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.

The Straight Dopey

I was looking through my 1970 Funny Doors set the other day when I noticed something well, funny.  Card number 20, "Dopey Book Shop" is festooned with eight book titles, which are being looked over by a puzzled consumer. I realized these titles sounded familiar and sure enough, Topps did something meta here, as almost all are taken from the 1967 release of Dopey Books!

Here's the door in question:

Now my set of Funny Doors is unburst so I didn't want to open the flaps up to see each gag's payoff but I do have an image of an original bit o'artwork (with partial overlay) that shows the reveals for some of them:

I showed that specific piece of artwork when I posted about the set not too long ago but it's come in handy again, so please forgive the repeat look.  As you can see, five of the gags are revealed.  Let's take a look, shall we?  From left-to-right, then top-to-bottom and using the Dopey Book numbering, we also have five that correspond to its gags:

31. What Every Girl Should Know (A Rich Bachelor!)

10. How To Take Care Of Your Teeth (Put 'Em In A Glass)

7. I Lived With Wild Beasts (My Family)

27. How To Put A Lasting Finish On Your Car (Try To Beat A Train To The Crossing)

36. I Hunted For Buffalo (But I Got Lost And Wound Up In Albany)

Another is very close:

32. Your Career In The Movies aka Dopey Books "You Can Have A Job In Movies" (As An Usher)  

Two don't match up:

See Europe On $5.00 A Day - I assume this is some kind of French Foreign Legion joke based upon the reveal behind the door.

Hypnotism - Not sure of this payoff based upon the illustration shown above.

Text has been replaced, of course, by an image for each payoff and the artwork is not the same at all given the size restrictions, but the point is made. It was pretty cool of Topps to do something like this.

Chips Off The Ol' Blockheads or, Here Be Monsters

Hey gang, today we take a look at the very oddball Blockheads issue that makes last week's subject, Wise Ties - a product Topps appears to have pulled or curtailed due to a perceived choking hazard - look like a national safety award winner. I've taken only the briefest of glances here at the set, which is also related to 3D Monster Posters, and therein hangs a tale (of terror).

As with the Wise Ties, Blockheads is thought to have been quicky withdrawn from the marketplace as they were intended to be opened up and used as Hallowe'en masks, like so:

While undeniably cool, you can plainly see that a safety hazard was presented by Blockheads miniscule eye slits. But here's the thing, thanks to some serious detective work by Fiend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins, it very much seems like 3D Monster Posters, long thought to have been a reissued or reconfigured re-release of Blockheads, came first in a test format, then was changed over to a mask.

I get the distinct feeling that any safety concerns were back-burnered at Topps in favor of a set's "cool factor," which to my mind could have been somewhat related to the way they lab tested things with kids.  It's not hard to envision some young tyke holding the original test issue poster to his face and saying how neat it would be if instead it was a mask. 

Lonnie's theory is based upon disappeared or changed indicia from 3-D Monster Posters compared to Blockheads, and while I love showing that stuff, I'm limited due to some low-res images but it sure seems like a solid hypothesis. Poster first, the mask:

 

You can see how the left side of the white box is blank on the mask example, as two lines of information were apparently excised from the poster, as seen at left.  Lonnie has also found some subjects where there is just a blank area on certain Blockheads that matches were indicia would or should have been. And that fuzzy word next to the "12 " on the poster example sure looks long enough to say "poster." All of this points to 3D Monster Posters being the first issue, closely followed by Blockheads.

Here now, the boxes:

3D plus three uses suggested, nice reinforcement!  The redesign added five cents to the price and added some wonderfully gruesome artwork.  What's abundantly clear is that Topps explicitly gave instructions right on the retail box for wearing the Blockheads:

This means they changed the product from being somewhat hazardous to fully hazardous ON PURPOSE! 

That top box was courtesy of Lonnie by the way, the bottom two from another Fiend o'the Archive, Terry Gomes. The box front displayed a helpful visual checklist of all twelve subjects (more on that in a sec) while the bottom indicia rocked a 1967 commodity code.

I do not have a 3D Monster Posters box bottom to show unfortunately. On a related note, longtime Topps consultant Mark Newgarden recalls finding these at what turned out to this Brooklyn test store:

He found them well after 1967, so they languished a bit until he came along.  Now, did Mark find a Blockhead or a 3D Monster Poster?  I'm guessing both were possible (Update:5/9/25: It was masks only. Full poster indicia has yet to be sighted based upon messages I've received since this was posted). He advised there were no wrappers either, they were just loose in the box.

I originally intended for this to just be a visual checklist covering both sets (the artwork itself was never altered) but realizing I had never really addressed either in full, things kind of ballooned on me.  Yet another Friend o'the Archive, Jeff Pace, sent along this shot of all twelve images.  It's got some glare, so let's regroup below:

OK, so the artwork is all stunning, and that's even before you relaize these were designed to sell for a kid's pocket change! This was where Topps was at the time though, as they knocked out one large format set after another, particularly in the 1967-69 timeframe, all of which featured amazing illustration work.

The checklist is as follows, going left-to-right, then top-to bottom:

The Hippie

The Ape

The Giant Fly

The Pirate

The Mad Scientist

The Witch Doctor

The Martian

The Three Eyed Monster

The Bleech

The Skull

The Moon Creature

The Green Monster

Some of those names may be from old checklists and might contain too many "the's"; these are tough finds and I do not have any scans of the subject names beyond The Bleech to go with indicia-wise. Here's non-glare views of  The Mad Scientist, The Three Eyed Monster, The Bleech and The Green Monster:

He seems to be the toughest one to find, at least from what I have been able to determine but it's all relative given the scarcity of these suckers.

Topps seemed to love three-eyed monsters as several have appeared in sets over the years. Pee Wee's Playhouse had an example, two in fact, twenty-two years later:

Yecch...the Bleech!

Sorry (not sorry).  Here's the real Green Monster:

I'll conclude with something I've shown before, namely the full artwork for The Witch Doctor.  It might be the best single example of artwork I've ever seen from Topps, quite close if it isn't, as it's hard to rank the really, really top ones:

These were all created for kids to essentially destroy then toss.  How monstrously crazy!