Burlesk

Burlesk, manufactured by V. P. Distributing Company of St. Louis, Missouri in 1944, is an electro-mechanical (EM) pinball machine produced during World War II. It was a conversion of Genco's 1939 game Follies of 1940, a practice common among distributors during the war when new manufacturing was constrained by material shortages.

As a flipperless EM machine, Burlesk relied on tilt, timing, and the era's electrical relays and solenoids rather than player-controlled flippers, which would not be introduced to pinball until 1947. Specific gameplay features and design elements of Burlesk are not well documented, leaving room for speculation among enthusiasts about how it may have differed from its source game.

Very little information survives regarding Burlesk's original art or theme. As a wartime conversion machine, it offers collectors and historians a window into how the pinball industry kept operating — largely by recycling existing designs — during a period of significant disruption.