You guys came up with answer pretty quickly to this, so here is another one:
Arcade game I saw at the Aladdin’s Castle in the mid-70’s. Featured a movie screen and a replica machine gun, like one found on a battleship. A film of attacking WW2 planes was shown and you’d shoot at them with the gun. If you hit the planes right the movie would switch to a scene of the plane crashing. The planes were real on film, not animated. Any clue?
Gotta be Sky Hawk - by Nintendo, of all companies!
Man, that was quick!
I remember seeing this game in only 1 location: at the Aladdins Castle in Memorial Mall in Sheboygan, WI. Never saw it anywhere else. Could never get that 8th plane down for the freebie!
I can’t see the video in the link, but here’s a sample of the full frame of the video from the game:
The top half is what you initially see. The game uses the white circle on the bottom half to detect if you’ve gotten a hit–you can see that the spot varies in size depending on the difficulty. If you scored a hit, the game moves a mirror at the right instant to switch to the bottom, which shows an explosion animation. It times it so that you never see the white circle, though I’d bet that it’s a finicky device and that sometimes it fails in a way such that you do see it, or maybe just a flash of it.