Oscar
About This Machine
Oscar, manufactured by Marvel Manufacturing Company of Chicago in 1947, is a single-player electro-mechanical pinball machine from the postwar boom years of the format. Marvel was a short-lived manufacturer active only from 1944 to 1948, and Oscar dates from near the end of that run.
Very little documentation survives about Oscar's specific gameplay features, theme, or designer. As with many EM machines of the period, its operation would have relied on the standard toolkit of the era: electromagnets, relays, and contact switches controlling scoring and ball movement around the playfield.
The scarcity of surviving information about Oscar only adds to its obscurity today. Collectors and historians researching Marvel Manufacturing's brief output will find Oscar a hard-to-pin-down but genuine piece of 1940s pinball history.