'll take us to the next slide.
    4:06
    Hey, everybody. Thanks, Evan. Yeah, pointy people. Who doesn't love pointy people? I got into this. It's actually a picture of my first game, Gulfstream. And I really wanted the Gottlieb, but they were too expensive, and pointy people were the only game I could afford. Because people didn't really appreciate the pointy people back then.
    4:35
    I had since got a real appreciation for them. There are two Pointy People artists, Jerry Kelly and Christian Marsh, and a lot of people confuse them. They don't know who's doing the artwork.
    4:50
    This first slide kind of points to how different they were. I mean, Jerry Kelly, you had to look quite a long time to see what it was that he was portraying, whereas Christian Marsh was basically just knocking him out, and it was a lot easier to see what was going on. So I got to take it back to the beginning of pinball art, which started with George Melenton. He was actually the first artist hired by advertising posters back in 1933 or 34. And immediately following that, the other place that was cranking out pinball play fields and this is all silk screen business, was Roy Parker. he worked for another company called Reproduction Graphics. So they were in competition with each other, but the way it worked is you went to Advertising Posters or Reproduction Graphics, they did the artwork for your machine. So you told them what you wanted, they cranked it out.
    5:56
    Roy Parker was quite a bit older than Melentin. Melentin, I think started when he was 19 and worked all night on a presentation for David Rockola, brought it in, and they pretty much hired him. This is during the Depression, too. So he got, I think, $25 for his first piece of artwork, which just floored him because that was a lot of money back then.
    6:21
    They continued to be the kings of pinball art for quite a while. You can kind of see the difference between their art with Do-Wah Diddy on the bottom by George Melenton and Robin Hood, actually Lady Robin Hood.
    6:36
    Totally different styles in terms of George Melenton was more of a fashion, came from using fashion magazines for source material. And I don't know where Roy Parker got his inspiration, but Lady Robin Hood. And this continued all the way. They were the kings of pinball art until 1964. At that point, Roy Parker was getting, was ill, and advertising poster had actually taken over the whole business of silk screening pinball play fields and pinball back glass and plastics, mainly because reproduction graphics burned down in the 30s, and then it rebuilt and it burned down again in the 50s. and at that point they just closed their doors. Roy Parker moved over to advertising posters, and George Melenton was, by 1960, he became the head of the art department. So he was technically Roy Parker's boss.
    7:46
    Both of these gentlemen cranked out quite a bit of art. It's kind of astounding when you go through the records and look at how much they did. But, again, Roy Parker was always kind of doing, I hate to use the word cheesecake, but a lot of it was of that nature. Gottlieb was fairly conservative, but they knew what their market was, and they wanted to appeal to men using not pinup, but more or less cheesecake models. whereas Melenton would always go after the fashion models. You can kind of see the artwork between Zigzag and Skyline, which are about the same years.
    8:34
    Parker was always a little stiff, and he was exclusive to Gottlieb, although he did do a lot of Chicago coin. So when he was getting sick, I guess advertising posters started freaking out and going, we need another artist. So they brought in Art Stenholm, and this is a little controversial because not everybody agrees with this. Oh, thank you. But if you look at North Star, it's a combination between Roy Parker and Art Stenholm. You can tell by the guitar that the Eskimo, or actually he's a Navy guy,
    9:09
    that's a feature you only find in Art Stenholm. And then Art Stenholm eventually replaced Roy Parker and did exclusive to Gottlieb. He started out, though, doing Williams and Bally. So it's kind of odd how they usually tested a new artist out with Chicago coin because they were kind of bottom of the barrel and it's like they didn't really,
    9:37
    this is a personal observation, they didn't seem to care as much about the artwork as Williams and Bally did. So they would always try a new artist out. I've noticed this, they were always doing a Chicago coin. So after Roy Parker died, Melenton started tapering off doing artwork too.
    9:56
    And so this is where Jerry Kelly comes in. So Harry Williams was instrumental. They call him the godfather of modern pinball. He invented so many things, and he came up with incredible designs. But they were always second to Gottlieb. Gottlieb was the king for the longest time. Lynn Durant and Harry Williams were friends before the war and during the war they formed a company where they refurbished the pinball machines because they weren't allowed to make new pinball machines so they'd refurbish them to like victory pinball anything doing with the war they did a lot of controversial ones with that too but we won't go into that um and i guess harry williams and lynn durant uh were very close friends lynn durant was an excellent uh electronic well electrical engineer and designed most of these games and after the war they split up and supposedly the rumor was it was over a woman and Lynn Durant won. I guess he got the girl, but he remained a bachelor and it got him into trouble eventually. And the paragraph to the right there is actually taken off of a news clipping from a newspaper about Lynn Durant getting, he just got into trouble because he was always, he's apparently giving away Cadillacs to ladies, et cetera. And so through tax evasion, he ended up in jail. And this is where Williams, the company Williams, bought all of United. And part of that package was Jerry Kelly, who was one of their main designers. So at this point, Harry Williams wasn't even taking care of, wasn't in charge of Williams' industry. It was bought by Seabird, and they continued to run it as Williams Electronics.
    12:11
    So Jerry Kelly comes over to Williams and is designing, designed their logo and designed Bally's logo. He also designed a few things for Valley, which we'll talk about later. But he came from Chicago Art Institute. So he was a bona fide artist. He's also an industrial designer. So he immediately got to work and wanted to change pinball because when he was at United, United was just cranking out very similar looking machines. And he was the first one to say, hey, you know, this is boring. You need to change this and change it up. At that point, he went over to Williams. So that infection spread over to Williams and he pleaded with them to like, let's do something new. You know, up until this point, pinball art was pretty stale. I mean Gottlieb was a king and they were it was very tame stuff They just weren taking any chances It hard to say why exactly but the time was right for some new art So here comes Jerry Kelly, and he designs this game Pot of Gold. And you really had to seriously look at this for quite a while to even figure out what the heck was going on. A lot of people even miss some of these things. It's like if you can see in the very center, right under the pot of gold, there's a ship in there. There's a prow of a ship. And there's a hole in the side of the ship, and there's coins spilling out of the bottom. And that was actually part of the game because at the end of each ball, it would fire a little bagatelle ball that would go down the pins and give you one, 300, 500 points. so Jerry Kelly worked a lot with Ted Zale when he went to Valley but for Williams he wanted to actually control the whole game you know the design of the art and the design of the game so he got his way a few times where he got to put in things that were really congealing the whole art theme and the game So this was the very first pointing people, and you can see they really are pointing. So at this point, William said, wow that worked pretty well, let's do another one. So he did a go-go and took the pointy part up a notch. And the thing that was great was these games were selling. So 5,000 games back and that was quite a lot. So they knew they had a winner with Jerry Kelly. So they kept him going.
    15:00
    You've got to kind of compare this to some of the other games that were coming out. Nobody used pink in a game. So the colors and just all the geometric design was really new and fresh. and some people made fun of the fact that they were so out there, but a lot of people really enjoyed these games.
    15:27
    So then after a certain point, Bally went, hmm, this is pretty unique stuff, and these guys have a real winner here, and they did what Gottlieb did. they made a contract up for Jerry Kelly, making him an exclusive to Bally, so he could no longer do Williams games. And this was his next one, Capersville, which I honestly, it's amazing artwork, but I never have figured out the actual gameplay behind this one. It has some little thing about the code, but it's all about spying and underwater. You'll find a lot of underwater themes in Jerry Kelly's stuff. For some reason, scuba divers are in at least three of his machines.
    16:18
    That's probably just part of the theme that he liked to do. Again, it's all very angular, and you really have to look at some of these things for quite a while to figure out what's going on. There's a little submarine there, and there's another type flying submarine that's in there.
    16:39
    You can always just stare at these things. And I guess part of the philosophy of this is if you have a four-player game, there's maybe three players that aren't playing, and so they get to look at the back glass and try to figure out the artwork.
    16:58
    So they lose Jerry Kelly. Advertising posters. It's hard to say how that worked out because I have not been able to find out who worked with Jerry Kelly. Did he work at Advertising Posters or did he work at Ballot? I can't really answer that.
    17:18
    But I do know that they had hired Christian Marsh, and he was a Frenchman who had come over there. And they hired him, according to his records, in 1964. and he was doing Williams and I think Chicago Coin.
    17:39
    His probably first artwork he did was Shangri-La. This is according to Christian Marsh's little memos. But there was another game called Beatniks. It's not a coin people, but it's Chicago Coin. And I think they were trying him out with Chicago coin first. But Shangri-La, if you look at Shangri-La, would you ever guess that that was done by the same artist that did the Pointy People? I mean, it's very detailed. It's not his style at all. But it kind of proves to the fact that he really was an incredibly talented artist. So it dispels the myth that he was just lazy.
    18:24
    He just happened to be really quick. and when they asked him, hey, people really like this modern design, these pointy people, they didn't call it that back then, can you do that style? And, of course, he could, and he really adapted to it well. So the first game for Bally by Jerry Kelly was surfers, and the first game that Christian March did was Shangri-La, And then shortly after that, within four games, he started doing pointy people.
    18:58
    So his first pointy people was Derby Day, which to me really isn't that pointy, but it's pointy enough.
    19:09
    I think the main thing to take away from here is he started developing the style called paper cut, where you just cut out pieces of paper and paste them up there and you make an image, kind of like mosaic.
    19:24
    And the reason that was really popular was because, you know what silk screening is all about, it's you've got five, six, or more screens that you're dealing with that all have to register. Each one is basically a pass of color. so really lends itself to pieces of paper being cut up and assembled to make a picture. This is probably why Christian Marsh just excelled at this because he was very good at doing that style of art. His second game was Jolly Roger, and then, again, that one isn't as pointy as I'd like it to be. but then you get into doozy and it starts getting even pointier but doozy to me i always thought looked like a car ad for a european car um and he was french so i think there's a little bit to that then you get to miso and miso was kind of a funny one miso was originally supposed to be miss q like miss q's the guy is breaking his uh cue stick but in french uh
    20:38
    Q means butt or ass. It's slang for ass. And so Christian Mars was like, oh, I can't do that. And so he changed it to O, but he had to go and tell them why. You know, well, that means, you know, Miss Butt. You know, you don't want to do all that on your pinball machine. So they all laughed and went, okay, Frenchie. And they changed it to Miss O. But I thought it was kind of interesting because he still kind of featured the Blonde has a kind of prominent butt.
    21:13
    But I love these. He starts getting into, I think by the time he got to Miss O, he's pretty comfortable with doing pinball art because he's starting to put jokes in it. And you've got to remember that he was inspired by Jerry Kelly. And Jerry Kelly, if you look at his stuff, he puts a lot of little jokes in the artwork. and you really have to look at it to see what's going on.
    21:44
    So then Kelly's now working full-time for Bally. And this is kind of the unfortunate part of the story. Jerry Kelly does some amazing compositions. I'd like to point to Mini-Zag. Mini-Zag's got so much energy in it And it's all current theme. You've got some English band, or it could be Paul Revere and the Raiders. It could be the Rolling Stones. But it's a TV show featuring these rock bands. And the women that he would draw are really ethnic, for the most part. They don't look like your typical American women. You know, they look exotic. And he also would do this thing, he does this a lot with balloons, and in this case it's the lights. And it fit right into this feature that Bally was promoting, this carryover feature where you'd have to do, you know, light up, I think, a mini zag. And then after you did that, it would light up one of the lights. And once you got all the lights lit up to nine, then it would pop off three games. So this carried over from game to game. So a lot of people would come up and, you know, if the lights were on eight, then you knew you had a really good chance to actually win three games. So it was kind of a neat feature.
    23:19
    In this one in particular, he has these little jokes because it's a live TV broadcast and the cameraman is actually focused on the dancing girl's butts. I don't know why this is involved. But if you look at the play field, it carries over. Like, it's kind of interesting. It takes something off the back glass and incorporated the joke even further onto the play field.
    23:49
    I'd love to tell you more, but you're going to have to see our show before it goes. Dogies is so confusing I mean you really have to look at that one for a long time very hard to explain but in there is a cowboy that's falling off his horse and he's shooting a gun just barely missing the other rider in the background and I mean you really have to look at and it's kind of a different style completely It's not paper cutout per se because he graduated from Chicago Art Institute. I'm sure he was doing fine art. So he was not used to really silkscreen art, and you can tell that in the way that he draws stuff because he'd use too fine of a line and actually get lost in the reproduction by the silkscreen. There's a head of hair on the cowboy. You can't even make it out because it's so fine.
    24:50
    So meanwhile, Marsh is just cranking them out. What happened with Jerry Kelly was, unfortunately, he did 13 games, I think 14 variations, but not too many. He lasted until 1969 and Valley shut him down.
    25:13
    Meanwhile, Christian Marsh has taken off, and he's excelling at doing pointing people. One of my favorite ones is Op, Pop, Pop, where I just love the fact he's feeling the blonde woman's hair and he's squeezing the paint out on the canvas. And then the lady in the background with the striped red shirt who's doing the classic artist pose, and she's got, if you see her paintbrush, she's got some green paint on that brush. If you look at the canvas, there's green paint dripping off the very corner. So he's kind of making fun of modern art, you know, that they're just kind of like very representational. And there's a little Calder mobile in the very top there, as a reference to Andrew Calder. Paddock is really amazing in terms of it not the pointiness but more or less the abstraction of like the horse into just geometric shapes and, you know, swaths of color. And the whole background, there is no background. It's just blank. So he really does a composition where you just focus on this horse who's grabbing the lady's hat. Another example is like Bolo.
    26:52
    All these people are kind of like in jazz mode. You know, they're just perpetually, yeah. So I always loved that. I used to walk through the museum like that.
    27:08
    So Marsh kept improving this whole thing to where the pointy people kind of took on an art that was simplistic and yet told a story and was immediately recognizable, as opposed to Jerry Kelly, which you really had to stare at.
    27:34
    And I don't know if that's why Jerry Kelly got dismissed so early, but I knew that Christian Mars was really quick. And so these guys are cranking out products, so you have to take that into account. He could really crank out the art. He did over 150 pinball machines, and that's not including the gun games and the bowlers that he did for United and all the work for Chicago Point on the side. he did a lot of work. In fact, he was the third most prolific pinball artist next to George Melent and Lloyd Parker.
    28:17
    I think the next one who falls is Gordon Morrison. And one really weird fact that I found out was apparently Advertising Posters had one big studio, and they had two artists that had to share that studio. The other artist was Gordon Morrison So you got Jerry Kelly doing Pointy people on one side And then you got Gordon Morrison doing his thing And they're both artists So they both influence each other And I got to look at some of their personal art And it's funny because Gordon Morrison was doing abstract stuff That you'd attribute to Christian Marsh and Christian Marsh was grabbing some of Gordon Morris' influence in his personal art. What they mainly did in their personal lives, their private art, nudes.
    29:16
    That's pretty much all they did. Probably because they couldn't do it for the Pinball Museum. So Christian Marsh just keeps cranking them out. Like I said, 150 games and about half of them, about 70 machines were pointy people machines.
    29:37
    So Bally High, just pointy to the max. And then Doodlebug is, I'm not going to say psychedelic, but he's trying to get there. He's trying to get psychedelic. And I had no idea. I looked at that doodle bug that they're writing.
    30:01
    I don't know, pretty crazy stuff. Starpool I thought was really interesting because it's like the first,
    30:11
    the early game, Miss O. Again, Miss O has this blonde in it that is kind of getting all the attention. and all the guys playing pool are looking at her.
    30:27
    Kind of carries through the same thing with this one, Star Pool. You've got the lady who's right next to the red-vested guy. If you look at her other hand, she's holding the ball.
    30:41
    So she's stolen one of the balls, and she's actually a player because she's holding an acoustic also. And the other lady behind her that looks pissed off, You know, she knows what's going on. The other lady is looking at the ball in their hand, so she knows what's going on, but the guys are oblivious.
    31:02
    And the real coincidence is Christian Marsh was hired by George Melentin, and they hit it off immediately. They used to spend lunch together once a week, and so they were friends besides working. They were friends on the outside. and one of his games that he did before he stopped doing artwork in, he stopped in 64, I'm sorry, this is in 54, he did another game called Star Pool. And, again, it was women playing pool. I think, I'm not sure, I can't back any of this up, but it sounds like he asked Christian Marsh, hey, why don't you do a star pool like I did? And so that was the last pointy people that came out of the whole genre.
    31:56
    So again, back to Goldstream, which was one of my favorite ones. And it took me a while to like this one, but once I got into it, I realized, wow, yeah, the composition is pretty amazing. and his use of colors, it was really different, you know, from what Gottlieb was doing and Chicago coin. It just seemed this was pretty far out there. Another one that's actually, it's the same game, only it has one extra lane up top is OXO, which is probably one of his most famous pointy people. Now that is probably the most pointy people game.
    32:42
    And for some reason, everybody seems to like that one. The artwork doesn't bother them. It's real psychedelic. It's fluorescent inks.
    32:51
    And I've never figured out why that one is acceptable to a lot of people that don't like pointy people.
    32:59
    And then this is my favorite one. This is the one that sold me on pointy people art. When I saw it double up, my heart flipped. I mean, it's like actionism and cubism.
    33:16
    It's pretty crazy. Plus, I did have one of those motorcycles when I was a kid. My dad and I tried it. It was a two-stroke. And he actually represented it pretty faithfully, especially the smoke, because it was a two-stroke. So two-strokes just let out a god-awful amount of smoke when you drove them. But, yeah, my wife and I rode motorcycles a lot, and I could really relate to that one. It just had all the right elements and the colors and just everything on that. They unfortunately only made like 80 of these, and I was fortunate to get one for the museum.
    34:00
    So back to Jerry Kelly. This is one of his first for Bali. was surfers. And here's one that has a lot of jokes in it. I'll just tell you. But I want to point out the side art on it with the surfer riding that big, long plank is just so Jerry Kelly. It's just like, well, how can I represent this using the minimal amount of information? Which I really find that fascinating because, like, How much ink can you save and still represent something?
    34:38
    But he always managed to get these jokes in. And, again, you've got the balloons there that are tied into this carryover thing. But if you look at the back glass, you'll see there's a pelican with something in his mouth, and that is the top for the brunette lady's bikini.
    34:58
    It's only in his mouth. And then there's a blind person that's selling balloons, but he's not blind because he's checking out her butt. I don't know what it is about these butt things, but they're there, I can't deny them.
    35:16
    Then if you go to the play field, he actually carries his joke over on the play field. Now you see the pelican is on, sorry.
    35:29
    he's sitting on the roof of that thing that's floating, and he's got something again in his mouth, but it's her bottom. It's the bottom of her bikini because she's wearing the top. So I don't know how that happened.
    35:45
    The other thing is that he was really into designing and integrating the theme with the play. So in this one, if you look at the play field, it's all blue. It's like it's water. So his theory is that the ball is a surfer, and he's surfing down the play field.
    36:05
    And when he hit a ball on something like this, this has a midway piece of plastic that guides the ball, and it actually swoops it over on the left and swoops it over to the right. And it really has this whole motion of like surfing and waves. And then he's got these little zipper flippers because he's working with Ted Zale on most of these games. So the mushroom bumpers close the zipper flippers and make for some pretty incredible playing. It's a great game. It's one of my favorites of his.
    36:50
    And then a go-go. A go-go is just like a party on a pinball machine. I mean, it's great. You get all these, that guy looks like, the guy in the center of the go-go back last looks like Wolfman Jack. I don't know if that was on purpose or not. But, yeah, the dancers are just going crazy. I love the guy with the headphones. He's bent over backwards in impossible positions.
    37:21
    And I think this is something that Christian Morris kind of borrowed from Jerry Kelly. I think he came up with that by himself.
    37:32
    Then you get something like Rockmakers, which is slightly pointy. And my wife and I stared at this one trying to figure out what the hell is going on. And I completely ignored the title, Rockmakers. So it looks like the guys aren't working at all, but all the women have harnessed the power of these dinosaurs. And what are they doing? They're making rocks.
    37:56
    I don't know why. That doesn't make any sense. But I just always thought this one was pretty funny. And the play field is just, like, so barren of anything, you know. It's kind of surprising that he would do something that barren of anything. But he was really in his minimalist stage. So this is two very different styles, as you can see. One, you really have to dig out the visual content in Dogies. You really have to look at that one. And it's a little more organic than what Christian Marsh does, but he kind of lost, you know, you have to struggle with it. And so it wouldn't always be obvious what's going on. Zip-a-doo, it's right at the height of the psychedelic era. And, you know, the gal's wearing paisley. And the funny thing about Christian Marsh is, yeah, he did pointy people, but he always made it round where it counted.
    39:09
    I won't say anything further than that. So this was interesting. Christian Marsh loved Jerry Kelly. He really had a lot of respect for him. And I didn't notice this for the longest time. And then one day I was looking at it. You know here Champ right And he doing a similar thing that Gottlieb that Art Stanholm did where he put the back glass of the game on the game So they playing champ And in the champ back glass, you see, oh, there's another back glass of champ. But then you look at the other. I always looked at that. I never looked at the other games. If you look at the other games, you'll see they're all Jerry Kelly games. The first one is, well, I know what the mini zag is the third one.
    40:06
    And you just find the, you have to go through all your Jerry Kelly games, but they're all Jerry Kelly games. And it was his tribute that he did in 1974.
    40:19
    It was right near when he did the last Pointy People. And that was his tribute to Jerry Kelly. Jerry Kelly, on the other hand, couldn't stand Marsh and actually made a point to tell people that he didn't do Mariner, that he's tired of people attributing that piece of crap art to him. He was really offended by this.
    40:42
    And it's kind of sad. I can actually look at it. Out of all the Christian Marsh games, that one is particularly close to the way that Jerry Kelly would do something, but it's pretty obvious it's not.
    40:57
    One thing, you can look at the pointy hands and see how they're different. Jerry Kelly just did them differently.
    41:07
    Plus, you can always see what's going on in a Christian marsh, and with Jerry Kelly you really have to struggle. But he did borrow some of the things like the scuba divers and the fins for that one. So I can see why people would confuse it. But he did not like that.
    41:30
    I think that's it. Wanted to say, yeah. Sorry for the abrupt ending. No, it's okay. Every game that you saw in the presentation is actually in the museum's collection. We either have them for play in the museum as part of the existing exhibit for pointy people or in the regular history room continuously because they're popular games and important games of pinball. And the rest are in our large collection that we have out in the warehouse.
    42:01
    The pictures that you saw for the presentation are part of a project that we've continued on that we started during the pandemic when we were closed, which is our photography preservation project. That's something that was financed internally within the museum. We have a special corner set up with color corrected lighting, a really special set up, a good photographer, great lenses. And we made sure to photograph the heads, the play fields, and a three-quarter view of each of these games for posterity. In some cases, some of these games don't exist in any sort of form other than in someone's personal collection or an art collection. And making sure we digitize things and preserve them for the future is really integral to our mission as a museum to try to preserve and bring these things to the public forever. So definitely, if you have an opportunity, please come to the museum to see this exhibit before it leaves. We will still have Pointy People Games throughout, but we'll be losing the main exhibit for a very special replacement exhibit that will be coming in that we'll have a press conference about that we'll be talking about social media. So definitely pay attention to that for the future. We did want to, it looks like we've got a couple minutes. We did want to open up the floor to Q&A, either about pointy people or the museum in general, for the little bit of time we had.
    43:20
    Manu? Well, it depends on the game. Sometimes, yeah, they're not related at all. Jerry Kelly probably did it almost half of the time.
    43:37
    And when you say that theme, the art, The prime example for me is fireball, because fireball is throwing balls at you on the back glass, and that's what happens when you play it. You get that spinner thing that nauseates most players.
    43:54
    So, yeah. When did he have his file? When was the last point he beat in a game that he was pointing at? That was 74. 74? Yeah.
    44:08
    Starpool, yeah. Yeah, that was his last one. Now he kept working doing artwork. He just didn't do any more pointing people. Yeah? That's a really great question. It's a Herculean effort to move that many games to another location, set them up, level them, make sure they play okay, and then retrieve them from that location. We would very much like to run expos and we're looking for a space where we could store the collection and run an expo each year. And it would be a location that could do both. And we could have them all preserved, climatically preserved and controlled, and they'll open that up maybe once a year without having to move that many games out to a location. It will allow us to have more as well. So definitely stay tuned for that. And that's definitely part of the fundraising that we do in reaching out and talking about future plans with folks. We would like to start doing shows again.
    45:12
    Yes, sir. Hey, Michael. I was trying to follow along with your pictures on my phone because I couldn't see the details on the screen.
    45:22
    And someone just chased here in the space a small database. And I think you've got them photographed. I'm not saying to them all of you to help Yeah, just that's been brought up before.
    45:45
    We'd like to do our own presentation, so we haven't shared them with the IPDB, partly because there's constraints on us as a nonprofit as to what we can do. So we have to put our own content onto these pictures before we can, I don't know if you noticed, but IPDB has a bunch of, you know, things at the bottom of each page. Yeah.
    46:14
    And so we just want to, we want to tell our own story. We're on a totally different, well, not totally different, but it's a different way of looking at pinball. and the content we want to provide is much different.
    46:32
    I tried, you know, we tried working with them a little bit, and we have given them photos. But this is a series of, as you can see, it's like a back glass, play field, and three-quarter shot that we've done for about half of our collection. And it took us, it was pretty monumental to do that during the pandemic. So we put a lot of work into it. So we are actually integrated it into a site, but it's not ready for prime time yet. The whole idea, and this is why we don't want to put it on IPDB, the whole idea behind what we're doing is comparison. You'll be able to pull up one play field and compare it to another play field, zoom in on them, put them side by side, search using art terms and different terminology than you'd find on IPDB. The main thing would be able to call up different pinball machines and compare the art. And I think that's great and all, but a lot of it's used for databases or resources, what it should be and also just to study it closer or touch enough or whatever. The software we're planning on using is the same software for navigation and zooming that's used for different national art galleries and groups. It's actually a government supported software and navigation system that will be higher quality than any uploading of images to a site that ClickOn would be. I'm not saying provide your best photos or anything, but replace some of his lower resolution stuff with something a little bit better to see if you're public. Absolutely. I think we're open to talking with them, for sure. Patience, my friend. Patience. Yes, sir.
    48:35
    Has the, or did the pointy art style find a way to be medium or advertising or art other than music?
    48:48
    You know, if you look at some of the commercial art from that era, yeah. You know, in terms of modern art, it was about 30 years behind the times.
    49:04
    You know, when you compare what was happening in France, you know, in modern art, and that style actually first came out. So pinball was about 30 years behind the curve. But American advertising started getting that kind of simplistic look at that point, you know, where um i it's an example like you really see it in signage i think yeah from the 60s to the early 70s even the really famous las vegas sign welcome to las vegas i think is a good example of a pointy people influenced their type of art which is really simple but just extraordinarily geometric yeah the uh the boomerang you know that whole the boomerang thing and uh geometric shapes yeah And even shows like, I think, the Jetsons is very pointy people. Yeah. Yeah, it kind of spilled over into cartoons. Like, Hanna-Barbera got away from total realism and just went with more simplistic designs of the characters. You know, so they weren't pointy. That was unfortunate.
    50:14
    Last question. Hi, guys. Do you think that Bally's emphasis on contemporary art and presenting something way different than their competitors is something that was baked in DNA, right? For being the first pinball company or amusement company that had an internal art team, right? Do you think that that was an important part of their DNA?
    50:37
    You know, it's interesting. You read their contract, and they turned over all design aspects to Jerry Kelly. all all design aspects of it so he wasn't you know he designed their logo he uh jerry kelly kind of bragged about how he had valley bigwigs come to his studio in chicago and they had to step over the drunks on his you know that were hanging out in his stairway they had to step past you know, these people come up in his studios, and they made these million-dollar deals, you know, and he had this original painting of the Valley Harlequin. So he went on to make them, probably made them quite a bit of money. He was an industrial designer, so he designed, there's a slot machine called the Money Honey, and he designed their bezel. Chris Koontz loves to talk about this all the time, because you don't even think about this stuff. You know, it's a mechanical design, and it made that machine so popular. That's why it got the name Money Honey. And it was just a design where he redid where the coins come out, which was, I guess, really small before. He just made it huge. So people would think, oh, man, this is going to be so much money coming out of this thing. They had to put a big old mouth on it, you know. So, yeah, I find it really curious. I'd love to know why they got rid of him. My theory is that he wanted more money. Apparently he was making deals. Well, we'll yield the floor for the next group, but we just wanted to say thanks again to Marco and Pinball University. Please come check out the show while it's still at the museum. And please check out the other talks we have. We have so many friends and volunteers at the museum, which are up here today, and they're all going to be really worthwhile. So just really thank you so much. We appreciate it. Yeah.
    52:41
    Applause