In order to understand the appeal of this game, it’s probably worth a brief refresher course on the history of junk yards as they have appeared in popular culture (also including tips, scrap metal merchants, etc.).  

The quintessential junk yard was, of course, that which was home to Dr Who’s police (public call) box back in the very first episode of the series.  Owned by the mysterious I. M. Foreman of 76 Totter’s Lane, this 1963 junk yard was actually a BBC set, although real life stand-ins were visited in later stories.  Perhaps its biggest claim to fame is getting a namecheck in the 1986 chart-phobic Dr Who charity single “Doctor In Distress”, which isn’t saying much.  Similarly, although the address of the junk yard at Mews Cottage, Oil Drum Lane may be unfamiliar, the tenants are instantly recognisable, being none other than Albert Edward Ladysmith and Harold Kitchener Steptoe.  This rag and bone men’s yard was largely home to Hercules the horse rather than to any actual junk and wasn’t really seen in all its glory until the feature film versions of Steptoe & Son.  

Speaking of films, a junk yard setting often crops up whenever there’s a bit of foul play at hand (and especially when there’s a gangster or spy that needs offing in one of those car crushers).  Think Goldfinger, Pulp Fiction or Superman III.  Plus innumerable Derek Jarman “state of Albion” classics and nearly every Children’s Film Foundation effort.  Junk yards are everywhere¹.  

Thus it was surely during an afternoon’s skive off work in 1975 that an employee of the Ideal Toy Corp found himself, popcorn on knee, enjoying The Who’s seminal rock opera romp, Tommy.  At the heart of the film, the titular hero follows his own reflection through a mirror into a junk yard where he finds a pinball table.  A pinball table that turns him into the champion pinball wizard.  A millionaire pinball wizard.  Million-pound pinball!  

Wait a minute!  Junk yard?  Pinball?  It might just work…  

We reckon, however, even that deaf, dumb and blind kid would’ve had a bit of trouble with the resultant toy, crazy flipper fingers or no.  As Ideal’s analogue answer to Bally’s famous Milk Bar machines, the central conceit of Junk Yard was seemingly purloined from those open-to-reveal saucy birthday cards of yore.  That is to say, half of the illustration on each of the various scoring tags was hidden.  Each tag was fastened to the frame with an elastic band and tautly hooked under a plastic firing range (used to best effect with a window pane which, once you’d scored a direct hit with the stainless steel ball, leapt up to expose the broken glass beneath).  Even the drawings themselves were, on the face of it, half-inched (in this case from Top Cat, being the typical cartoon-inspired scrapheap fodder - old boot, fish-bone skeleton, knackered tyre, and so on).  

Sadly, like its film and TV counterparts, Junk Yard was always destined to add a bit of background colour rather than feature centrally.  So it was with this game.  By the late ‘Seventies and the arrival of Tomy’s Atomic Pinball, any and all rubber-band-powered toys found themselves heading to that great jumble sale in the sky, replaced in our favour by their D-cell guzzling descendents.