Lost In Spacetime

If you are of a certain age, like moi, you probably have fond memories of watching Irwin Allen's Lost In Space, either during its prime time run or in reruns in the after-school programming block on one of your local TV stations.  It unleashed some meme-worthy catchphrases during its three year run and it later led to a rather meh feature film and then an awesome rebooted streaming series on Netflix. In short, it's ingrained in the popular culture and has been for quite some time.

The show, featuring the future (1997!) misadventures of the spacefaring Robinson Family, who made up the majority of the crew of the good ship "Jupiter II" along with Major Don West, the simpering saboteur stowaway Dr. Zachary Smith, and an occasionally untethered robot premiered on CBS in September 1965, airing from 7:30 to 8:30 on Wednesday nights, a time slot it never strayed from incidentally. Topps commemorated the set with a 55 card release in 1966 that featured some wonderfully colorful space-y artwork.

Here's the eye-catching wrapper:

Simple but effective.  The retail box was even better:

That Cyclops is about to get zapped!  Our furry friend was also featured on an Aurora plastic model kit, so he got around:

The bottom of the Topps box has a very, very late "Brooklyn" 32 postal code, possibly the final one and I assume they had flats on hand for certain retail configurations, with just the black bottom indicia still lurking when Lost In Space was released:

That oblique view has all of the main human cast save Dr. Smith present as well.  Like I said, it's a nice display and popular too as sci-fi fans and card collectors both pursue the set and its packaging materials.

This card features Guy Williams, who starred as Professor (and Commander) John Robinson, along with June Lockhart and Mark Goddard:

The publicity shots used by Topps were exceptionally sharp; the detail on the card above (set-ender #55) is superb.

A orange and black design took up a large portion of the reverse which was capped with a text block.

The cards bear no Topps markings, just a copyright from the production company. This dates the set but I believe there is an associated wrinkle in time (groan).  If you click over here to Todd Riley's non-sport.com site and dig in with a set search, you will see that the shipping carton bears a commodity code of 470-10-1-6, which is lacking on the wrapper and retail box. This is a primeval code for Topps, one of their very earliest and not quite formatted in the way that would follow and stick for a few decades. They must have hit on the format after the wrappers and boxes for the set were printed but before it was shipped.

Pondering this, I'm guessing the set was greenlit in late 1965 or early 1966, before Topps had fully implemented and refined the codes, which related to the move of their main plant from Brooklyn to Duryea, PA.  The shipping carton over at Todd's site has a packing date of July 26, 1966, so it seems Topps either waited for the show to have some ratings action before fully deploying it or there was an unspecified delay as Summer was a TV-dead zone back in the Sixties.

A major snag out of the hands of Topps may have helped snafu production, as the available cards seem just a smidge less than similar TV themed sets of the era, with  22 overprints making it appear a little more abundant than it actually is, I'd say. Chris Watson's Non-Sports Bible mentions the overprints being nos. 10,14,16,17,19,20,21,22,23,24,27,31,33,37,38,40,42,44,47,51 "plus two additional cards." I was hoping, based upon this uncut partial sheet, his information checked out in terms of all these being in two rows of 11, as is usually the case with 55 card sets, but alas.  In fact, it's not matching up at all, as all four vertical columns (rows when reoriented to match the fronts) here show one or more of the supposedly over-printed cards, although I guess there's a slightly better than non-zero chance they could have been randomly arrayed:

So the OP's remain a mystery!

As for that snag, ABC plopped the "A" episode of the brand new Batman series in the same time slot as Lost in Space in January 1966 (replacing the old chestnut The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) and it immediately dinged LIS in the ratings, seemingly helped by the fact the Caped Crusader's "B" episode aired on the next night each week. By the time the Topps Lost In Space set debuted, Batman had become a nationwide fad and the 1965-66 television season would have already concluded, neither of which was ideal. Batman, of course, was a cultural phenomenon and would lead to no less than five Topps sets in '66.

Here's a fun Fact, Guy Williams was also the star of the late Fifties show Zorro and a bit of a rarity when it comes to Topps vintage television related releases: an actor featured in sets covering two different shows:

There's not much to the set but I'll take a look at Zorro next time out.

Test Pattern-The Mid 60's Black and White TV Cards From Topps (Part 2)

Intermission time in a way today kids. A few of the mid 60's B&W TV sets do not fully fit into the somewhat generic template Topps was working from at the time. A couple of these sets share the default Topps block print with the Daniel Boone/Superman/Flash Gordon et al lineage but are not notoriously difficult or test issues. One however, is devilishly difficult. They also serve to show the big dividing line between the old and new Topps that is drawn between 1965 and 1966.

1965 is the year Topps moved its packaging and distribution to Duryea, Pennsylvania from their old Bush Terminal environs. While corporate offices would remain in Brooklyn and printing of virtually all sets was being done by Zabel Brothers of Philadelphia, the move to Duryea brought together farflung confectionery, packaging and shipping operations. Once Topps get settled in to their new digs it also seemed to free up the corporate imagination that led to a huge burst of innovative sets from 1966-71, far removed from the simple black and white TV stylings discussed in my last post. As the broadcast, cinematic and print worlds moved to color wholesale in 1966, so did Topps.

I'll go back in time a little form the end of the last post, to 1965's Gilligan's Island set:



You can see some some of the basic "ready made" B&W TV elements are present: the little logo and the default block print. The style of the set though is very much in the You'll Die Laughing vein, where humorous captions are added to a production still. Gilligan was a full retail set, hard to find it top notch condition today due to the backs and it probably did not sell through its print run, but it was and is readily available.



Designed to be fanned to show flip movies, these cards are often found creased in the middle today. As you can see though, the back is nothing like the ready made issues.

Another sold at retail set that also looks like it did not sell through is 1966's Lost In Space issue:



We have logo, black bar and inverted color default block print. The back is very much like the ready mades but with some really nice detail:



Looks like one of those lurid pulp magazine covers! Lost In Space's first season, 1965-66 was shot and shown in black and white, it went to color thereafter. I am of two minds on this set sometimes but it seems to follow the logical progression of the B&W TV sets.

Fear not, curiosity seekers, there is still an ultra tough test issue out there that falls back on some of the ready made template, the extremely tough 1966 Flipper test set:



Unlike our other entries here, Flipper was always filmed in color, so we have a reverse of the Beverly Hillbillies situation! The reverse though, is more Gilligan-y:



Flipper, a scant 30 cards in number, is an almost impossible set - up there with the rarest Topps cards and I question if it was even tested. It was likely abandoned in the final stages and a product called Flipper's Magic Fish, originally slated as an insert for the Flipper cards as shown by this box proof, was jury-rigged to stand in its place:



The Magic Fish were "wigglies" and should be considered toys as issued; had they been inserts then they would be considered "cards" I imagine. I cannot find any good scans of these elsuive fish and will save an in depth look at them (and indeed any of the sets discussed in this series of posts) at a later date.

1966 also saw a Topps set that perfectly married the old and the new in promoting Get Smart, a very popular show that exploited the James Bond craze. The cards were actually small, almost square and sold as panels of two:



Inverted block print but no logo here. The back gives us more block print and a quiz:



The big surprise with the Get Smart set though, was the inclusion of an insert, still something of a rarity with Topps' non sports cards. Sixteen Secret Agent Kits were issued in the packs as well, all in glorious color:



Topps was starting to face pressure from Fleer, Philadelphia Gum, Donruss and even Leaf in the TV show licensing game during the mid 60's and they turned to the tried and true gimmick of the insert card. Only the pilot episode of the show, which aired on September 18, 1965 was shot in B&W so Topps may have felt they needed a big splash of color on the Secret Agent Kits to compensate.

Some very strange sets remain to be looked before the decade is rounded out-stay tuned!