Happy-Go-Lucky

The game in the flyer shows a thin fixed post in the flipper gap, looking more like a peg, encased in a hard plastic sleeve similar to the type used for switch stack insulation. Gottlieb's previous game having a Safety Gate, Knock Out, shows a peg in the flipper gap in its flyer. The next game with a Safety Gate after Happy Go Lucky is Mermaid, and the flyer game shows the familiar rubber-ringed plastic post in the gap. Steve Young tells us that the peg post was used on Happy-Go-Lucky only for the sample games while production games used the regular plastic post with rubber ring. The flyer game also has extra long flippers whereas the production games for which we have pictures all have shorter flippers, with rubbered posts to make up for the difference in flipper length. Designer Wayne Neyens had a machinist make these longer flippers from metal. Although they appeared on the game in the flyer, he tells us they did not appear on production games, saying Gottlieb "didn't go much for innovation in those days". In our Files section are copies of Wayne's original sketches for this new flipper design, showing it measured more than 3 1/16 inches in length, as well as copies of additional Gottlieb information on this prototype large flipper. The backglass uses musical notes to show the name of this game as hyphenated. The schematic also hyphenates the name, while the flyer and instruction card do not. Wayne told us his original name for this Model 48 game was "Ten Little Indians" (his sketch indicates "10 Little Indians") to go with the sequences of ten on the playfield. See also Model 39, Gottlieb's 1950 'Ten Little Indians'.