I don't have. clue how they got it, but it deserves better. based on what it costs to make just a custom tape head alone, if this isn't the original then they spent tens of thousands of dollars having a recreation made. I'd never heard of the thing before today but everything I've found about it suggests it was fiercly guarded secret technology at the time.

Their web site is a mystery, too. It looks like the unfinished page for a failed gamer-oriented clothing startup with bewildering, likely accidental, antisemetic undertones.

It's not a mellotron, it's a hilaritron...

It looks very similar to a mellotron mechanism to me, but if the Wikipedia article is to be believed Douglass was already doing laugh tracks a few years before the first Mellotron was released in '63.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this wasn't directly related to the Chamberlin (either through being designed on commission by the company or through being made out of repurposed parts).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlin

Very cool indeed.

Wrong video. FUCK

Yeah, that board could be as old as the mid 1970s but it's probably more like 80s. My guess is someone restored it at some point and replaced the original board with a one-off from a prototyping house or something.

It looks like it's just a bunch of playback circuitry for the heads (basically a bunch of little preamps and a fixed-gain mixer) and might not have anything to do with motor control, maybe it's literally a replacement board for a mellotron or something, they made those until the early 80s and then started again in the late 90s or early 2000s and who else would you get to provide parts for something like this?

But I also noticed the PCB doesn't match. I guess it's also possible that thisthing is a homemade replica made with a ix of antique and new parts, there's not much information out there about it. That seems like a really difficult, expensive project for something so weird, though, more likely one of the hands in the video belongs to a relative or descendant of a friend of Douglass or got it at an estate ale or something.

This is definitely the original machine. Here's the listing for it on an auction site: https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/9389220_600a-d40-1-world-famo us-laugh-box-by-charles-douglas

Note that the leftmost three keys are out of alignment.

It's possible (or likely) that the original circuitry was tube-based and somebody at some point bypassed that and went for solid state. And yeah, I'd guess early 80s.

Yeah, good point re: tube circuitry.