The Unauthorized Hagiography of Python Anghelo
By Joe Ciaravino
Editor’s Note: Here is Part I in a series written by Joe Ciaravino and profiling the legendary pinball artist, Python Anghelo. This marks what would have been Python’s 70th birthday. (He died in April of 2014). RIP PA. Miss ya, big dog. Somewhere up in heaven, you are prolly looking down at us, smiling, and doing something absolutely disgusting.
Also note: A few of these images are screenshots from the most-excellent documentary, Python’s World. Which you can find here.
There is no doubt in my mind that the late, great Python Anghelo was an eccentric genius who earnestly believed that pinball was a genuine American art form. His work advanced the scope of what a pinball game could be, and he always believed that pinball would continue to be relevant to every new generation. He had a photographic memory and an artistic talent that was only matched in its attention to anatomical detail by the great Renaissance masters. All this mixed together with the surreal imagination of Salvador Dali.
However. And I say the following with the deepest respect and admiration: Python Anghelo was also a boozing, drug-addled, egomaniacal, degenerate sex-fiend! There is absolutely no way anyone in this day and age would ever hire a man like him to make games for children!
But hey, this was the 1980s!
PART I: The Beginning
Python Vladimir Anghelo was born in Transylvania, Romania, on January 1st, 1954, into a poor, working-class Jewish family.
Not only was Python artistically gifted at a young age, he was also very mechanically inclined and often built hunting devices and even assembled a bicycle out of spare parts. He learned the fundamental concepts of the design process out of necessity. Python would describe his early artistic training as “spartan” and was always fond of saying, “Adversity is the Best University.”
Transylvania, early work, and making Salvador Dali eat shit.
When Python was very young, his parents both worked full-time jobs, and yet his family still struggled to make ends meet through the most austere years of communist rule in Romania. Encouraged by his grandmother and aunt, Python would draw for 6 to 8 hour stretches as a young boy. Drawing became an obsession and escape for Python. He became interested in stagecraft and prop design when he was 11 years old. Python had developed a flair for the dramatic and theatrical worlds he could create.
He later honed his artistic talents at the Bucharest National University of Arts. Python was 17 years old when and he and his family moved to the United States, where he continued to study art and animation.
When he was 19 years old, Python won a Metropolitan Art Museum contest, beating out the likes of Salvador Dali. The October 27th, 1974 edition of the Chicago Tribune featured a four page article on Python Angelo’s remarkable talents.
Python’s artistic career thrived. From 1974-1980, He headed 2 art studios, Pen & Ink and Art Force Studio. He produced commercial work; illustrations for TV Guide and other print advertisements, murals and even sharing copy duties. Through Python’s illustrations you could see the way he blended patterns and forms of nature into new, inventive, and arresting images.
Python despised intellectualism and elitist art. He believed that great works of art could be appreciated by the masses as much as the highly privileged. “That’s great art, when it’s universal. It goes across intellectual bases, across races, across time… time is the best judge.”
Leaving Disney for… Joust
Python worked at Disney as an animator for a couple of years but quickly felt frustrated by the imposed creative limitations. When the opportunity presented itself in 1979 he quit his position at Disney to work at Williams Electronics. In the process, Python supposedly took a 50% pay cut because he believed video games had more engagement potential than traditional animation. Python felt that he could connect his art with the public more directly through video games and thus began his journey to fulfill “Artistic missions from God, like The Blues Brothers.” Sheesh.
His first foray into the coin-op industry was in 1982 with the smash arcade hit, Joust. Python’s rendering of medieval knights riding mechanical ostriches over a lava-covered hellscape was the perfect kind of wacky bat-shit crazy concept for a video game that captured the imagination of players back then. Python also worked on the character sprites and animations which were surprisingly fluid and realistic for that era.
After a few more mildly successful video games, Python became transfixed on designing a pinball machine. His first pinball collaboration was with legendary pinball designer, Barry Oursler who had just designed the 2-player pinball version of Joust, so they seemed like a perfect fit.
Pinball: The amusement park under glass
It didn’t take long for Python to become obsessed with turning pinball into a theme park under glass.
"Pinball, to me, was a miniature amusement park that poor kids could go to fulfill their fantasies, changing into the ball, and have power at their fingertips for 25 cents,” he said."... When I do a game, I want to inspire. I want to be a relevant, spiritual force while entertaining.”
It took only weeks for his work ethic to become apparent to his colleagues at Williams.
Barry Oursler on Pinball Profile: (Python) always came through in the end and did a lot of great work. But I mean, sometimes it was nerve-wracking working with him 'cause you just never knew when he was gonna get something done. He'd wait 'til like the last week to start working on something- he might have had three months on it. And I guess everybody at the office was like, panicking "Is he going to get it done? What are we gonna do?
Python was famous for taking 2-hour lunch breaks whenever he did show up at the Williams offices. He would come up with a litany of far-fetched excuses for not showing up to work at all. Barry Oursler would personally attest, "His mother died three times. Whenever he didn't show up, either his mother had died, or he was on safari with National Geographic."
The walking HR disaster and sizzurp inventor
Python was the ultimate nightmare for any company’s HR department. He would often scrawl obscenely crude and perverse illustrations on the company whiteboards. He once drew Wile E. Coyote from Looney Tunes, tying down The Roadrunner to a bed and raping it, with the Roadrunner screaming, "MEEP! MEEP!" Yeah. Yikes.
According to one anonymous Bally/Williams executive, Python often brought a little brown bag to lunch. Inside the bag contained a can of Sprite, a handful of Jolly Ranchers, and a little plastic bottle of prescription strength purple cough medicine. He would combine all of it in a paper cup and chug it down with his meal. Yup, Python was drinkin’ purple drank, purp, sizzurp, syrup, lean… whatever ya call it, he was getting seriously fucked up at work on the regs.
Python often referred to himself as "A wild and crazy guy." and a "Crazy cat." and felt that keeping typical office hours was total bullshit for a creative person such as himself. "I came in 24 hours when I wanted to. Because I don't believe in coming in to 9-to-5 and pretending I'm working. I'm being creative when I can be creative. I'll go in work for 2 days non-stop... or I'll go in work 16 hours, or I'll go in work 2 hours."
Here’s the thing: it worked. He reportedly never missed a single deadline and his work was always tight as fuck. What a baller. In 1985, Williams released Comet, the first pinball game Python was fully involved in. Python’s dream of a totally cohesive thematic presentation of a theme park under glass was finally realized!
Comet: The miniature amusement park full of murders and orgasms
On the Comet playfield, one can see the incredible attention to all the minute detail in the hundreds of spectators, animals, attractions, vehicles and performers observed from a bird’s eye view. Python was an absolute master of foreshortening the human body from the omniscient player’s perspective above.
On the backglass element of Comet is a depiction of sheer horror and abject terror worthy of painter, Francis Bacon! For inspiration on the expressions of the windswept riders on the Comet backglass, Python claims "I went to Great America and I paid those guys $2,000 to go on a roller coaster and turn the front seats backwards so I could see the people. And it seemed to me you got to see what the other people experience. And when we went down, I see these people screaming like they were getting murdered, or having a multiple orgasms."
Sitting at the very back of the demonic-visaged coaster is a portrait of SNL Bad Boy, John Belushi with his hands outstretched like a bird in flight. In front of John is a little black girl whose depiction has always been under some racial scrutiny. Python defended his work and resented accusations that his controversial portrayal was a racist caricature.
Comet was a certified hit for Williams, selling well over 8,000 units of the game. The game was one of the first modern pinball machines that appealed to both male and female players equally. Python is officially credited only for the artwork on Comet, but he always insisted on coming up with the idea for the first-of-its-kind “1 million trick shot” in the upper right corner of the game.
A rival emerges, and his name is… Steve Kordek
This is where Python first started butting heads with legendary game designer Steve Kordek. Kordek was a Williams Pinball OG. Having worked 63 years in the pinball industry, Kordek designed over 100 pinball games for Genco and Williams and is most remembered in the pinball history books for placing two electro-mechanical flippers at the bottom of a pinball playfield. Which, to this day, remains the industry standard. In his seventies at Williams, Steve was appointed to a figurehead position in charge of the pinball design section and supervised all the pinball design teams.
Python was often very resentful of Steve’s advisements. "Kordek was against my million shot in Comet and then he took credit for it!" Python said, adding later, “Steve Kordek threw me not out of the room, but out of the building several times." He claimed that after 1985, he was no longer a full-time employee of WMS, but a creative consultant with an office at the factory. "I quit Williams over 30 times and was fired from Williams over 20 times."
High Speed: Python and Steve Ritchie haul ass
With Python’s sophomore game, he was given the opportunity to work with what was then the most successful pinball designer in the business, Steve Ritchie. Together, they developed High Speed, which was credited with a lot of technical firsts, but most importantly, it was the first game to feature a narrative, with characters in conflict and a resolution when you achieved the jackpot shot.
Steve Ritchie has said on numerous occasions that the concept of High Speed “Was based on a true story. I was actually chased by the cops at 146 mph in my 1979 Porsche 928.” However, Steve and Python disagreed on what perspective the player should embody. Python was adamant that the player took the perspective of the police, chasing down the speeding criminal. To encourage kids to steal cars and try to outrun the cops Python felt it was too “anti-establishment”.
After a few heated arguments, Python was able to get Ritchie to cooperate and agree on the Backglass artwork by rendering the speeding driver in a cherry red Lamborghini Countach with a beautiful blonde woman beside him. The car’s license plate read “KINGPIN,” which was a reference to one of Steve Ritchie’s nicknames.
Along with the backglass artwork, Python advised on the lighting choreography including the rotating red police beacon light on top of the backbox. Because of the pallid, blue tinged skin of the police officers’ wrinkled, contorted faces on the backglass, the internal nickname for High Speed was “Zombie Cops From Hell”.
Python claimed to have gone on several “ride alongs” with the Chicago PD and witnessed a few take-downs a la the TV show COPS. After the backglass artwork was finalized, Python decided to fuck off to Europe for 6 months and when he returned to Williams, he began to bad-mouth Mark Sprenger’s playfield artwork. To Python, the playfield Mark created looked like a tangle of bland, empty and lifeless grey highways. There just was not enough excitement or drama happening on the streets. Despite this, High Speed was a monumental commercial success and a sea-change in how pinball game rules progressed along a narrative arc.
Grand Lizard: I mean, there’s a big lizard in it.
Python was once again paired with designer, Barry Oursler and tasked with illustrating the backglass art on Grand Lizard and designing the look of the giant plastic lizard head at the back of the game. Barry said working with Python was always “An experience.” Python spent most of the art development process AWOL on one of his “safari trips.” Python was an accomplished outdoorsman who loved hunting and fishing in America’s great wilderness. So he would just go out into the bush with all his gear, tripping balls on a multitude of psychedelics in the middle of the woods for weeks on end. (editor’s note: This is where Joe ended this paragraph, so I guess we will roll with it.)
Pin Bot: The pinball that started as a poem and ended as Python’s biggest hit
Python’s next pinball project would be his most ambitious yet and arguably the singular masterpiece for which he is most remembered for. Python became fascinated with the solar system and the universe and mankind’s place in it. Outer space became the new setting for his own brand of entertainment and theatricality. Most pinball designers would usually begin with fabricating the central mechanical device of a game or sketch out a general layout of the shots and start building it out in foam core. But not Python. He literally came up with the concept of Pin*Bot by writing a poem.
PIN BOT
BY PYTHON
I AM YOUR PINBALL GAME, I’M PIN.BOT.
YOUR WIT IS MY COMPUTER SOFTWARE.
YOUR FINGERS MY HECHANICAL DESIGN.
BUT YOUR IMAGINATION I HAVE NOT.
TO YOU THE SPHERES OF MY COSMIC PLAYFIELD;
PLANETS, PINBALLS ARE THE SAME.
I AM A GIANT, COSMIC ROBOT,
A MASTERPIECE OF MAGIC AND HIGH TECH;
BUT HUMAN I AM NOT!
SO, ON YOUR SAPIEN SKILLS AND TEMPER RESTS
THE CONQUEST OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM,
AS WELL AS MY EXISTENCE.
With Pin*Bot, not only were you observing the game, but you were also literally a part of the game mechanics, with your fingers being analogous to Pin*Bot’s fingers (and vice versa!).
"To me, a pinball machine is a robot. You are basically controlling like an exoskeleton robot in Aliens. Your fingers control the robot. And through you, through your fingers, the robot is an extension of you.” Anthropomorphizing pinball flippers into a piece of moving anatomy became a consistent feature in his future pinball design work. The fingers of the clown in Cyclone, the tails of the cats in Bad Cats, the jaws of the Fish in Fish Tales, and the seal flippers of Pinball Circus are all examples of this.
For the unique skill shot element at the top right corner of the game, Python was inspired by the conical swirl made by the shape of a seashell he found. Python recognized this spiral design found in many of nature’s creations followed what is described by ancient Greek mathematicians as the golden ratio. Supposedly Python hand sculpted the skill shot piece out of clay and attempted firing it in his mother’s oven. Something in the chemical compound of the clay resulted in an enormous explosion that blew the door off the oven.
Python sketched out all the elements Pin*Bot and Barry Oursler translated that sketch into a functional layout for a pinball game. The late Joe Joos Jr. who was a mechanical miracle worker, made all the mechs on the game functional.
Python originally wanted Vangelis to do the soundtrack for Pin*Bot. But when he was told by management that it wasn’t possible within his budget, Python turned to legendary sound designer, Chris Graner. Python wanted the musical soundscape of Pin*Bot to be better than 2001: A Space Odyssey. What he got was one of the most original, ethereal and epic themes for a pinball machine ever created. Python would later call Graner “The Mozart of pinball.”
In the final days before the game went into production, Python spoke to the management at Williams and insisted that himself and his entire design team have their names credited on the Pin*Bot playfield and demanded that they all got royalties from the sales of their games. For him, a great pinball machine was akin to a film production and as such, all creative leads deserved to be formally recognized at the bottom of the playfield, as opposed to hiding easter eggs of contributor’s names in the margins of the game.
Pin*Bot caught the cultural zeitgeist when it was released in the fall of 1986, becoming a huge hit, selling over 12,000 units, and even appears briefly in the beloved Tom Hanks movie Big.
