"TRAVEL to exotic cities. DEMOLISH perfectly good roads. ESCAPE nasty police. SEE an alien spacecraft. DRIVE a runaway bulldozer. WHAT are you waiting for?!"
Is a pinball machine designed by Pat Lawlor and released by Williams Electronics in 1994.
The story behind its creation was this. Allegedly Pat Lawlor, after having designed the wonderful The Addams Family and the excessive and IMO overrated Twilight Zone, was stuck in a roadside diner near Chicago because all the roads were closed to where he was going, when in walked a bevy of construction workers. They then reportedly started to comment loudly about how they were getting time and a half to literally demolish and rebuild those roads despite there being no problems or damage to them, but they were doing it anyway because of that sweet sweet overtime. This planted the seed for our moustachioed pinball designing hero to create this. A machine about ripping up roads across the United States for no adequately explained reason. With Red, played by Carlene Carter (yes, that one) whose song "Every Little Thing" plays if you get the high score, and Ted, in jaunty yellow hard hats. It's about demolishing and rebuilding roads for no reason other than to annoy everyone else. So you, as the titular Red and Ted, have to take your bulldozer on a road trip across the United States, causing chaos, grabbing overtime pay, avoiding police, and of course at all time make sure the radio stays on country and western and never, not once, dials over to *shudder* talk radio.
Red & Ted is also a widebody machine and has a somewhat unusual playfield layout. For a start, it has two plungers. The right hand plunger is the standard one and gets the ball into play with a short lane that ejects it middle right. You can get a skill shot if you can drop it in a certain sinkhole near there or you can do a very soft plunge, and it will come down a bypass into the right inlane, from which you can do a flipper skill shot into the upper left ramp. There are also three left and one right flippers. The lower left flipper and right flipper are where you expect them to be, but there is a middle left flipper which is fed either by making orbital shots or through a little loop immediately in front of it, and an upper right flipper that is fed by making a shot into the upper left sinkhole. The middle left flipper aims at a target bank and a sinkhole, while the upper left flipper aims at further lateral targets and lanes in the upper right. The biggest and most obvious feature of the playfield are the two animatronic heads of Red (a smirking ginger woman in a yellow hard hat) and Ted (an older chap in a hard hat). These blink and move their eyes around and physically yap at you with the voiceovers as well. They are mechanically very similar to the similar head in Funhouse although far less nightmarish. (I can't play Funhouse by the way. It gives me night terrors.) In front of Ted's head is a dozer blade which acts as a target bank. Red's head does give you a bonus and an amusing callout - "What'd I ever do to you?" - if you hit it and if you can get the ball into her mouth while she's yapping at you, she spits it out and calls you a cheeseburger. There's also various orbitals which go in multiple different ways.
So, how do you build up your score? Well, making ramp shots and hitting the middle right sinkhole gives you miles, and miles get you closer to your next city, and each city has its own mode. The lit city is determined by whether the standup target the ball most recently hit was a white one, yellow one, or orange one. You start at the East Coast either at New York or Miami and have to advance your way to the west coast. So although there are 15 different modes to play, in a standard run you may only play five of them. The last city is either Seattle, Portland, or San Francisco and completing one of those three modes lights the wizard mode, in which everything is lit. There's also a multiball as well. To get to this you have to hit the dozer blade in front of Ted's face to advance the days of the week. Once you get to "FRIDAYYYY!" the lock is lit at the upper right sinkhole. Lock two balls and the shaker motor in the cabinet fires up, Ted's mouth opens, and the dozer blade starts going up and down. Get the ball into Ted's mouth to start it. He will appear to choke on the ball before swallowing it. During multiball the shaker motor is active, the dozer blade goes up and down, and you can get jackpots by getting your balls into Ted's mouth again (oo-er). If you manage it, then the soundtrack changes to Carlene Carter's song "Every Little Thing" until the end of the ball, and you can relight it by hitting enough ramp shots. If you drain all but one ball, Red will complain that "you missed EVERYTHING!" and you're back to single ball play.
Other amusing things include Fire in the Hole where you have to make a shot from the middle left flipper into the middle right sinkhole, Flying Rocks where a ramp shot instead opens a double diverter into the left hand shooter lane, and you can plunge the ball right up so it bounces off Ted's head, and Bob's Souvenirs, where if this is lit at the top left sinkhole, you are offered to spend some points from your score to purchase a souvenir. Some souvenirs are worthless but others, if you have been to the right city, give you large boosts to your end of ball bonus, and if you light Albuquerque as one of the city modes and start it you are confronted with a Native American trader who offers to purchase all your souvenirs for a one time bonus, though he isn't guaranteed to give you more than you paid for them in the first place.
Anyhow. The city modes. There's quite a lot of them and some of them call back each other. They're usually presaged by Red saying, "Hey look Ted, (thing)" and then Ted says something amusing or droll. There's also some reactivity here. If your first mode is New York - "Hey look Ted, taxicabs!" - in which you must hit the bulldozer to flip or crush or mutilate a row of yellow cabs, at the end of the mode the angry taxi driver will say "you have not heard the last of me!" He's not lying. If you then get to Dallas the mode will be "Monster Cab" in which the DMD shows the bulldozer being chased by a yellow cab on monster truck wheels and you must make ramp shots to escape. If you then get to Salt Lake City the mode will be "High Noon" in which you are told "I have come for you Mr Bulldozer Man!" and you have to hit an orbital shot in a very tight time limit while a sting from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly plays with Monument Valley in the background on the display. Some of the modes are also quite difficult. I struggle to do particularly well with Minneapolis ("Frozen People") because it will immediately end if you hit the blast zone which is a pretty big target bank. If you get to the West Coast and complete a mode, Ted will slam the bulldozer down, the earth will explode, and you start the wizard mode in which everything is lit, immediately it's multiball, and the shaker motor goes nuts.
Despite not being American or working in manual labour or as a tradie, I love Red and Ted's Road Show. It's genuinely funny in a comedic sociopathy sort of way. The fact that Red and Ted can cheerfully joke about demolishing things just for the sake of it seems to scratch my sense of humour. The unusual playfield layout has a lot of flow and there's a certain unpredictability to the various shots. You really have to be on top of your lateral game to make the most of this, and also be prepared to catch, trap, or pass tricky ricochets. Pat Lawlor also dialled back his excessiveness that he'd got into with Twilight Zone and it really helps. Despite this, it didn't sell anywhere near as well as Twilight Zone or Addams, partly because the theme isn't quite so saleable. I mean, yes, bulldozers and construction machinery is cool, but roadworks really are not. I also think that the animatronic heads might have put people off because they can be a bit uncanny valley though, like I've said, nowhere near as awful as Funhouse.
I haven't played one of these in quite a while and I've not seen one come up for sale at any sort of a reasonable price. Yet. If I did, I would totally grab one to go next to my Rollergames. However I suspect with the animatronics and the shaker motor and the unusual layout it's probably mechanically a bastard to keep in a good state.
(IN24/25)