Additional Guidance

Well, my lament last month about missing out on the full set of 1971 Bazooka box back set prosaically titled A Children's Guide To TV Football has been partly assuaged by the fact Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins snagged a scan of these last year, which now allows a full checklisting of the set.

This is the macro view:

You can see that there's three subjects with full illustrations, one with a referee's hand and flag on the left opposite a brutish football player on the right and another eight with a football coach and player on the left and a spotter with binoculars on the right. I managed to show each variety in the previous post about this set due to dumb luck last time out. As I mentioned last time out, Topps did not put a lot of effort into this set, which would become a bit of a trend with Bazooka in the 1970's.

The full checklist is like so (top left description is listed after the subset designation):

1 Football Lingo - Automatic
2 Football Lingo - Broken Field Runner
3 Football Lingo - Audible Coverage
4 Football Lingo - Game Plan
5 Football Lingo - Interception
6 Football Lingo - Killing The Clock
7 Football Lingo - Belly Series
8 Football Lingo - Prevent Defense
9 Officials' Duties -Referee
10 Officials' Signals - Running...Into The Kicker
11 Officials' Signals - Touchdown
12 Officials' Signals - Crawling

There's a few more early Bazooka sets I want to corral, it's  a slow but ongoing project and results will be posted here as things are uncovered.

A Child's Garden Of Turf

Well, the final week of the NFL regular season concludes tomorrow and what more opportune time to explore an obscure Bazooka package design set called A Children's Guide To TV Football.  Issued in 1971, presumably due to the launch of Monday Night Football the season prior, ACGTTF represented a new direction of sorts for Topps after they killed off the printing of baseball cards on the back of Bazooka party boxes and fumbled an attempted football card set thereon, all in 1971.

There were 12 box backs created, some primarily text-based:

That's pretty basic, even for this period at Topps, where they were gearing up for their March 1972 IPO. That first public offering of their stock had been preceded by a massive consolidation of their various family business and co-ventures, among other costs saving moves and I suspect this set was part of the associated belt tightening. Here's the commodity code:

I had originally thought this set came out after the 1971 Bazooka Football cards but that set's box has the same commodity code, which is....interesting:

The front of the box allowed for either option:

Compare this to the 1971 Baseball box and back:

(Courtesy Dave & Adam's Card World)

I'm not sure what the -02 box looked like but note this is the year Topps had planned a 48 card Baseball set for Bazooka, then pared it down to 36 subjects.  There's no box associated with the longer set but it's entirely possible I'm missing an interim one that was prepared but never deployed. 

ACGTTF is really hard to find so my question is, did Topps also plan to issue the Children's Guide initially then pull back and go with a traditional football set? Or were they just not considered worth saving, being so esoteric?  Both? Neither?

Here's another:

And yet another:

I have not been able to find all 12 subjects and the checklist I have so far is sparse and represents only the above three specimens:

No.1 Football Lingo

No. 9 Officials' Duties

No. 12 Officials' Signals

You will note the set derives from a Grosset & Dunlap book (published in 1967) called Football Lingo, written by Zander Hollander and Paul Zimmerman, with illustrations by Jerry Schlamp. Hollander wrote 8-10 sports related books a year, many of them annual paperback guides in his Complete Handbook series and if you are a certain age you may recall them being offered by Scholastic. Hollander also wrote for Howard Cosell when the nasally one received his first big broadcasting break and that connection to Monday Night Football is an intriguing one in light of this set. 

But Schlamp is our link here as his illustrations look to be adorning the Officials' Signal box but not necessarily the Officials' Duties box. I base this upon the similar Basketball Lingo book cover art and you can see why as the ref on the latter looks a lot like those officials on No. 12:

There is a Baseball Lingo book as well, of course; check out the look of the ballplayers:

I've only seen multiples of the Football Lingo Bazooka box and wonder, after considering all of this, if this was a set designed on spec and then rejected by Grosset & Dunlap?  It certainly could have been a failed test as well but the sharing of the commodity code with the 1971 Bazooka Football set makes me think it's possibly the former. Topps was not shy about getting rejected products out into the world, it just took a little time and stealth.

I know at least one full set exists, thanks to a recent auction (which I missed, curses!) but the lot description only showed the box fronts for some reason. Hopefully one of our readers won the lot and can advise accordingly.

Tipp Topp

Every once in a while I am surprised by a new entry to what I call the Master Topps List.  I keep a record of each set issued by the company from 1948-80 and since about 1999 maybe every couple of years a new entry is made to the list (I have been keeping track since 1989 or thereabouts, in case you were wondering just how far back this obsession goes).  Faithful reader and sometime-troubadour Matt Glidden sent along a question the other day that led to a fresh entry in the database.

 

Tipps From The Topps is a well known Bazooka box back panel, or package design set but I had never seen one without a ballplayer's picture in the leftmost panel.  Here is how the Playing Shortstop panel looked on the back of a 1968 Bazooka box, as originally issued:

There are fifteen panels in the original set but the later set is described as having only twelve subjects.  I'm not sure of the set count for the non-photo issue nor which topics may have been pulled for the re-release so it's an open question as to its actual length and composition.  A booklet of the Tipps was also issued at some point:

A promotional page in the back of the booklet infers the booklet may have been distributed by MacGregor Sporting Goods but that is unconfirmed.  MacGregor had a history of offering tips booklets of different sorts through ads in Boys Life magazine so I think this is a fairly solid lead as to the booklet's origin.  The interior pages of the booklet, which feature all 15 Tipps, are in black and white:

 

 

As for our photo-less Tipps panels, the year of issue would seem to be in the early 1970's; I would say 1970 or '71.  I'll get into it more next time but there is some reason to believe Topps scratched their scheduled Bazooka back panel set in 1970 (it would have been a return to the three card panels of yore) and there is also a photo-less football issue in 1971 called A Children's Guide To TV Football, probably issued as a result of Monday Night Football being a hit in the ratings:

The vagaries of the 1970 and '71 Bazooka baseball box backs will be looked at shortly, so stay tuned kids!

Having A Party

Before Topps issued their 1959 Bazooka baseball and football box back cards (referred to in the hobby as package design, or PD cards) they came out with a couple of very primitive cutout sets on the backs of their larger, 25 piece boxes.  An important part of Topps' marketing and sales strategy, the 25 piece "party box"  is thought to have debuted circa 1955-56.An early box back, thought to be the first of three issues featuring irregular looking cutouts, i.e. not cards, is entitled American Defenders, and featured three cutouts per box:















The bazooka is a nice touch!  I am not positive as to set length, possibly it was four panels, as one for each branch of the service would be appropriate.  The cardboard looks to be of the older style Topps used in the mid 50's and I would think this set could have been on the very first party boxes as Topps was very much attuned to providing value for money as part of their marketing.

The next package design set was probably Real Flying Models of U.S. Airforce Planes:



Dating of this set of seven looks be be 1957-58.  Topps would return over and over again to assemble-it-yourself airplanes in the ensuing decades.  This set, unlike the previous, actually has an ACC number, which is R707-3.  Burdick, instead of grouping cards by manufacturer, would often have headings for an issuer's thematically linked cards, such as airplanes and that is where this set is pegged.

We are left with one more similar set, probably issued after the baseball and football cards of 1959, featuring six Models of U.S. Space Missiles.


I would guess early 60's for this set, although a Jupiter rocket carried aloft a satellite for the first time in January 1958 and it's possible this set is from that year.  Dating of these issues is difficult as there are incomplete checklists known (at least to me) which makes it hard to determine what year a particular piece of hardware was first made.

You can view examples from each set here at Dan Calandriello's great online gallery.  Thanks to Jeff Shepherd for the scans above.