Saturday 17 January 2009

Old King Cole Spending a Penny

What an irreverant title for a blog entry covering a character who has become a favourite nursery rhyme but who existed in real life and obviously made such an impression on the people of his time that his name was carried on down through the centuries.

The Spending a Penny bit however comes from this being one of many remembered penny slot machines in the arcades of the 1960s. This was never a favourite of mine personally as by the time it came out I was that bit more mature - I was six in 1960 for Heaven's Sake! By then I was wanting to push the buttons on the similar Pepe The Clown machine as on that you could control the puppet's hand and leg movements!

A penny well spent in this machine played a record (normally a naff one as I remember...) and the puppets jiggled about a bit, further tarnishing the good King's reputation, lovingly kept intact for some 15 centuries up to that point... He was King of Rheged, one of Briton's major kingdoms of the Dark Ages, stretching from the Caledonian Forest down to the River Ribble, so taking in today's Cumbria and north Lancashire.

Whilst I'm featuring arcade machines, here's a variant of a hockey game that I've featured previously. The game in my previous entry had a swivelling hockey player at each end, controlled by the two players. Here, the presentation is a little more basic with two simple rods acting as bats to both defend your own goal and try to direct the ball towards your opponent's goal.

Coin Slot Machines Index

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