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.

What The Hellcat?

In 1950 Topps released the first series of a set called Freedom's War and it was a big hit. An additional series followed and if it wasn't for some high profile protests in the spring of 1951, at least one more series after that would have been issued.  The saga of this set is a story for another day as it has so many anomalies and variations a detailed post or two is necessary to decode it all.

Today we are looking at tanks, specifically the M-18 Gun Motor Carriage, affectionately referred to as the"Hellcat" and which was manufactured by Buick during World War 2. Why?  Well, I'll tell you...

The first series of Freedom's War consisted of 96 cards.  These were followed by 7 special cards featuring tanks which were diecut, unlike the rest of the set. after that an additional 100 cards appeared and the set ended up with 203 cards.  That odd number has always bothered me as it does not make a whole lot of sense.

One of the tanks, #101 (our friend the "Hellcat", comes with two different colored backgrounds, one mostly orange and the other predominantly yellow.  However, if you look at these cards you will see the picture is quite different when comparing one color to the other.  Here, take a peek at the orange:

Now for yellow:

The tank is spaced differently and there is far less detail on the non-tank portions of the yellow card. There are other, more subtle differences as well if you look closely.  The back of each is identical:

Yellow seems to be a little harder to find and there is a suggestion in the hobby literature that non diecut versions of the card, unlike the other 7 tanks, do not exist.  I have no way of confirming that at present so who knows if it's true.

So what happened?  I suspect either one of three things.  The tanks were sandwiched in between both series and appear to have missed in of the print runs as well, indicating production problems affected them.  Either someone misidentified one of the M-18's in the production process and two different looks were created for the same tank or two different teams worked on the tanks and one inadvertently was assigned the same vehicle.  Instead of fixing the error, Tops went ahead and issued two different #101's as the cards were selling hot and heavy. Alternatively, a different tank could have been intended for one of the backgrounds and for unknown reasons it had to be pulled and the just subbed in what they had with the M-18 and gussied it up a little bit. By the time they would have done a correction, they were on to the next series and probably decided to scuttle the tank series so it was never fixed.

While a master set of Freedom's War would total well over 500 cards, a complete set should total, to my mind at least, 204 cards and not 203 and both versions of #101 should be included.

Penny Arcade-1950 Freedom's War

War cards were a big Topps staple in the early 1950's. World War 2 had ended a scant half a decade earlier and unbelievably yet another conflict, the Korean War, was raging. The boys in Brooklyn took advantage and issued a large set of cards called Freedom's War over a two year period from mid-1950 to mid-1952. I won't get into all the permutations here but there are card stock differences, single cards, two-card panels, three price points for packs, a series of die cut tanks that lost the cut and then were pulled completely, at least three separate printings and a bunch of other stuff I'll get into in a really long post someday.

Oh yeah, they looked really good too:



Come on, how great is that shot? The backs are typical Topps fare at the time:



These are sized at 2 1/16" 2 5/8" which was a common size in use at the time.

Today though, I want to look at the penny wrapper, which is outstanding:



Topps was likely trying to up the patriotism quotient in their battle with Bowman, a company known for its staunch pro-government stance.