Are You Ready For Your Mystery Date?

Today let's take a look at another entry in a long line of Topps penny pack vegetable-dye based issues, the 1960 (or '61) Magic Tatoo set. These spit 'n' slap sets were literally based upon the ur-Topps novelty set, 1948's Tatoo. In this case a special concealing layer revealed the answer to a brief riddle-like feature, often, and oddly, in in the form of a declaration that sat atop each subject, like so:

At a guess, there's a horse or a beat up fedora under that layer of wavy lines but I have not been able to decipher it for real.  The outer wrapper was nautically-themed, no surprise give the three-set run of Popeye tattoos Topps was just finishing off:

Popeye's third issue from Topps also featured a mystery component that was more opaque:

The year of issue for Magic Tatoo (and the Popeye tattoo sets) is a bit malleable as they all seem to have had a roughly 18-24 month sales cycle.

The real question is how many different subjects came in the Magic Tatoo set?  About 60+ subjects are known and as Topps usually printed tatoos of the era in iterations of 16, then 72 or 96 subjects seems like a possibility.  We do know 120 packs came in the retail box:

I would not be surprised, given the images on sailor boy's torso, if most of the images were recycled from their earlier tatoo sets.  There is also the mystery of the retail box's outer sleeve, which really just repeats things; maybe there was an offer on the bottom or it served to stave off moisture?

Answers are not easy to come by with these and they remain, after the nigh-impossible 1955 Davy Crockett Tatoo issue, the hardest of the one cent Topps tatoos to track down. 

Let's Do The Twist

 A bit of an unexpected update today campers!  You may recall some earlier posts on the 1968 Topps Wild Animal Surprise Box which is a bit of a mysterious product.  The retail pack (which is a box) has been seen previously and here's an example with a helpful ruler measurement of one side (roughly three inches in length):

So that looks like the width could be around five inches. The retail box had what looks like a checklist on the top flap:

However, as we're about to see, that may not be a full or correct checklist.  This recent eBay auction looks like it contained an interloper, not to mention it's the first time I've seen what is purported to be the contents of the box:

Yup, it's a polar bear! As you may note, said creature is not detailed on the box flap checklist so that's a bit off-putting.  Here is a closeup:

Oddly enough, that Banana twist gum looks like it's packed in the cello with the polar bear, which this side confirms:

At the moment, I'm not clear if those two grape twists came inside the box originally, although I suspect they did. It's quite nice to see a wild animal surprise though!

Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins sent along some scans of opened twist wrappers.  They turned out to be Flavor Mates too:

The 1968 commodity code matches that of the Surprise Box, which is nice to see. Lonnie also sent along an Orange Flavor Mate scan, which has no visible code:

As has been the pattern lately here at the main Topps Archives Research Complex, finding a long sought after item or two has inevitably led to other questions! More to come once I can figure out some answers...

The Big And The Bad

Topps released all sorts of button sets over the years, starting with 1956's Baseball Buttons. They then began issuing humorous pin sets, most of them metallic, on a semi-regular basis in 1960 with Funny Buttons although there were points they became sporadic.  1975 saw a test set called Big Bad Buttons and it's safe to say they are difficult to find today. 

The year prior had seen a full retail release of Batty Buttons, which for my ten cents is the best of the non-sports bunch. So the fact the Big Bad Buttons test was a clear failure in '75 must have been a surprise to Topps.  This is how they arrived at the test stores (thanks to Friend o'the Archive Rob Lifson for these two images):

Topps handily provided a checklist on the back of the test envelope:

I was lucky enough to snag a BBB recently and have to say while it's a sharp looking set, it seems to lack the snappy verbiage offered by Batty Buttons. 

Big Bad Buttons measure 2 7/32" in diameter and are a little larger than the 1974 Batty Buttons, so I guess this was truth in advertising. Here is my type example:

The artwork is well-executed and the reverse features a fairly thick protective layer of cardboard within which the pin resides:

I don't think there's anything under there but I didn't want to remove the cardboard (which is quite smoothly finished) as it seems like it would crease if I did so.

Here' a scan of another button, courtesy of Marc Simon:

Again, not at all that pithy of a comment. These really are hard to find and I had seen only a handful of images prior to my recent acquisition. Some Topps test issues are scarcer than others and the Seventies offer a good share of difficult ones.

Cocktail TIme

Every once in a while I like to bring Bowman into the mix here since its been a Topps brand since 1956.  The name didn't really get much use after the acquisition until a set of Baseball cards using the brand was released in 1989 and eventually became a big hit for Topps.  The Blony bubble gum brand was also put into various uses by Topps through some time in the early Seventies. But I'm not here to talk about all that, instead I'd like to look at some older Bowman gum products.

Warren Bowman was a very interesting man who had already worked at a number of professions by the time he was 30. In 1927 he moved his fledgling confectionery company from Lansing, Michigan to Philadelphia after introducing a chewing gum called Ju-Ce-Kiss.  I managed to find a scan of a wrapper but it's a rare one:

(Courtesy www.wave.rozhlas.cz)

I really like that $50,000 tagline!

While I don't plan to look at Blony for this post, as I have covered it somewhat previously and plan to do a much deeper dive at some point, Warren Bowman had it in the marketplace not long after moving to the City of Brotherly Love and in May of 1932 had formed and capitalized Gum, Inc. who had a decade long run as the premier manufacturer of bubble gum cards before World War 2.  Blony was introduced around this time as well.

Bowman had his ups-and-downs, even at his own firm but kept cranking out bubble gum until the war throttled his sugar allotments.  He rebranded as Bowman Gum, Inc. in August of 1943 and pivoted to "adult" gums under the "Warren's" name as the conflict raged. In 1943 he came up with Cin-A-Mint, intended primarily as a post-smoke palate and breath cleanser.:

You can see corn syrup and artificial flavors were in use:

The same year saw "Fruit" Cocktail gum, another wartime mélange:

Then 1947 saw a Mint Cocktail gum introduced:

Breathtaking was only one superlative:

Bowman also re-established his bubble gum line in 1947, with Bub:

All sorts of ingredients in this one!

1948, of course saw the reintroduction of Bowman's trading cards, as the U.S. returned to a normal manufacturing footing.  Bub was around for a bit and in 1950 saw this particular combo offered:

Nice marketing idea:

I hope to delve into the many vagaries of Bub at some point down the road as well but will leave off for now.

Warren Bowman exited his company in 1951 and moved to Florida to develop real estate and work on various food products and packaging innovations before passing away in 1962 at the age of 67.

I'm With Stupid

So we have seen the last of several spectacular auctions of material from the Andy Yanchus collection that were held over the past couple of years.  Yanchus was a former designer for Aurora Plastics during the heyday of their iconic Universal Monster model kits and then worked as a colorist for Marvel Comics.  Along the way he amassed a stunning collection of comics, toys and cards.  In April of this year (2024 if you are reading this in the future) his trading cards and related ephemera were offered by Bruneau & Co. Auctioneers, of Cranston, Rhode Island. Within those varied lots were some real gems and very, very big surprises as Yanchus was a massive collector of rare Topps test issues, among many other things.

There will be more on this collection's holdings here but today I want to look at an obscure Topps issue from 1971 called Stupid Scratch-Offs.  Prior to this auction, the set was pretty much a total mystery and it wasn't even clear, at least to me, that is had even been tested.  Well, it certainly did see a test:

The set name perfectly describes these suckers and the format is Q&A:

These match to the questions above:

There is some very nice Wally Wood and Wood Studio artwork in the set.  Here's some more:

I know the cards say there are 44 but Yanchus had 16 different (I think) and in Topps Test Land, partial, skip-numbered releases are legion and it's possible only twenty-two were made up at first.

More stupid answers:

Might as well show the rest!

As below, "Turkey & Greece" appears to be missing a color pass compared to the above example:

Aren't these great?!  I can add one more subject, from an old scan where I'm not sure of the source:

Oof:

I'd like to get the attributed date of 1971 locked in if possible, as it seems to me it could be slightly earlier.

Swann Song

Further to some recent posts about the quite nicely-done Topps Sports Club News, Friend o'the Archive John Moran sent along scans of all six pages of what I believe is the final issue, Volume 2, Number 2, released for the Fall of 1976. As surmised last time out, Lynn Swann was the Guest Columnist du jour and the subject of the color 8"x 10" insert for this issue.

Here then, is the last of it:

Yup, Herb Goren gets another byline and I still suspect he pretty much wrote most of the content. The 1976 Football set preview kicks off what was a mostly mundane half-decade for Topps sports card design.  

Page two is all continuity:

Fun and games abound on page three plus book reviews that cover all four major sports.  Give the talent available to Topps in their stable of freelance artists and in-house in 1976, I have to say the illustrations continue to underwhelm, remaining the one really weak area in the whole publication:

The collecting network continues to network on page four:

There some inside dope on various athletes on page five.  Always a popular feature in the sports mags of the day, so why not here?

More underwhelming artwork with "Hot Dog: and some quiz/crossword answers.  

And that was that. As I've mentioned, the Sports Club seemed like a pretty good idea, with a clean, professional look.  The ride-along extras though, were what really made this a sweet deal for the audience it reached. It sure seems like fun while it lasted!

Blankety Blanks

I had long thought the saga of the 1971 Topps Winners Cards (OK, technically they hail from 1972 but no one refers to them that way) was concluded here but as it turns out I was, wrong about that.  Oh, the set's subject count remains complete at 19 and we know all about the original distribution and populations of these cards but the one thing that has eluded study has been the entry blank.

The special retail box that promoted the contest was only released in select areas for a limited time.  It's not clear why Topps elected to limit this promotion but the geographical array of contest winners certainly indicates only a select few locales had any chance of entering the contest.  To refresh your collective memories, this was the box in question:

It was plain to see that you had to ask the "storekeeper" for an entry blank and it's assumed they resided inside the box when first delivered, with instructions.  (UPDATE 6/10/24: They were stuck to the box top-see below for further details.) Thanks to a recently online auction, we can finally show said blank:

Sorry for the kludgy "watermark" but so it goes....

So you had to either send in your entry with five Baseball wrappers or just print the word "Topps" on an index card. Interestingly, there was both an upper (15) and lower (6) age limit for entrants:

No clue on what the poster would be and that 350 commodity code doesn't seem to marry up with the wax box or wrapper codes.  The "regular" codes I've found are:

1-401-37-01-1 (wax box advertising "Extra! Real Metal Coins"))

1-402-37-01-1 (wax box advertising "Collect All The Top Stars)

0-402-09-01-1 (wax wrapper with "Collect All The Top Stars" slug)

0-402-90-01-1 (wax wrapper with "Extra Insert in Each Pack" slug

1-368-15-01-1 (small blue box that held a cello pack of 30 cards)

The wax retail box hawking the contest had this code:

1-347-37-01-1

Topps tracked expenses for each issue using the codes so 347 clearly is a misfit in the 401/402 wax box/wrapper sequence.  I suspect the 350 code was assigned to track expenses for the firm that tabulated the results but the initiating 4 is curious. I hope to investigate all this further at some point and welcome any comments about the 347 and 350 codes.

Update 6/10/24: Lonnie Cummins advises the forms were in a pad that was stuck to the display box.  He further notes: "The reason the forms pad might have had a beginning ‘4’ is because that was normally the commodity for a sticker uncut sheet and if there was a sticker on the back of the form pad, then, there you go" Makes sense to me, thanks Lonnie!  He sent a nice scan as well to illustrate:

If I had enough brain cells left, I would have recalled the Baseball Card Exchange wrapped boxes from last year's National!  Nice price if you can get it! Lonnie also found the name of the firm that coordinated the contest: D.L. Blair, which was founded in 1959 and closed in 2016. They may have carried on as an advertising consultant based out of Long Island. So Blair of Blair!