Football, You Bet!

Continuing from last week, the trove of 3-D protoypes recently auctioned by Heritage contained four subjects beyond the dozen Baseball players already dissected here. Let's start today with Football, U.S. style.

There are four known U.S. Football subjects in the 3-D prototypes developed for Topps, two of Bart Starr and two of Tucker Frederickson, who each appear in two different sizes.  The other Starr is larger than a normal card, more like 5x7 inches as is a Frederickson, although Tucker has the same pose on both sizes seen to date. This Starr is a lot nicer than the other, which has some condition issues:

You can see a little nub on the top border; these seem to have been produced much like the Kellogg's Baseball cards that would begin to appear in 1970, also using the Xograph process (which is a trade name used by Visual Panographics). As with the Baseball examples, the backs are all pristine, or close to it, with no back stamps. In a Freaky Friday kind of move, the larger Starr has no fake autograph!

If you scroll down the above link for the damaged Starr, a less damaged (and slightly tilty) Frederickson appears, showing pull marks at the upper left similar to those found on some issued Baseball examples. That's the same size as the one Heritage has, and it's a little more rectangular then the big Starr. I don't  have permission to show my scan of the larger Frederickson card but believe it measures roughly 7 x 9 inches.

This is all very interesting to me as the process was clearly being worked out with what was fairly new technology.  Topps had interest in overseas Football as well, no surprise as they had been selling internationally almost since their 1938 founding.

We've seen this Cané before, although unlike the current example, with a backstamp.  Here's the unmarred example:

Note how squared off the card is. There is a Sarti offered by Heritage with the same characteristics:

Much like the "big boy" Frederickson, I don't have permission to show the san in my files of the third European football, Rivera of Milan but it uses the same graphics as the Cané and is also squared off like these two.

Meanwhile, a really weird one from the Topps file copies is this Captain America:

The artwork seems a little off-model to me, although Cap was in the midst of a reboot, likely due to some legal maneuverings, starting in 1968, so who knows? What I do know is this Cap prototype sold for a whopping $52,460!

 I'll see if I can get the OK to post the mysterious 3-D scans mentioned above, stay tuned.