Master Of Disaster

Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins has been going to town on researching obscure Topps sets, packaging, printing anomalies and any number of things that I like to do as well but often don't have enough time to pull off.  He's recently undertaken the cataloging of a set that never was, which we are both now calling Dangerous Animals.  This name acually dervies from a recent auction description seemingly devoid of any factual evidence that this was the name of what would have been a killer 1950's Topps set but I think you'll agree it fits.

Lonnie has created a visual checklist of all 64 known images from what was almost certainly intended to be the second series of Bring 'Em Back Alive. Fate, however, intervened and an extremely benign set called Anmals Of The World served instead as the high series to what was one of the best sets Topps ever produced.

Dangerous Animals art first appeared in the 1989 Topps Auction catalog, mis-identified as Animals Of The World artwork.  That sloppy description slowly and steadily irked me and I've previously voiced my complaints in this regard. The set though, was seemingly close to completion as this original art piece shows.  Note Woody Gelman's red crayon 27 in the circle at lower left and a remnant of a penciled "28" above:

There were pencil notations on some other pieces as well indicating numbering.

That seems to be a Buck lookalike shooting this aggressive creature but who knows?  Topps may have waited too long and their license from Frank Buck's estate expired, or they just got cold feet and went with Animals of the World instead.

Lonnie thinks the Dangerous Animals set would have topped out at 100 subjects.  Here's the 64 he's found to date for your enjoyment, with sourcing:

I'm not sure Frank Buck would have found any living Glyptodons or Mosasaurs in the wild!

Narwhals are the bomb:

Dinosaurs and Mammoths, oh my!

Hopefully more of these turn up someday along with more of the story!

A Penny Here, A Nickel There

As we come up on the Fourth of July, which is perhaps my favorite holiday, I though I'd kick back today, practice my 12 oz. curls and just show a little eye candy representing items that are infrequently seen.

This is a box of some scarcity and it held 100 (maybe 120) tabs of Pixie Bubble Gum, each with an X-Ray Roundup card inserted between its wrapper layers. I can't swear I've seen another example of this box; this made an appearance on eBay a couple of months ago.

Dig the artwork:

They never missed a chance to get an advert in for Bazooka but as you can see here, were still making their original, Topps Gum in '49, although it would soon transition to a Chiclets style chew before going away completely in the early 50's. I think this box pre-dates the once-cent Bazooka tabs that were introduced in mid-1949:

Topps stopped including cards with their one cent gum tabs late in 1949 and I'm fairly certain they curtailed the postage stamp sized License Plates set accordingly and then reissued it in a larger size for 1950.  Flags of All Nations-Soldiers of The World also got this treatment as Topps transitioned so a larger card format. This format, measuring 1 3/4" x 2 7/8" was only used for these two sets. The 1949 Stop 'N Go wrapper (Topps named the cards and the gum separately back then) is tough, as is the 1950 version.

Bring 'Em Back Alive helped kick off off yet another, larger card size in 1950, one measuring  2 1/16" x 2 5/8" and which debuted with Hopalong Cassidy.

For some reason Topps used a date on their nickel packs but usually not their penny packs. That's a nice wrapper pardner!

This five-center is a lot more crinkly:

Any of those elongated five cent packs would have held panelized cards, a practice Topps ended by 1952. The practice of separately naming the gum and card set had disappeared by then as well.

I Am Not An Animal (Set)

Way back in 1989 Guernsey's conducted  a huge auction for what was, at the time, considered to be a large portion of Topps' stash of original artwork. This auction was highlighted by the offering of six original paintings used to produce the 1953 Baseball set, led by Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. We know now, thanks to oodles of auctions held in the last quarter century and the voluminous offerings of the Topps Vault that the Guernsey's auction merely scraped the surface. However, one batch of artwork in the Guernsey's catalog did not make sense.

Nestled in the back 40 of the catalog was this batch attributed to the 1951 Animals of the World (AOTW) set:

I've written about these paintings previously and to recap, thanks to a major media dustup about the violence and celebration of war in the 1950's Freedom's War set, which was then truncated immediately at least one series shy of completion, Topps President Joseph Shorin told the press in 1951 that a second series of Bring 'Em Back Alive, featuring the exploits of the famous adventurer and big game "animal collector" Frank Buck, would be issued instead of another series of Freedom's War but it never happened.

My guess is that by the time Joe Shorin made this announcement, Topps no longer had enough lead time on their license to produce a second series of BEBA. As many in the hobby know, AOTW numbering picks up at #101 and the thought is it replaced the planned 2nd series of BEBA. But what of the eleven cards shown in the Guernsey's catalog? They looked more like a sedate version of BEBA, which was quite a lurid set, but also in no way resembled AOTW.

Here are typical BEBA and AOTW cards for comparison; look at the action depicted on the former:

                                         

Now, thanks to a recently concluded Huggins & Scott auction, a number of new examples of this mystery set from the Guernsey's auction have surfaced:

         

     
You've got more action on these 28 examples than AOTW (which had none) plus at least two planned cards where someone very much resembling Frank Buck (but who is almost certainly not the famed adventurer) is depicted. On the other hand you also have a gorilla juggling a leopard!

So after seeing this latest batch I am wondering if they were from a planned set that was not related to either BEBA or AOTW. You can even see a coordinated design where a larger "portrait" of the animal is shown on each card along with an "action shot" background, much like the 1955 & '56 Baseball cards, so a later date of intended issue is certainly possible.

There are penciled comments and "in-series" numbering on the margins of some paintings and they are clearly done by a different hand than most of the the BEBA and all of the AOTW paintings.

Topps was probably in the final phase of pre-production on these but then something happened and the whole thing was scrapped.  Maybe AOTW sold poorly and spooked Topps, which would not surprise me, or if the paintings were more of a planned mid-decade issue the Bowman/Connelly acquisition may have intervened, but clearly this was a project that was intended to be issued as a standalone set or series. So we still have 39 mystery subjects out there to deal with!

Boxing Day

I'm feeling a bit lazy today and thought I would just take a look at some interesting box graphics from the early days of Topps.

Very much a design that shows how quickly Topps issued this set in the wake of the Korean War, the Freedom's War box has some fairly basic graphics that don't really represent the great artwork in this set:

The "Save 'Em Trade 'Em" slogan was used across the Topps line of cards starting in 1950, appearing on retail and advertising pieces as a unifying meme to get the kids to buy more product.  It also was coincidental, excepting the reissues of Flags of the World and License Plates in their larger size, with their issuance of two card panels in nickel glassine and ten cent cello packs and ran until the end of 1951.  Fighting Marines was the first panelized set that didn't feature this wording since the beginning of 1950 so the campaign ran for almost two years.

Much more colorful was the Bring 'Em Back Alive box, which appeared before Freedom's War:

And before that, we had Hopalong Cassidy, which actually featured a photo and was the first entertainment property licensed by Topps:

Yo-yoing into 1951 Animals of the World had some decent graphics:

The motto isn't on the box but it is on the wrapper:

Baseball Candy even got into the act, as you can see on this scan of an ad provided by Friend o'the Archive John Moran:

Ringside?  Check:

Those ad back cards replicate the box graphics, one of Topps' best efforts I think. And ewhile we are in the sporting arena, let's not forget Magic Football:

Just like Animals of the World, you have to look at the wrapper to find the motto:

Now there is an anomaly out there as well and it belongs to Ed-U-Cards.  This 1952 photo from one of their ad campaigns is very intriguing, especially since Topps produced the Lone Ranger set for them in 1950 and there is a somewhat close connection with Baseball Candy:

Those early Ed-U-Cards graphics are not as cartony as their later issues and given the wording on the retail box, I am starting to wonder just how much of a connection there was between Topps and Ed-U-Cards.  Or maybe Solomon & Gelman's art agency is the connection.

Animalistic

Topps was in the midst of a fabulous run of sensationalized subject matter on their cards in 1950-51: after Hopalong Cassidy had been introduced, the company issued a lurid set of 100 cards entitled Bring 'Em Back Alive, which depicted fantastic jungle scenes allegedly encountered by the explorer Frank Buck and then the multi-series Freedom's War, with all sorts of explosions and mayhem depicted.  Bowman was also issuing similar cards (Red Menace) in this time frame.  Then came a lengthy protest from a group called New York Veterans for Peace, a letter writing campaign from large numbers of concerned mothers, some negative publicity in the press and before you knew it Freedom's War and Red Menace were yanked from the shelves by their respective manufacturers, each at least a series shy of completion and much to the chagrin of each firm as enormous profits were wiped out almost overnight.

While intolerance and censorship are nothing new, they do make companies  react.  Bowman had made their mark after World War 2 with a number of sets depicting the carnage and violence created by man and Topps was never a company to shy away from salacious material; there are bare chested women depicted, National Geographic style, in Bring 'Em Back Alive after all but there were lots of parents who controlled lots of allowances and they would not be given fresh ammunition by Topps, at least not immediately.

In the wake of the Freedom's War debacle, Topps president Joseph Shorin announced they would cancel any more orders and come out instead with a second series of Frank Buck cards.  Today we know that a series called Animals of the World ended up assuming the numbering of Bring 'Em Back Alive, depicting one hundred very tranquil looking beasts, all taken from artwork by an artist named Mary Baker.  Take a look at a Bring 'Em Back Alive example first:

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That is a typical example from the set and not even the most shocking one.  Now compare to a typical Animals of the World card:

That is actually one of the more action packed examples from this set.  Quite a difference, no?

Let's look at the backs, BEBA first then AOTW:

Note the wording about "This Series" near the bottom of the AOTW card. Since there was no first series, we have to rely upon what Joseph Shorin said about a follow up to Frank Buck.  Now, this is not the point of today's post, despite the long winded wind up.  What piqued my curiosity today was an item description in the 1989 Topps/Guerney's auction catalog concerning original Animals of the World artwork, which states:

"ANIMALS OF THE WORLD

These 11 full color paintings are the originals produced in 1949."  The picture accompanying the lot looks like this:

Those look pretty close but not identical to Bring 'Em Back Alive but in no way, shape or form depict subject matter from Animals of the World!  Take a look at these Net54 Vintage Non Sports Club gallery pages (BEBA here and AOTW here) and see for yourself.  That ostrich in the lower left corner is scary looking!

So what happened?  I'm not really sure but suspect that Topps could not obtain licensing for a second series of cards from Buck's estate, then for some reason halted production of the artwork for the second series and instead went with Mary Baker's paintings, which were well-known as part of a children's book, instead.  This could have been done to save money but I think it probably was instead foisted on the public to show all the alarmed Moms of the world what good, wholesome eggs they were down at Topps.