Gummy, Gummy, Gummy

Well I am approaching my third month of quarantine and I have to tell you, seeing some MLB on TV or maybe the NHL playoffs would be real nice right about now.  Alas......

I thought this would just be a series of random images today but a bit of a gum theme developed, so I just went with it.

1949's Pixie Bubble Gum, which contained an X-Ray Roundup card (the gum and the cards were assigned different names early on by Topps before someone realized it was a stupid idea) and the red cello viewer needed to decipher the back.  I can't say I've seen a pack (emptied of the gum) offered with a viewer before but the card is also missing!

You could send away for a handheld viewer though, via this "waxy" insert found, in this case, in packs of Hopalong Cassidy:

Check out this other waxy insert from A&BC with Bazooka Joe offering a premium scarf of your favorite football club-fab!

Reminds me of similar 1967-68 inserts from the Topps Baseball and Football packs that advertised or promoted various things.  I tried to determine the date of this thinking it just listed First Division teams and a couple from the Scottish League but there was no correlation.  Seller just had it as being from the 70's.

After Topps tried to resurrect their Mini-Chiclets like Blockbuster gum in a bizarre reusable straw configuration they went with a new name, Gumniks, filled with the product in 1974. Or was it vice-versa?  Either way:

Here's another gum piece that Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins passed along a little while ago.  I can't find any information on it, does anyone out there know anything about it?

That's a very wholesome looking ad!

Stay safe out there folks!

(Update 5/23/20: Found a Grape Gumniks, in all its artificially flavored glory-I loved that flavor as a kid):

Pixie Must

Topps has been a sporadic producer of albums during the course of their almost seventy year history of issuing cards.  Their two small (about 4" x 5") Hocus Focus albums were issued in 1948-49 and designed to house a full 126 card series of the set commonly referred to as Magic Photo. Topps did a lot of bifurcating when it came to naming their gum and associated card sets back then, so Hocus Focus was the name of the gum.

Little slits were made on pages of black paper to hold the cards in the pre-plastic days. However, Topps did themselves one better when they came up with an album for the Pixie gum card set known as X-Ray Roundup. Thanks to a pickup of three Pixie albums over the summer by Friend o'the Archive Tom Boblitt, we can take a look-see at a very clever construct.

The cover mimics that of the Hocus Focus album:

The trick here is captured in the cover text "with both sides always on show". Recall that the cards were designed with a magic "X-Ray" feature on the reverse.  Well this album was designed to showcase both sides of the card while still using black paper pages:

Neat, huh?!  Plastic pages have been around the hobby for almost 40 years now but before the late 70's it was paper all the way.

You can see the checklist peeking through.  Topps subdivided the set into four broad subjects and moved the numbering around a little; here's some detail from the back inside cover:

That little viewer was a red plastic magnifying glass. I used to have one but it's been misplaced over the years. The packs included a red piece of cello to allow the hidden picture to show through:

The little peepholes allowed a partial glimpse of the x-ray!

The back of the album is blank, the tape is a later addition I guess, maybe the original owners attempt to house the cello paper?

The staples were possible as the album only had nine pages (and only held 81 cards). The earlier Hocus Focus album used brass fasteners.

The album ("holder") and "viewer" were advertised as part of the issue, this is the interior of the penny wrapper:

Considering vending boxes only had about 30 different subjects in a difficult collation and there were no nickel packs, I doubt more than a handful of folks put together a full set as a kid. Kudos to anyone who did!

Dollar Store

It should be no surprise to the intrepid readers of this blog that a time machine with the controls set to the late 40's and early 50's would be the number one item on my science fiction wish list of impossible gadgets. You see, the plan would be to find and purchase a large quantity 1940's U.S. Currency, go back in time and then buy up all sorts of goodies that would be mailed to my childhood home (purchased in 1956) with a note to my dad saying "do not open until Christmas 2010". Pops is a good guy and fellow collector (of toys and trains mostly, not cards) and he would definitely squirrel away such care packages as instructed.

Failing that, I'd like to find a wormhole to 1950 mail ninety-two cents to Topps for what looks to be the first Fun Pack:



That ad is from the April 29, 1950 issue of The Billboard, which as we all know used to cover all sorts of amusements and vending concerns in unbelievable detail until it went mostly music only in 1961.

While Topps indicates 6 different types of Novelty packs were available, they only list five in the ad: Flip-o-Vision, Pixie, Golden Coin, Varsity and Tatoo. The sixth could have been either Hocus Focus (the Magic Photo pack, not the later issue) or Stop 'N Go license plates. Another nickel pack like the Flip-o-Vision or Golden Coin is also a possibility. It was probably left open-ended so whatever return from the distributors was occurring at the time could be included.

The ad reappeared in the May 27 issue so Topps clearly had some overstock to move. While that fact and the ad itself are noteworthy, what's even more interesting to me is that every novelty issue described in the ad is known to definitively pre-date 1950 with one exception: Varsity, which contained the small Felt Back Football cards.

The Felt Backs have been the subject of past scrutiny via articles in hobby publications over the years, there being two distinct schools of thought. The first is that they were issued in 1949 and then reissued the following year. The second is that they are a 1950 only issue. Even Topps is at odds with itself on this; Sy Berger was in the 1949 camp while the corporate office in the early 1990's was in the 1950 only camp.

I think this ad eliminates the possibility of option #2 as it would not have allowed enough time for returns of the set to flow back to Topps. I also doubt they would have sold football cards in the early months of 1950 as they really would only be attractive in the fall. The wrapper carries a 1949 copyright by the way, which is meaningless as Topps sometimes copyrighted things a year or two before issuing a set.

Tatoo is another issue that may be dated incorrectly as some veterans think it was a 1948 issue, although it seems pretty clear from reading Chris Benjamin's guides that is came out in 1949. This ad does not give any further insight into that but it gives a pretty good look at what didn't sell through for Topps in '49.

Flip-o-Vision, which was a gimmick set of flip movies, had been beset with various licensing issues and may have been intentionally pulled from the market to avoid litigation. The Golden Coin set was probably just a poor seller as the coins are not around in any quantity today. Tatoo may have been overproduced as it seems to have sold well enough to be reissued and expanded in 1953 while Pixie, which held X-Ray Round-Up cards, was probably severely overproduced even after selling quite well. Likely a second run was printed after the first one sold like gangbusters. Multiple vending bricks of X-Ray Round-Up have been found after the fact so there was a bunch of unsold product out there for sure.

That leaves Varsity and with Bowman and Leaf having the NFL locked up in 1948/49 in a supposed deal that gave the former the 1948 season and the latter the '49, Topps was left with the less appealing college football market.

Given the scarcity today of the felt backs, it would seem even this attempt at an aboriginal fun pack met with limited success. I'd guess the remainder of the products intended to populate the unsold 100 count sample boxes were ultimately destroyed, possibly dumped in 1960 along with the 1952 baseball high numbers by Sy Berger himself.

Happy New Year folks!