Miss America

Miss America, designed by Harry Mabs with art by Roy Parker, was manufactured by D. Gottlieb & Company in January 1947. This single-player electro-mechanical machine was built on the same playfield as Gottlieb's 1945 title Stage Door Canteen, redressed with new artwork and a pageant theme.

Like other games of its moment, Miss America predates the flipper: it is a flipperless machine relying on 16 passive bumpers to guide the ball's path around the playfield, rather than on flipper-based aiming. Gottlieb's first flipper game, Humpty Dumpty, would not arrive until October 1947, several months after Miss America's release. Many operators later retrofitted flipperless tables like this one with add-on flippers, often mounted in unconventional playfield positions, to keep them competitive with the new technology.

With 1,673 units produced, Miss America stands as a snapshot of pinball at the very cusp of the flipper revolution, and its shared playfield lineage with Stage Door Canteen makes it an interesting case study in how manufacturers reused designs with new artwork and themes.