Other developments by region
The slot machine has taken on many shapes and names since their inception back in the 1800’s. They were first called Bell Machines and have evolved into Fruit Machines and One-Arm Bandits, to Pokies and Video Slots. One common factor has remained though, they are one the most popular forms of gambling played by millions around the world.
We owe this great game to its inventor, Mr. Charles Fey of San Francisco, California. Its original intent was to mimic a poker game, but this was found to be impossible to recreate the number of winning combinations with the technology available at the time. Fey then devised a machine that had 3 reels and just 5 symbols. These symbols were; Hearts, Diamonds, Horseshoes, Spades and a Liberty Bell. The placement of the Liberty Bell is what gave the machines their name. The Liberty Bell is an iconic piece of history in America that represents its freedom from the British. Just a quick history lesson for those who wanted one.
s: Animated TV shows and the rise of anime
New colorful cartoon superstars
After the additions of sound and color were a huge success for Disney, other studios followed. By the end of the decade, almost all the theatrical cartoons were produced in full color.
Initially, music and songs were the focus of many series, as indicated by titles such as Song Car-Tunes, Silly Symphonies, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes, but it was the recognizable characters that stuck with audiences. Mickey Mouse was the first cartoon superstar who surpassed Felix the Cat's popularity, but soon dozens of cartoon superstars followed, many remaining popular for decades.
Warner Bros. had a vast music library that could be used in cartoons, and inspired many cartoons as well, while Disney needed to create the music for every cartoon. Leon Schlesinger sold Warner Bros. a second series called Merrie Melodies, which until 1939 contractually needed to contain at least one refrain from the music catalog. Unlike Looney Tunes with Bosko, Merrie Melodies only featured a few recurring characters like Foxy, Piggy and Goopy Geer before Harman and Ising left in 1933. Bosko was replaced with Buddy for the Looney Tunes series, but he lasted only two years, while Merrie Melodies continued without recurring characters. Eventually, the two series became indistinguishable and produced many new characters that became popular. Animator/director Bob Clampett designed Porky Pig (1935) and Daffy Duck (1937) and was responsible for much of the energetic animation and irreverent humor associated with the series. The 1930s also saw early anonymous incarnations of characters who would later become Elmer Fudd (1937/1940) and Bugs Bunny (1938/1940). Beginning in 1937, Mel Blanc performed most of the characters' voices.
Disney introduced new characters to the Mickey Mouse universe who would become very popular, including Minnie Mouse (1928), Pluto (1930), Goofy (1932), and a character who would soon become the public's new favorite: Donald Duck (1934). Disney also realized that the success of animated films depended upon telling emotionally gripping stories; he developed a "story department" where storyboard artists separate from animators would focus on developing the story alone, which proved its worth when Disney studio released, in 1933, the first animated short to feature well-developed characters: Three Little Pigs. Disney kept on expanding his studio and started more and more production activities, including comics, merchandise, and theme parks. Most projects were based on the characters developed for theatrical short films.
Fleischer Studios introduced an unnamed dog character as Bimbo's girlfriend in Dizzy Dishes (1930), who evolved into the human female Betty Boop (1930–1939) and became Fleischer's best-known creation. In the 1930s they also added Hunky and Spunky (1938) and the popular animated adaptation of Popeye (1933) to their repertoire.
US theatrical animation in the 1960s
For One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) production costs were restrained, helped by the xerography process that eliminated the inking process. Although the relatively sketchy look produced by the xerox process is often maligned by historians and critics, the animators at the time embraced being able to have their drawings transferred directly onto the finished picture. This period at Disney also coincided with the maturation of the "Nine Old Men", a tightly knit group of animators whom Walt entrusted with the development and animation of the films especially as Walt devoted increasingly more time to the construction of parks and other projects. Animators typically regard this period in the studio's history as the most accomplished in terms of the draftsmanship and overall quality of animation. Animation, character designs, and model sheets from this period are still used as reference by animation schools and studios today. "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" was a hit for the studio as was The Sword in the Stone (1963) though over the years it has become one of the least-known Disney features. 1964 saw the release of the live-action/animation hybrid Mary Poppins (1964) which received 13 Academy Awards nominations, including Best Picture. Disney's biggest animated feature of the 1960s was The Jungle Book (1967) which was both a critical and commercial success. This was also the final film that was overseen by Walt Disney before his death in 1966. After Walt's passing, the studio went into a period of long decline. Led by the Nine Old Men, the studio continued to produce films that were successful enough to enable the continuation of the studio. As veteran animators began to age, a training program was introduced to nurture the next generation of talent. The departure of Don Bluth sapped the studio of many veterans and forced many young animators into taking on bigger responsibilities. By the early 1980s, the Nine Old Men had retired, many veterans were gone, and this cohort was struggling to keep the studio viable.
UPA produced their first feature 1001 Arabian Nights (1959) (starring Mr. Magoo as Alladin's uncle) for Columbia Pictures, with little success. They tried again with Gay Purr-ee in 1962, released by Warner Bros. It was well received by critics, but failed at the box office and would be the last feature the studio made.
The Supreme Court ruling of the Hollywood Anti-trust Case of 1948 prohibited "block bookings" in which hit feature films were exclusively offered to theatre owners in packages together with newsreels and cartoons or live-action short films. Instead of receiving a reasonable percentage of a package deal, short cartoons had to be sold separately for the prices that theatre owners were willing to pay for them. Short cartoons were relatively expensive and could now be dropped from the program without people losing interest in the main feature, which became a sensible way to reduce costs when more and more potential movie-goers seemed to stay at home to watch movies on their television sets. Most cartoons had to be re-released several times to recoup the invested budget.[51][52] By the end of the 1960s most studios had ceased producing theatrical cartoons. Even Warner Bros. and Disney, with occasional exceptions, stopped making short theatrical cartoons after 1969. Walter Lantz was the last of the classic cartoon producers to give up when he closed his studio in 1973.
DePatie–Freleng Enterprises, founded by Friz Freleng and David H. DePatie in 1963 after Warner Bros. closed their animation department, was the only studio that found new success with short theatrical cartoon series after the 1950s. They created Pink Panther in 1963 for the opening and closing credits of the live-action Pink Panther film series featuring Peter Sellers. Its success led to a series of short films (1964–1980) and TV series (1969–1980). Pink Panther was followed by the spin-off The Inspector (1965–1969), The Ant and the Aardvark (1969–1971), and a handful of other theatrical series. The Dogfather (1974–1976) was the last new series, but Pink Panther cartoons appeared in theaters until 1980, shortly before the demise of the studio in 1981. From 1966 to 1981 DePatie–Freleng also produced many TV series and specials.
Japan was notably prolific and successful with its style of animation, which became known in the English language initially as Japanimation and eventually as anime. In general, anime was developed with limited-animation techniques that put more emphasis on aesthetic quality than on movement compared to US animation. It also applies a relatively "cinematic" approach with zooming, panning, complex dynamic shots, and more attention to backgrounds which were instrumental to creating an atmosphere.
Anime was first domestically broadcast on TV in Japan in 1960. The export of theatrical anime features started around the same time. Within a few years, several anime TV series was made that would also receive varying levels of airplay in the United States and other countries, starting with the highly influential 鉄腕アトム (Astro Boy) (1963), followed by ジャングル大帝 (Kimba the White Lion) (1965–1966), エイトマン (8th Man) (1965), 魔法使いサリー (Sally the Witch) (1966–1967) and マッハGoGoGo (Mach GoGoGo a.k.a. Speed Racer) (1967).
The domestically popular サザエさん / Sazae-san started in 1969 and is the longest-running animated TV show in the world according to Guinness, with more than 2,250 episodes.[53]
Being Patient and Profiting From Slots
Now that we know the background on slots, let’s get started on how to play and some general tips to help you make some money. By now you’re probably itching to play and want to know how. It’s quite simple really and you only need to follow a few steps
All slots are based on the same premise. You insert money and spin the reels. There’s not much control you have over the outcome of the reels. Slots will have bonus rounds where you can interact with the game and you will have some dictation on the outcome, but for the most part you just pray to lady luck.
Once you pick a machine to play, you will insert your money and pick how much you want to play for and how many pay lines. A lot of machines will have the option to play for multiple coins and pay lines. Use the selector on the machine to choose how many coins and how many pay lines. Once you make your sections, pull the reel, push the button or touch the screen to get the reels spinning. That’s just about it and it’s really that simple.
The very first thing you should do is know the rules of the slot you’re playing. Understand how the bonus rounds play, how many pay lines you can play, how to make a winning combination, etc…. Without knowing how the machine works can make for a frustrating and expensive first time.
As a good rule of thumb when playing slot machines, you always want to play the maximum amount of coins and pay lines if possible. This helps to ensure you can win the most amount possible. It also allows you to hit the jackpots on most machines. Most slots will only pay out the jackpot if you are playing the max coins and pay lines. Hitting the jackpot combo and realizing you weren’t playing the max can be costly.
And speaking of jackpots, you should try to play machines that do have a jackpot of some type. They can be very lucrative when hit and should be chosen over a machine that does not have a jackpot whenever possible. Some live casinos have been heard to pay out over $1 million in jackpots to lucky winners. With one spin of the reel, you may be able to quit your day job and lay your favorite slot for the rest of your days.
Image credit: Julia Bujalski
The earliest forms of Bingo date all the way back to 1530 in Italy. At the time, a game called Lo Giuoco del Lotto D'Italia, or the Italian Lottery, was extremely popular. Lotto boards were rectangular and had 27 squares each – nine squares across and three squares down. Players were given cards with numbered squares and the winning numbers were drawn out of a sack.
The game quickly moved through Europe and gained widespread popularity. In the 1770s, a young Frenchman created an alternate French version of the Italian Lotto, called Le Lotto. The French game featured cards with three rows and nine columns. Each had a random number from 1 – 90 written on it. Numbers were once again drawn from a sack and the winner would be the first person to get all the numbers in a horizontal row.
Eventually, the game was brought to North America. The North American precursor to Bingo was called Beano. In the early 1900s, Beano gained popularity at carnivals throughout America. The game gets its name from the way that players used beans to cover their squares. Also, the winner would shout “Beano!” The game is thought to have been introduced in North America by Hugh J. Ward, who wrote a rulebook for his version of Beano in 1933.
In 1929, a Brooklyn toy salesman named Edwin S. Lowe observed a game of Beano being played and decided to develop his own version of the game. Lowe’s game featured cards with five rows and five columns of numbers. After branding his new game as Bingo, he began selling it in 24-card sets. However, he later worked with a Columbia University mathematician to create over 6,000 unique Bingo cards!
Where did the iconic name come from? Legend has it that while Lowe was developing the game, he invited a group of friends to test the new gameplay. Due to its similarity to Beano, one player became confused and shouted, “Bingo!” upon winning – and the name stuck. However, since the term “Bingo” was already being used for a similar game in the United Kingdom, it’s also possible that Lowe simply borrowed the British game’s name for his own American version.
s–2010s: Animation goes digital
After the success of Pixar's Toy Story (1995) and DreamWorks Animation's Shrek (2001), computer animation grew into the dominant animation technique in the US and many other countries. Even animation that looked traditional was often created fully with computers, helped by for instance cel-shading techniques to replicate the desired look of traditional animation (true real-time cel-shading was first introduced in 2000 by Sega's Jet Set Radio for their Dreamcast console). By 2004, only small productions were still created with traditional techniques.
The first decades of the 21st century also saw 3D film turn mainstream in theatres. The production process and visual style of CGI lend themselves perfectly to 3D viewing, much more than traditional animation styles and methods. However, many traditionally animated films can be very effective in 3D. Disney successfully released a 3D version of The Lion King in 2011, followed by Beauty and the Beast in 2012. A planned 3D version of The Little Mermaid was canceled when Beauty and the Beast and two 3D-converted Pixar titles were not successful enough at the box office.[73]
Disney started producing their own 3D-style computer-animated features with Dinosaur and Chicken Little, but continued to make animated features with traditional look: The Emperor's New Groove (2000), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), Lilo & Stitch (2002), Treasure Planet (2002), Brother Bear (2003) and Home on the Range (2004).
Treasure Planet and Home on the Range were big flops on big budgets and it looked like Disney would only continue with 3D computer animation. Financial analysis in 2006 proved that Disney had lost money on their animation productions in the previous ten years.[74] In the meantime, Pixar's CGI features did extremely well. To turn things around Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, and put creative control over both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios in the hands of Pixar's John Lasseter as part of the deal. The studios would remain separate legal entities. Under Lasseter, the Disney studio developed both traditionally styled and 3D-styled animation projects.
The theatrical short How to Hook Up Your Home Theater (2007) tested whether new paperless animation processes could be used for a look similar to cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s, with Goofy returning to his "Everyman" role in his first solo appearance in 42 years.
Ron Clements and John Musker's feature The Princess and the Frog (2009) was a moderate commercial and critical success, but not the comeback hit for traditional features that the studio had hoped it would be. Its perceived failure was mostly blamed on the use of "princess" in the title causing potential movie-goers to think it was only for little girls, and old-fashioned.
Winnie the Pooh (2011) received favorable reviews, but failed at the box office and was Disney's most recent traditional feature to date, though the studio has stated in 2019 and 2023 that they are open to proposals from filmmakers for future hand-drawn feature projects.[75][76] Frozen (2013) was originally conceived in the traditional style but switched to 3D CGI to enable the creation of certain required visual elements. It became Disney's biggest hit at the time, surpassing both The Lion King and Pixar's Toy Story 3 as the highest-grossing animated film of all time, and winning the studio's first Academy Award for a best-animated feature.
Hand-drawn animation continued to be very popular outside of the US, most notably in Japan, where traditionally styled anime remained the dominant technique. The popularity of anime continued to rise domestically, with a record-high 340 anime series airing on television in 2015, as well as internationally, with a dedicated Toonami block on Cartoon Network (1997–2008) and Adult Swim (since 2012) and with streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime licensing and producing an increasing amount of anime.
Studio Ghibli continued its enormous success with Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001), ハウルの動く城 (Howl's Moving Castle) (2004), 崖の上のポニョ (Ponyo) (2008) and 風立ちぬ (The Wind Rises) (2013) and Hiromasa Yonebayashi借りぐらしのアリエッティ(The Secret World of Arrietty) (2010), all grossing more than $100 million worldwide and appearing in the top 20 of the highest-grossing anime films of all time (as of 2024). Takahata's かぐや姫の物語 (The Tale of the Princess Kaguya) (2013) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film Academy Award and many other awards.
Makoto Shinkai directed 君の名は。(Your Name) (2016, highest-grossing anime film of all time internationally) and 天気の子 (Weathering with You) (2019).
Early animated music videos
Although the combination of music and animation has had a long tradition, it took some time before animation became part of music videos after the medium became a proper genre in the mid-1970s.
Halas and Batchelor produced an animated video for Roger Glover's Love Is All (1974) that was broadcast internationally over decades, often as an interstitial program.
Pink Floyd's 1977 Welcome to the Machine music video, animated by Gerald Scarfe, was initially only used as a backdrop for concert performances.
Elvis Costello's Accidents Will Happen (1979) was made by Annabelle Jackel and Rocky Morton, known for their animated commercials. Despite an initially lukewarm reception,[61] the video has since received acclaim.
Roger Mainwood and John Halas created an animated music video for Kraftwerk's Autobahn in 1979.[62] The short wordless documentary Making it move... showed the production process.[63]
A cartoon for Linda McCartney's Seaside Woman was made by Oscar Grillo and won a Palme d'Or for Best Short Film at the Cannes festival in 1980.[64]
Studio Ghibli and TV anime
Anime, together with printed manga, had built an enormous fandom in Japan and became a big part of the country's mainstream culture. Among anime's many genres, mecha (giant-robot science fiction) became particularly iconic. Print manga in particular entered into a golden age during the 1980s, buoyed by series such as Dragon Ball (1984–1995), and these series received successful long-running anime adaptations. The relatively new home video market grew very large and original video animation (OVA) became a much-appreciated medium, often with higher-quality productions than those made for TV (in contrast to the US, where direct-to-video was mainly a medium for releases that were not expected to be popular enough to warrant a theatrical release or TV broadcast and therefore often produced on a much lower budget). Naturally, the OVA medium was also suited for the consumption of erotic and pornographic animation. The first erotic OVA release was the ロリータアニメ (Lolita Anime) series from February 1984 to May 1985, soon followed by the Cream Lemon series (August 1984 – 2005). The genre became internationally known as hentai and is infamous for often containing perverse subject matters, including underage sex, monster sex, and tentacle sex (originally devised as a means to bypass Japanese censorship regulations). New anime series based on European material included ニルスのふしぎな旅 (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils) (1980–1981) and スプーンおばさん (Mrs. Pepper Pot) (1983–1984).
Hayao Miyazaki's epic theatrical features Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), based on his manga, and 天空の城ラピュタ (Castle in the Sky) (1986) are regularly praised as some of the greatest animated films of all time. Castle in the Sky was the first feature for Studio Ghibli, founded in 1985 by Miyazaki with Isao Takahata and others. Studio Ghibli continued its success with Takahata's WWII film 火垂るの墓 (Grave of the Fireflies) (1988) and Miyazaki's iconic となりのトトロ (My Neighbor Totoro) (1988) and 魔女の宅急便 (Kiki's Delivery Service) (1989).
TV animation in the 1940s
The back catalog of animated cartoons from many studios, originally produced for a short theatrical run, proved very valuable for television broadcasting. Movies for Small Fry (1947), presented by "big brother" Bob Emery on Tuesday evenings on the New York WABD-TV channel, was one of the first TV series for children and featured many classic Van Beuren Studios cartoons. It was continued on the DuMont Television Network as the daily show Small Fry Club (1948–1951) with a live audience in a studio setting.
Many classical series from Walter Lantz, Warner Bros., Terrytoons, MGM, and Disney similarly found a new life in TV shows for children, with many reruns, for decades. Instead of studio settings and live-action presentations, some shows would feature new animation to present or string together the older cartoons.
The earliest American animated series specifically produced for TV came about in 1949, with Adventures of Pow Wow (43 five-minute episodes broadcast on Sunday mornings from January to November) and Jim and Judy in Teleland (52 episodes, later also sold to Venezuela and Japan).
s: Absolute film, synchronized sound and the rise of Disney
A number of key events occurred in the 1920s, including the development of the first animations with synchronized sound, and the founding of the Walt Disney Studio. The decade also saw the first appearance of Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie (1928).
In the early 1920s, the absolute film movement with artists such as Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Oskar Fischinger made short abstract animations which proved influential. Although some later abstract animation works by, for instance, Len Lye and Norman McLaren would be widely appreciated, the genre largely remained a relatively obscure avant-garde art form, while direct influences or similar ideas would occasionally pop up in mainstream animation like in Disney's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in Fantasia (1940), which Fischinger originally collaborated on until his work was scrapped, and which was partly inspired by the works of Lye or the later movie The Dot and the Line (1965) by Chuck Jones.
