With a career spanning over 40 years that includes 14 studio albums, five Grammy awards, a TV show, and a movie, Weird Al may have only just revealed his greatest accomplishment to date: a new Weird Al-themed pinball table called Weird Al’s Museum of Natural Hilarity packed full of his musical parodies and endless inside jokes.
Even as arcades slowly died off when home video game consoles became graphical powerhouses, pinball machines have managed to retain their popularity, thanks in part to their targeting of specific fan groups. Walk into a room full of pinball machines and you’ll undoubtedly gravitate to a machine themed around a movie or TV show that you’re already familiar with, and it’s why companies like Stern have, in recent years, churned out tables featuring pop culture phenomenons like Stranger Things or Star Wars: The Mandalorian.
There’s also no shortage of pinball machines featuring famous musical groups from Led Zeppelin to Rush to The Beatles, but Multimorphic is the first company to create a table featuring Weird Al’s massive body of work. Fans of Weird Al (is there anyone with a soul who isn’t?) will probably find themselves singing along to 17 of his greatest hits licensed for the machine (including Like a Surgeon, White and Nerdy, Amish Paradise, and Dare to be Stupid) while they play, but the table also includes over 2,000 voice callouts recorded by the musician, and countless objects, gags, and imagery from his movies, shows, and music video, all under the loose theme of a Museum of Natural Hilarity.
Being Weird Al-themed is probably more than enough for most fans to unload a pocket full of quarters, but the table is built on Multimorphic’s P3 Pinball Platform which brings some modern features to pinball with the most obvious being a 1080P high-def screen under the lower part of the playfield that works with real-time ball tracking to make on-screen elements interact with the ball.
Pre-orders for the Weird Al’s Museum of Natural Hilarity start on February 28, and two options will be available: a Standard Edition kit featuring a standard height backbox, and a Limited Edition Kit featuring an animated Weird Al playing the accordion popping out of the top — but only 227 of those are being produced. This is far from being the cheapest of Weird Al collectibles, however. The P3 Pinball Machine itself will set you back $US8,300 ($11,522), while the Museum of Natural Hilarity upgrade kit starts at $US3,000 ($4,165). Do you dare to be stupid with your budgeting?
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