1972 Gottlieb Jungle pinball machine

Here's my latest victim, a 1972 Gottlieb Jungle. Pretty cool artwork by Gordon Morison on this one. The backglass is quite humourous with all the animals and the Tarzan figure with their tongues sticking out while trying to impress the girl. Impress or get in her pants... one or the other.

Anyway, this Ed Krynski-designed game has a couple of fun shots, but they're kinda overshadowed by the totally unsatisfying spinner shot up the middle. I like my spinners to spin forever and whoever thought that putting a pop bumper right behind a spinner was a good idea obviously missed the point of spinners entirely. I mean, I know what they're going for here -- get the ball in the centre area and let the pop bumper go to town on it for a while -- and that's all fun and good, but the result doesn't really achieve the fun factor I think they were looking for. The spinner, more often than not, gets its action stopped quickly when the ball enters, and then quickly exits, out the centre area. Too bad. See Bally's Boomeraing and Flicker and Playmatic's Fairy for variations on this idea. I'm sure there are others also.

In addition, there's not a whole lot to shoot for aside from heading for the top of the playfield up the left or right. Fortunately, making those shots is pretty fun.

Anyway, bottom-line for me on this one is that it's a pretty ho-hum game from the pinball king of the era.

Jungle is the 4-player version of this playfield layout. The two-player version is Wild Life. Jungle King and Jungle Life are both single-player add-a-ball versions. I think this layout would be vastly superior as an add-a-ball.

For more info on this game, check out the IPDB listing here: http://ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=1332