Saturday, February 1, 2025

Rats!

Before the Sixties turned Day-Glo, there was a cottage industry of movies and TV shows that were set during World War 2. The boob tube's offerings ranged from the ridiculous (McHales's Navy, Hogan's Heroes) to the sublime (Twelve O'Clock High) with the others falling somewhere in the formulaic in-between.  One of these focused on the Long Range Desert Group, which was a British "recon and raid" unit that operated in Africa and, as the name suggested, primarily saw action in the desert.

ABC aired a show on Mondays at 8:30 detailing their fictional adventures fighting Rommel's Afrika Korps, called The Rat Patrol, which debuted in September 1966. Starring Christopher George as Sgt. Sam Troy, his small group of desert rats created big ratings in their debut season.  They weren't so lucky in season two as serious war shows were starting to fade, due in part to negative reaction to the Vietnam War. But before things turned south, Topps commemorated the series with a 66 card set.

Featuring full color fronts with no distracting graphics, the look was clean:


The backs used the combination puzzle/text look Topps was moving towards at the time:


As nice as the set looks, it's really no great shakes. The wrapper though, was an eye-catcher, and just pre-dated the commodity codes being added following the year's move by Topps to Duryea:


The retail box was awesomely action-packed-check it out:


The cards can be found with ease and are not all that popular.  However, that ring shown on the wrapper splash is a whole 'nother ball o'bullets.

The Insignia Rings used the same form as 1966's Funny Rings (about the oddest Football set insert that ever existed) but added a metallic gleam. Since they were essentially designed to be destroyed, the rings are quite hard to find in nice shape today. Here's my example, which is fairly typical of what's generally available condition-wise:


An uncut sheet of rings, likely a partial, exists:


As tough as the rings can be, there is another Rat Patrol item that's exponentially more difficult, a test of the cards:


Topps originally used the red silhouetted modified Jeep (partially shown in the card image) as a logo but scrapped it for the retail release.  The back is identical in both sets (I'm pretty sure they didn't use "darn!" as an expletive in the real war):


It's not clear how many subjects were used in the test but not all 66 are known, or even close to it, at least as cards; there is a partial sheet showing the full set with the red logo however. It's not clear to me when knowledge of the test cards first surfaced but they are not listed in either the Benjamin guides nor the Non-Sports Bible and I don't know if PSA would even grade them. The test cards are very, very hard to find.


Saturday, January 25, 2025

Why Do You Think They Call It Dopey?

By 1967 Topps was cranking out all sorts of interesting non-sports sets, many of which featured the sarcastic tone that was the hallmark of the MAD magazine fueled artists and writers working under the aegis of Woody Gelman. One of the more amusing sets to emerge from this creative be-in was Dopey Books.

Comprised of 42 foldable cards on thin stock, which measure the standard 2 1/2" by 3 1/2" when closed, the set closely follows the pattern seen here of a serious looking cover...


...containing a snotty gag within, centerfolded, with an accompanying humorous illustration.:


You can see the back cover here, oddly blank for all 42 subjects; a colophon of some sort would have really sealed the deal IMO:

The set may have been rushed into the marketplace, based upon the wrapper.  Many look like this:

Note the lack of a commodity code!  Those were firmly in place by 1967 but Topps goofed this one up. There's not a ton of wrappers out there but I found this guy, folded like this just for online sale:

I ran this Magic Magnet anomaly by Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins, who thinks it likely that all wrapper variants should exist with and without the code. Right now, two of the three others (Chemical Magic comes both ways) should eventually also be found with it. Time will tell if the Camera and Exploding Battleship versions also come both ways but it seems like a good bet. Weird, but wrappers from the set are scarce for some odd reason, especially since the cards can be found somewhat easily.

The box and contents presented well, noting the torn Valentine sticker indicates it was repurposed for 1968 "VD Season":

Here's another box with that added sticker:


Ain't that dope?

Saturday, January 18, 2025

Hey Rook!

Last time out I was surprised to discover I had never covered the 1973 set Topps issued to commemorate The Rookies. Originally an ABC-TV Movie of the Week that aired in March of 1972, the flick and the series that followed that fall focused on the work and personal lives of a small group of Los Angeles police officers that had recently graduated from the police academy.  The most famous member of the cast turned out to be Kate Jackson, who played a nurse married to one of the fledgling cops. Ratings were middling until the third season when it crept into the Top 25 and a syndication deal was reached. That fell apart and after one more season the show was done.

The middling ratings may explain why this set is so hard to track down these days.  It's clearly a 1973 issue based upon the test T-code assigned by Topps and in fact it's only the second one to use their new nomenclature for test sets (the first was Emergency!/Adam-12, which also kicked off a rather generic refinement of many non-sports sets to follow). A test wrapper is known:


As mentioned in my post last week, only 60 cards have been graded by PSA.  I can't say I've seen any with gum stains but that wrapper does look like it had been folded with cards inside. I have to assume the test failed miserably. With many examples known in the hobby being severely miscut, I wonder if a sheet, or a partial, was cut up after the fact somehow?  

Happily, my type example is cut well; it's not perfect but for this set it's close:


The backs, also standardized, feature some text and partial puzzle piece action:


That's Georg Sanford Brown pictured, whose missing "e" I found fascinating as a kid. 

As I've written, the cards are extremely tough to find and only one full set is shown in the PSA Registry. In theory, it's easier than Emergency!/Adam-12, which has a mere 46 graded PSA examples, with 50 cards needed for a set, but that's splitting hairs.  In fact, I've seen more raw E!/12 cards than examples from The Rookies over the years , although not by much. Not all of the most difficult Topps test cards are from the Sixties!


Saturday, January 11, 2025

Brown & Blue

While I didn't bid on it, a curious piece of Topps history was hammered on eBay late last year.  Using their own employees for photo shoots was a continuing theme with Topps in the Sixties and Seventies, and some of their antics are a little humorous in retrospect.

This is an original photographic pasteup from the archives of Brown Brothers, a stock photo firm that was big for a good chunk of the Twentieth Century: 



Lelands has been auctioning off the firm's archival items on the 'Bay and also in some catalog auctions but the three notations are masking another Brown reference, namely the friendly "shopkeeper" pounding a baseball mitt, one Len Brown.  Brown was Topps New Product Director Woody Gelman's assistant at the time and he's helping the PR push for those 1963 Bazooka boxes that not only had three package design baseball cards on the revere but five All Time Greats cards within. 

These were the boxes being hawked by Len:


The reverse of the photo shows a lot of decrepit rubber cement along with a notation:


I've blown it up to make it easier to read:


I am surmising this particular piece came from Len's first wife and was in her possession as part of their divorce.  Of note are mention of three 1973-74 test issues; in order these are Deckle Baseball cards from '74, plus The Waltons and The Rookies, both TV shows of the day that Topps tried to make work as card sets in 1973.  I've covered the first two here previously but to my surprise I've never referenced The Rookies, which is one of the tougher test issues of the decade and far harder to track down than the other two, at least from what I've found.

They come from a time when Topps was trying to standardize some of their graphics:



A little text and a puzzle make up the reverse:


The example above is unusual as it's not severely miscut, since most of the set's surviving examples are found that way. In fact, many of its 44 subjects are horizontally-oriented and the cuts can be so bad that the caption is often found above the photo and not below:



Yikes!  It's truly a tough issue and finding well-cut cards is super challenging.   PSA has graded a mere 60 examples overall with nothing above a grade of 7 given. However, 44 of them are in the sole registry set, which is complete with a GPA of 6.898. By way of reference, 255 Waltons cards have been PSA slabbed (nine 9's given) and over 3,000 1974 Deckles, with seventy-six 10's granted somehow!

Saturday, January 4, 2025

Second Team

I'm on a bit of a Baseball Candy roll of late and today we look at what is the least popular of the five subsets that made up Topps' inaugural release of a standalone baseball set. That would be the Team cards.

I've written about these oblong,  gold bordered cards previously but there was a recent sale of a full master set of 18 at Heritage that caught my eye, although not my wallet.  Sets do come up, a bit infrequently, but every year or so one is offered at auction. It's unusual for the master set of dated and undated varieties to pop up but that too, happens from time to time.

Printed along with the Connie Mack All Star cards, PSA as of December 13th, had graded 1,053 examples of which the highest is a lone 8.5 of the dated Athletics card.  The dimensions work against them as a mere six straight 8's have been assigned and it's easy to infer high grade raw examples are just not out there. Meanwhile 996 Connie Mack's have been slabbed by PSA and 211 Major League All Stars. That's a different distribution from the last time I really checked, about a decade ago, with the spread between Teams and the Connie Mack's almost pulling even while the Major League All Stars have gone from about half the population of the Connie's to a mere twenty percent or so. Those MLAS cards are tough kids!

Distribution between the dated and undated Teams varieties seems roughly even and the least graded cards are those of the Giants, followed by the White Sox and Cardinals. I'm still tying to figure out if Topps used three different cardboard stocks and can say the recent Heritage lot only showed two, the brilliant white stock that seems to stay bright forever and the far dingier tan backs. I've long thought a cream stock exists but it didn't show up in this lot and relying upon scans doesn't always yield precise results. Let's take a look then at two different Teams, the Dodgers and Athletics.

The boys from Brooklyn were going to blow a massive lead in the National League pennant race by season's end but it was a dynastic squad that often brawled with an even more dynastic one in the Yankees from 1947-56, with six World Series clashes but only a single World Championship to show for it.

The back of this undated card shows off the brilliant white stock; it's a thing of beauty in a way:


Meanwhile the Whiz Kids got a National League Champions notation:


There was no Yankees card as seven teams were never produced, so no corresponding American League Champions card exists. The back of the Phillies card is also brilliant white:


They got two red pennants added on the back as well.

Now for the dated cards, which were issued after the undated ones, likely in a bid to avoid running afoul of Bowman.  Dodgers again:


Here's a closeup of the name plate showing the date.


The dingier card stock is easily discernable when compared to the white:


The Phillies stand tall...


...despite the dingier card stock:


That's how the whole auction lot presented; brilliant white for the undated cards, dingy stock for the ones with dates.

The offered set was ninth on the PSA Registry and a check over there shows sixteen master sets on the registry, with half of them at 100% completion. The Heritage lot was the lowest ranked set that was complete, with a GPA of 3.48; the no. 1 set has a GPA of  6.16 and only one other partial is above 6. 

These cards are not for everybody but many Hall of Fame players can be found in the photos and they certainly have their place in the history of the hobby.


Saturday, December 28, 2024

Red Robin

Three major Topps rarities of the Postwar era were auctioned earlier this month by Heritage Auctions and I have to say, the results were a little lackluster overall. As previously documented here (and in any major price guide of the last forty-five years) the 1951 Topps Major League All Star subset of Baseball Candy contains three cards that were never released to the public: Hall-of-Famer Robin Roberts, 1950 NL MVP Jim Konstanty, and Eddie Stanky. Two Phillies and a Philly native, which may be why they got yanked, the City of Brotherly Love being home to Topps arch-rival Bowman.

These may be the sixth examples of each subject to emerge from the depths of the Topps files and Woody Gelman's massive ephemera collection but more research is needed on that front to confirm.  No matter, they are truly rare and desirable. Which is why I am a little surprised at the prices each realized for two of them.

Let's begin with the Roberts card:

Like the other two offered, it's graded by PSA as Authentic-Altered.  The alteration can be seen here:


The backs are important as it helps trace each example. Someone heavily taped the hinge and die cuts on this one as it had been used as intended.  This intrigues me as it could indicate a kid got ahold of it originally. 

Next up is The Brat, Eddie Stanky, a vastly underrated and somewhat unknown ballplayer these days but not by those that played against him or appreciate baseball history (he retired with a .410 lifetime OBP):

Same story here, it's popped and taped:


Finally, the Konstanty.  I have to say, if you pointed this guy out in a police lineup and said he was a major league pitcher, I probably would have cracked up if I didn't know better:



As with the other two, a quite thorough tape job was performed:


Now for the prices, which include the buyer's premium:

Roberts: $66,000
Stanky: $43,200
Konstanty: $19,200

The Stanky ended about where I thought it might, perhaps under by about 10-15% but Roberts and Konstanty seem like they went pretty low.  The fronts look quite presentable to me and the tape jobs probably didn't help but these cards emerge for public sale on average maybe once every eight or ten years.  As a rough comparison, sloppily hand cut proofs of each, which were not die cut, sold in an REA auction in 2018 for:

Roberts: $132,000
Stanky: $45,000
Konstanty: $45,000

So the current result is a little lackluster it seems.

Each of the Heritage examples also have their own unique smudge on the front which means they can be matched against previous examples. The backs are unique as well but the main problem here is the lack of good, his-res scans of all known examples. Hopefully some images will surface and a comparison can be made.  Meanwhile, congratulations to the winner(s) of these extremely difficult cards!

Saturday, December 21, 2024

Orbital Mechanics Mate

I regret I don't have any Christmas-themed objet's d' Topps to share this year but have no fear -a whole buncha of product updates from Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins are here!

Further to the goodies passed along by Jason Rhodes a month or so ago, Lonnie has provided images of an OPC Sparklers Bubble Gum retail box:

Compare that to the US version:


What's odd is that the lip-licking kid has been redrawn (a tip o'the Santa hat to Mark Newgarden for that observation). It's slight but the two images not the same.  The fruits orbiting his head are new as well. I get the additions to his noggin's solar system but the changed main image is a little mystifying. Also of note, the gum count has doubled, to 160 pieces of "ballgum" as they say up North:


The back panel is fruity:


The U.S. box had a Bazooka ad but in in Canada a side panel recreated the image from the (U.S.) box top, with the sparkly gumballs in orbit.

Speaking of fruity gum, a Wild Cherry Flavor Mates wrapper also exists:


That makes five flavors now:

Banana
Fruit Punch
Grape
Orange
Wild Cherry

Interestingly the Banana and Fruit Punch flavors are clearly identified as having "Imitation Flavor" on the main "splash" of their wrappers and both of those carry a commodity code.  The Orange and Wild Cherry flavors only note natural and artificial flavors in the ingredients indicia and carry no code, so I wonder if they predate their imitation brethren?  The codes started sometime in 1966 and while there could have been tests of the product, or a tweaking of ingredients it may have just been a matter of timing on each wrapper's design and implementation. 

I'm still looking for a good scan of the Grape wrapper and any other variants that might exist but this blurry image (also from Lonnie) is inconclusive as to what is written thereon, but don't believe I see a commodity code or any large "Imitation Flavor" wording, so it adheres to the present "no code/no imitation" protocol:



Lonnie also sent along a much more vivid partial box cover scan that makes me think our flavors have maxed out at five:


That's all four known individual fruit flavors indicated, with fruit punch implied, I guess! That's some enticing artwork but I don't think it helped sales much.

Have a great holiday everybody!