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My memory of that game is watching the guy “hippie” sink about 5 woodscrews into the game with a power drill to secure the lockbar when it was loose, and then use tape to re-attach the ballerina’s leg that broke off and was flopping around on the playfield.
…Game must not be very valuable. 
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I definitely did not turn down the chance to play Pinball Circus when I went to the Pinball Hall of Fame. What stood out to me more so than the unusual design is the use of squash-and-stretch on the DMD animations. If you know nothing else about Python Anghelo, it demonstrated that yes, he could animate at a professional level.
Seeing that made me realize I really don’t see as much squash-and-stretch as I would hope in DMD animations not made by him.
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Tim Arnold runs PHoF basically for no profit. This makes it a little hard to maintain games sometimes. (Not to mention there are only two known Pinball Circus machines, and with Python Anghelo’s death in 2014 it’s unlikely we’ll see more soon.)
He animated for Disney before he went into pinball!
…sorry, I am a huge fan of his. 
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that’s because the money made is given to the Salvation Army. The PPM in Alameda is a nonprofit, and they keep their machines in excellent shape. That’ because their nonprofit mission is actually pinball, not charity.
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I got to play the white wood with the snake in the middle. It was a lot harder than the final version that’s at PHOF. Definitely thrilling when you finally get it all the way to the top. Agree with you about the flow.
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I’ve seen this whitewood around a couple times, but was under the impression it was part of a Remake project, rather than the original game. I definitely like the asymmetrical flippers on the PHoF variant more than the symmetrical flippers on the whitewood.
Maybe going off on a tangent a bit, but where does IPDB draw the line on determining a completed unit? In the case of TPC, two machines are known to exist with a possible 3rd. Makes me curious if the above whitewood included in that count, and if not, how many TPC whitewoods are out there.
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I honestly don’t know. It makes sense to me that it could be a remake. That pic was taken a little over 2 years ago at Southern Fried in Atlanta. I know at one point during the show it was having problems, and Ben Heck was working on fixing it. I didn’t talk to anyone about it, I just played it. I’m sure someone here will know more and fill us in.
You do know there is a team remaking and ‘finishing’ Pinball Circus right? Big question is if they will ever decide to try to take it to production, or builds beyond the kits they are building for the team itself.
I heard about it in an interview Python did in the early 2010s. What’s the name of the group?
Awesome, thanks! I signed up for their newsletter. Looks like their last piece of news was April 1 '15 though. 
The one at PHOF is actually not the original design. Python left Williams before the project was finished it was changed for that prototype unit. The flippers are not suppose to be asymmetrical. Notice the artwork on the playfield by the flippers. Python always integrated the flippers into the art. Cyclone and the clowns fingers. Fish tales and the fishes lower jaw. Those dolphins are lined up for normal flipper placement. The snake in the middle on the new whitewood was part of the original design. Pythons idea was to have a button on the front of the game that you hit with you pelvic region. If James Loflin gets the game done it is exactly what Python wanted. He was working on it right up to the day he died with James. Python even had all the original recordings and music for it.
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For the last whitewood I saw it worked rather well and they had it tied to an extra button. Basicly think medusa. Center post with extra button to pop it up. Worked almost exactly the same but it’s a wider flipper gap with a big snake head in the middle.
I forget the designer who came in and made it asymmetrical after Python left. Kordek maybe?
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That about all I can recall at the moment from my last talks with Maximus guys/Python. I was lucky enough to be in contact with him a bit before he passed. Wish I got to know him more.
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I do recall him saying he wants these to be setup for redemption and in places like Chuck E. Cheese’s. His last job was designing redemption games I believe. As “adult” as some of his ideas were he loved making things for kids.
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Yep, and he received a bunch of formal animation training too. (My point is, of course, that if you know nothing about him, you can tell the animation was done by an experienced animator. There wasn’t much else like it elsewhere in pinball DMDs.)
IPDb seems to have a pseudo-wiki approach. There’s a page for some Naruto reskin, for instance, even if no pictures are available.
Pinball Circus would definitely not look out of place in a Chuck E. Cheese’s. That being said, the family amusement center business ran into great difficulty during the Great Recession. It seems to be pulling itself back up though, with Dave & Busters having expanded tremendously over the past few years. I wonder if there’ll be some other chain that’ll come by around here too.
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