Sailing the Sea of Holes

Ah, what could have been! Friend o' the Archive David Davis, knowing I go weak in the knees for anything having to do with Yellow Submarine, sent along a licensee list for the movie which you can see at the top of this link. While some of the products on the list were produced and some were not, the five licenses granted to Topps immediately caught my eye.

Since Topps made a grand total of zero Yellow Submarine products, it seems they gave us a sea of holes.



The list is comprehensive and would have made for a great marketing campaign. The five licenses were for:

1) Trading Cards
2) Pressure Sensitive Stickers
3) Tattoos
4) Flying Things
5) Posters.

Perhaps Topps did the research and determined there was not a huge market in their target demographic for tie-ins to the movie or the fees ended up being prohibitive but none of these products ever were even proofed from what I know of it.

Anglo Confectionery released a great set off 66 cards in the UK at the time the movie was in its first run so not even A&BC, the British partner of Topps as the time, even made it out the door with a set of cards. The stickers and tattoos would have been colorful affairs and the mind reels at a Yellow Submarine themed set of Flying Things but I would really have liked to seen some psychedelic posters made by Woody Gelman's crew!

Scratch Game

I don't think Topps was a major "green" company back in the 70's but they sure were ahead of their time when it came to recycling.

Borrowing a design from the interior of the 1970 and 71 Baseball Scratch Offs and foreshadowing the 1980 version, Topps produced a pair of inserts as the seasons turned 1974 into that were kissing cousins and then followed with a slightly more distant relative.

Inside the 1974 Topps Hockey Packs were these blue scratch off cards:



The back very handily gave instructions on how to play the game with a friend:



In parallel with this insert, Topps also created one for the basketball packs that was dead red:



Very close to a 1971 baseball interior, no? Well the instruction back was very close to the hockey version too:



They then came up with garish, dayglo green insert for the 1975 football cards that was close, but not quite, the same as the arena games versions:



The field goal tries are a great addition! Given the time lag between production of the basketball and hockey sets compared to the football issue, Topps must have felt the inserts were helping move product off the shelves. The back differed a bit from the hockey and basketball reverses as well:



Too bad there was no corresponding baseball version in 75. These three sets really show how Topps would design something and then re-use and reconfigure the design for other issues.

Album Art

Generally speaking, if I own something discussed here I will use my own pictures or scans. Many times various Friends o'the Archive send along fabulous scans of cards and related pieces, many quite rare that I will use. Ebay is very useful for pictures of things I do not yet own or am not bidding on for various reasons. However, I just won an item that is too big for my scanner so I will have to use some pictures from the 'Bay, except from a different auction!

What is this gargantuan construct that has vexed me so? Why a Topps Hobby Card Album!

The album is designed to hold 208 cards standard sized cards. The cover will remind you of some earlier wrappings and trapping for the Trading Card Guild, so these must have been bouncing around the premium fulfillment warehouse for a good long time (more on this in a minute). The Topps shield logo is practically aboriginal. Here is the cover:



Measuring a whopping 10 1/8" x 8" this album featured heavy duty pre-slit black construction paper pages to provide state of the art storage:



There was a handy do-it-yourself checklist on the inside back cover:



And some history and instructions on using the album and checklist on the inside front:




The back cover limns more Trading Card Guild action:



Blony is listed along with Bazooka and the inside cover also mentions the "2 1/2" x 3 1/2" cards that are currently so popular" giving us a date no earlier as 1957 for the album's first appearance. The Ebay auctions refer to this as a 1967 issue; I am not sure when the supply was finally exhausted but Blony was discontinued in the early 1960's. It is plausible Topps sent out the albums after Blony died out until no more were left.

I have a comprehensive list of the baseball wrapper side panel ads for this period and the album does not appear on nay of them. I have to believe it was offered on Bazooka comics and maybe on some non-baseball wrappers since clearly it was a by-request item. The album was certainly a mail in offer and four of them were apparently housed in this envelope from a Bazooka premium fulfillment warehouse:



Topps certainly did a lot to promote the growth of the hobby itself back in the day. I am also aware of some generic knockoff albums from around 1965 so there was some competition in the field.

Lidsville

Last fall I posted on the early 70's Topps Candy Lids. Nothing has changed since then except I found a few old scans stashed away in the dark recesses of my hard drive. So I figured, what they hey I'll be lazy and show 'em as we wind down the dog days...

Oxymoronically, here's a black & white of color separation proof of the 1970 Willie Davis lid, front and back:



Never willing to waste a concept, Topps released a comic-themed set called Rocks O' Gum in 1971:



My favorite part of the Rocks set is that there is a Woody Gelman reference on one of the lids:



Poor Woody!

Tatoo Me

Well, it was inevitable. After Sunday's post on the two baseball tattoo (or tatoo) sets produced by Topps, I have been sucked in and am working on a much larger post concerning all of the Topps penny tattoo issues from 1948-67. That will take some time however and today, courtesy of Friend o'the Archive Doug Goodman, I will instead show a few illustrative scans from the baseball issues.

From 1960 here are a couple of the generic "plays":





Horizontally, the player autograph subset is also quite attractive:



While the team logos bring us back to the vertical:



In 1964 we also have some variety. Here are the three colors of wrapper, almost an All-American look:







The team logos seem a little less likable compared to four years prior:



But the real meat is in the player variations, all of which involve Hall of Famers. Harmon Killebrew resembles an old stoplight (no yellow):



While Sandy Koufax has the yellow but is geometrically differentiated:



We know The Mick wasn't yellow but he is here:



The Say Hey Kid also may not be a blockhead (autograph seekers may disagree) but Topps thought he was:



More to come on the Tattoo front, stay tuned!

Tattoo You

Topps has a long history of issuing tattoos. One of their first issues was a tatoo set of general subjects that was issued in 1948-49 and reissued in 1953, simply called Tatoo Bubble Gum, aka Carnival on the display box. They followed this with numerous sets primarily based upon comic characters in the 50's and 60's before adding sports themed vegetable dyes to the mix. They continued into the 70's and 80's with these sets and for all I know still issue them today. I'll delve into the non-sports and non-baseball tattoos at a (much) later date as they have a convoluted history date-wise to say the least. Today I want to take a peek at the one cent baseball tattoos of the 1960's.

As their retail war with Fleer raged, Topps started issuing more and more sets as their coffers filled with the pennies and nickels of the baby boomers. 1960 really marks the beginning of a competitive period with Fleer and a few other confectioners such as Swell and Donruss that would last about a dozen years. The first stand-alone baseball set to be issued in four years by Topps was a series of 96 rather generic looking tattoos that sold for a penny.

There are fifty five players, sixteen team logos, ten autographs and fifteen plays depicted in muted colors, sold in a rather nice pack:



The tattoo itself was on the inner wrapper:



Here is a detailed, mirrored image to give you an idea of how it would look on your forearm, albeit blurry and washed out like we all remember:



O-Pee-Chee, Topps' Canadian marketing partner, also issued the Tattoos in '60. Here is a sealed pack that will give you and idea of how these looked at retail:



That's Jim Gilliam bleeding through by the way. The back was almost identical, with one small difference I will highlight in second:



You can clearly see the Made in Canada and Printed in Canada declarations but here is a closeup:



Compare that to the US version:



It is said the OPC set mirrors the US one but I have never seen an actual checklist for the Canadian issue. Some information is available here on a fabulous O-Pee-Chee baseball site (click around and to-and-fro, there is a lot there) but there is no separate listing shown either so I'll believe it when I see it, as they say.

Topps issued another set (Baseball Photo Tatoo) in 1964 that featured much more realistic looking players. 55 players (with four variations as well) and 20 team logos make up a shorter but better looking set:



I'll post about the variations down the road as I need to assemble scans but Killebrew, Koufax, Mantle and Mays can be found two ways each. The tatoo has a lot more detail than four years prior:



Mirrored, you get this:



Some were a little more colorful:



That color is where the variations come in by the way and is tied in to the print runs, which vary depending upon the color of the wrapper. There are red and yellow wrappers in addition to the blue and players are not available in all colors from what I have seen, although some can be found with two. There was no corresponding Canadian issue in 1964.

The 1960 OPC's are by far the hardest to find and exist at a small fraction compared to the US version, which is also not easy. The 64's are the easiest to find in comparison. More on tattoos someday folks but a thorough review of the color schemes is in order first! I'll also have a pice on the 1971 Baseball Tattoos down the road as well but those are a different beast than these penny pack sets.

Free Free Free!

Back to a subject I like a lot: 1951 Baseball Candy. In past posts I have written probably far too much about the five loosely connected sets that comprise this issue but Friend o' the Archive John Moran sent along some old ad poster scans that are worth showing and also help to shed some more light on the issue most commonly known for its Red and Blue Backs. Here's one that likely was a point of sale poster:



It's a little hard to read but you had to send either five penny wrappers or one nickel wrapper plus your picks to win the pennant in each league to Topps no later than September 14, 1951. I have to assume the thinking was the Series would be in New York in '51 (indeed it was, in the year of the Miracle at Coogan's Bluff; or, The Art of Sign Stealing), since it had been every year but one since '47 as that seems a pretty thin time frame to sort through and contact all the grand prize winners as the first game was scheduled for October 4th.

Clearly, this shows Topps intended for the cards to sell through the end of the season, a mistake they would repeat in 1952 as they were still learning how to read the market. I have a sneaking suspicion Topps may have tried to sell a last run of cards almost exclusively in New York City those two years.

Another interesting thing is that it shows the nickel and penny packs advertised together, something I have not seen before.

John sent another neat piece, a subway or bus ad, echoing the nickel packaging that exhorted kids to "Collect A Whole Deck", something I am close to doing almost sixty years later in both flavors. Those pesky blue backs still have me searching though: