The Devil Made Them Do It

I am a few months early (or late, depending on your perspective) but have had some really nice color scans sitting on my hard drive for a bit from a 1965 Topps Hallowe'en marketing brochure forever and figured today was the day.  I think these were provided by BBF O'the Archive (that's Best Bubblegum Friend) Jeff Shepherd but I usually tag his stuff and the scans are decidedly untagged.

Page one shows your typical, idealized Topps Topps consumer, the latest in a lengthy string of freckle-faced kids that went back to the 40's:

He;'s got quite the haul there!  The Bozo gumballs are interesting to me as I think they had just re-entered the US product line at this time, having been exiled to Canada for a bit (I could be wrong about that though, perhaps they were still sold in the US since their introduction in 1949).

Page 2 brings us Bazooka, Bazooka and more Bazooka:

I don't know why there were such minute differences in the counts.  20 pieces of bubble gum vs. 25 or 100 vs. 110 in the larger size seems like like splitting hairs.

More hair splitting but these are Hallowe'en themed packages now. I guess Topps just had a price point for every conceivable market; they had just eliminated penny packs earlier in the year after 17 years years of faithful service carving out market share vs. profit.

I can't quite make out the logo on the gumball pack at top left but it may be generic. Ten party bags included, woo-hoo!  Those Fun Packs look familiar and could have held any number of goodies.  I think the 1965-ish Flash Gordon cards were dated based upon this catalog since they came in these style packs but Topps may have used the design for a couple of years hence.  We have Bazooka and Bozo at the bottom:

I believe this is page five but I could be wrong.  This was either a folding brochure or I am missing a couple of pages.  Smoke 'em if ya got 'em, I guess:

Sweet displays; I suspect not too many of these survived:

The highly professional look of this brochure was typical for Topps.  They would send these to their jobbers (wholesalers) and direct retail accounts (larger chains like Woolworth's and Rexall Drugs) and there were probably five or six such brochures produced every year, in additional to all the salesman samples, promotional items and the like.  

It was all good business despite the obvious expense.  In 1961, the last year I can find a documented record for, Topps had total sales of $13,500,000 and Bazooka accounted for over half of that at $7,700,000.  Topps also sold $3,475,000 worth of baseball cards in '61 and they were actually down slightly from 1960 thanks to Fleer ramping up their card production.  That means everything else they sold, which would primarily have been Football, a little bit of Hockey, some Non Sports cards and whatever else they had their fingers into, amounted to $2,325,000. 

Wrapping It All Up

Those pesky B&W 1960's Topps issues just won't go away. No sooner do I scatter blogs on this subject throughout the last month like Hansel & Gretel at a 4C convention, than Les Davis and Kurt Kursteiner et al come up with a killer article in The Wrapper #240 tying up the loose ends. Well played Gents, well played!



In addition, the current issue features some crazy Fleer confectionery items from Jeff Shepherd's collection (this blog would be half blank if not for Jeff's killer scans) and about a kazillion other essential non-sport articles and ads. You all need to send send Les Davis $23 (plus some orphaned postage stamps) and get with the program.

I'll just state for the record that those oddball Flash Gordon packs


discussed here, have been shown to have also appeared in Topps baseball boxes in addition to Fun Packs; Bob Marks noted in The Wrapper #124



that four such boxes at 120 cards per box had been found in 1984, in the first known instance of a double wrapped Topps trading card product. I would say at most two or three additional boxes worth have been found over the years, so the total number of Flash Gordon cards out there could be in the 720 - 840 range. However, that count may include an empty box so the number could be less than 600. In my experience, if there is a population of under 1000 cards total for a 60's or 70's test set, then there is extreme competition among collectors for them and they bring prices in the $150-$200 range for singles when they pop up for sale or auction.

In theory this would yield around twenty or thirty 24 card sets, but card # 24 seems to be in short supply, as do nos. 6, 10 and 11, especially the latter two. I would be shocked if more than a half dozen complete sets exist in the hobby as a result of the distribution of the short prints among the known cards. This is not unheard of - the 1971 Bobby Sherman Gettin' Together set has the same collation problems, although it seems to be available in about triple the supply of the Flash Gordon cards.

The bizarre manner in which these Flash Gordon cards entered the hobby seems to smack of Woody Gelman funneling items to his trailblazing card dealership, the Card Collectors Company



which had an offshoot called Nostalgia Press that handily reissued the American Card Catalog among other things. From what I can gather, once Topps sold the retail product, the rewrapped product, the Fun Packs and whatever other channeled discount blowout they could muster, Woody Gelman took control of the detritus and sold it to the far flung hobbyists of yore. That is our blessing and our curse.

Card Collectors Company sustained a fire in the early 1970's that destroyed part of their warehouse and consumed much precious inventory while creating some legendary scarcities within the Topps oddball canon. That story will be told another day.

Happy New Year folks!

(Updates made to the 2 paragraphs below Wrapper #124 illustration 11:00 AM 12/31/08)