Alive in '55

Last month's post about possible dating anomalies concerning the Topps Robin Hood set caught the attention of Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins, who pointed out a couple of things of import on that front. First and foremost, I either need screens with better resolution or a new prescription for my glasses. Lonnie then pointed out the copyright on the one and five cent wrappers was a unique one for Topps, especially the penny version.

Here is the one cent wrapper, in case you forgot how it looked:

Double the indicia, double the fun:

I spent some time casting about for the meaning of "OFF F" but it turns out the five cent wrapper had it spelled out all along, which I couldn't quite resolve on the pack example shown last month.  Lonnie kindly sent along a wrapper image with more clarity:

Just below the five cent circle, you can see that it says "OFFICIAL FILMS":

Lonnie also passed along a five cent retail box scan, which was Canadian in origin (you can easily tell by the "36 Count" stamp).  The packs would have held four and not five cards like in the US and you can see the Official Films name at bottom right of the top flap:

Nice box!

As it turns out, Official Films were the syndicator for The Adventures of Robin Hood in the US (and possibly Canada).

There's still  dating and attribution anomalies as the October 1955 copyright for the set being at odds with the 1960 American Card Catalog entry:

All of this leads me to think the Topps Robin Hood debuted in 1955 and then, well, I dunno.  Did it sell so fantastically it lasted until 1957?  Was it reissued? But if so, where are all the one and five cent wrappers? What of the Lucky Penny insert then, eh? And why, if Woody Gelman was one of the ACC editors, is the date for a Topps set wrong?!  Was it just a typo? Then there is the notion it was based upon some undefined movie. 

I've identified six possible silver screen candidates, all of which were released after the classic 1938 Errol Flynn version, with the actor playing Robin in parentheses:

• The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (Cornel Wilde)
• The Prince of Thieves (Jon Hall)
• Rogues of Sherwood Forest (John Derek)
• Tales of Robin Hood (Robert Clarke)
• The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men (Richard Todd)
• The Men of Sherwood Forest (Dan Taylor)

The Richard Todd vehicle was a 1952 live action Disney feature, and the The Men of Sherwood Forest was a Hammer Films production released first in the UK (seemingly in 1954) which then, maybe (hard to tell) debuted two years later in the US, so perhaps it was just a brain cramp somewhere coming up with it as the source ,but none of these flicks starred Richard Greene, so it's an obvious error.

Questions, questions...but I am now considering this is a 1955 set, with confusion still about the dating in the ACC; your mileage may vary. That would make it the first standard sized set from Topps then, and not Elvis Presley more than a year later, quite surprising but the boys from Brooklyn were experimenting with various dimensions for most of their first card-issuing decade. I suspect it was conceived as a Giant Size set, hence the divisible-by-ten set count, then a decision was made to reduce the size of the cards to 2.5 x 3.5 inches for release.