No Box Left Behind

After last week's look at the obverse surprise photo some Bazooka boxes carried in the mid 60's (and 1971), I thought it best to close the circle and also show boxes from the years with package design cards of players from various sports but with no secondary photo on the box front (or end flap); I'll tackle non-sports boxes (and some with sports-related content) at some later date but they are really hard to pin down. This installment covers the years 1959 to 1971 not addressed last week in my post on the "extra" images used.  As a reminder, these bonus "front of the box" photos were as follows:

1963 - Babe Ruth

1964 - Sandy Koufax & Mickey Mantle (both on end flap)

1965 - Mickey Mantle

1966 - Sandy Koufax

1967 - Mickey Mantle

1969 - Babe Ruth

1970 - Babe Ruth (reissued box design)

1971 - Johnny Bench

The Koufax and Mantle photos never changed from year to year, while the Ruth did, aging in reverse!

I also included the 1968 box last time out despite no additional photo appearing thereon.  It had a "Special Feature" splash hawking "Tips From Baseball Stars on How to Play Better Baseball" instead. These tips are known as Tipps from the Topps and featured a small, inset photo on each "Tipp" which I have covered previously as well.

When we go back to the aboriginal Bazooka set, it was a one subject affair, with a gorgeous card taking up most of the box back.  These were issued for both baseball and football and might be the nicest things Topps ever produced.  This is the first run 1959 Baseball box, front and back. You can see how the original Bazooka Joe is shown blowing a bubble that turns into a window on the contents, which was protected by see-thru cello, both courtesy of Robert Edward Auctions:

So the splash for the set was actually located below the card! Note how it mentions "9 All-Star Player Cards" as the first release had, yup, 9 subjects. The little illustrations on the splash are generic.

A second wave of cards followed, with 14 players added.  It's possible Hank Aaron was printed with both runs as his name can be found in yellow or white but it's not clear if he was a reissue or if a correction was made to the first run of 9 cards (the name in yellow matches the rest of the set). It's worth noting too that Bazooka usually issued both 20 and 25 count boxes, as you can see above and below. This might explain the white/yellow Aaron variations, or it might not.

For the second batch of 14, Topps changed the box colors and the splash.  This example of Jensen shows the white to yellow switcheroo and a subtle change to the back splash, i.e. "nein on the 9":

Topps then went for a Football set in the fall, with equally stunning results.  The box front is the same as that used for Baseball while the reverse splash is changed to reflect the new sport:

18 subjects were included and Chuck Conerly is shown with either the Colts (an error, he never played for them) or the Giants, indicating at least two press runs, possibly split between the 20 and 25 counts but these are among the rarest boxes imaginable so it may never be determined. More on Conerly can be found over at Post War Cards, which is a really wonderful site, kinda like here but covering a wider range of producers.

Topps killed off the Bazooka Football cards after 1959 and they would not reappear until 1971. Baseball on the other glove, settled into a nice three-players-per-panel groove thereafter.  Here's the 1960 box front, with the cards finally getting some attention:

(courtesy Sports Collectors Daily)

You will note the old bubble blowing Bazooka Joe is gone, as Topps went for the Moms with the Parents Magazine seal, which they used on and off over the years on many products, likely dependent upon their annual advertising budget.

1961 brought white back to the design, which was unchanged otherwise.  It was also used in 1962:

This now brings us to the 1971 Football set. Those all-American kids from the Baseball boxes have  been supplanted by a small but enthusiastic marching band, perhaps meant to conjure up an image of halftime (I'm old enough to remember halftime marching bands at NFL games) since no bonus player was shown on the splash:

(courtesy Sports Collectors Daily)

There was a 1971 O-Pee-Chee Canadian Football release but's ultra-rare and may not have seen the retail light of day.  No box front has been seen but it probably doesn't resemble this only-somewhat-less-difficult OPC Hockey box from '71, courtesy of Bobby Burrell:

Have fun trying to find one of those!

You can still find boxes of Bazooka but it just isn't the same anymore.

Separation Anxiety

Some cool and unusual sightings on the interwebs over the past several weeks that didn't really seem to mesh into coherent discrete subjects are the focus today pilgrims.  See if you can cipher the theme!

A lot of the innovative Topps sets of the 1960's and 70's were actually kind of swipes of earlier things, many from the 1930's where I assume they held some sway over Woody Gelman. Check out this 1934 ad, bottom left to be exact:

Yup- that's an antecedent to Pak o'Fun, which became a 1969 Topps release of some current difficulty in assembling, seen here in uncut sheet form at Heritage Auctions:

Good luck with this set, I'm still 5-6 cards short and a couple can't be found without the finger holes punched out. Talk about a mish-mash of things!  Laugh-In Necklaces, Funny Doors, You'll Die Laughing, Flying Things and Foldees are just some of the other sets being sucked in here (or jettisoned out, as the case may be).

1971 brings us north of the border, where O-Pee-Chee issued a modern rarity, the Bazooka NHL package design set, shown here with some Bazooka Joe and the Gang wrapper roll footage:

Back to something a little more weird, here's some uncut strips of the 1976 Fancy Pants, a truly problematic issue to find these days. Those tops are sliding off the backings, as is the case with many sticker sets of the era:

A dozen years later, although it seems more like that many light years, from an issue that cops from Pak o'Fun, these activity cards from 1988's Pee Wee's Playhouse are hard to find for a more modern issue. This is primarily due to horrible collation I think.  I bought two boxes years ago and ended up with 35 copies of one of the activity cards-yikes!

Finally, while I almost never post about post 1980 issues (rule already broken above), here is a Topps Heritage homage to the 1969 Decal inserts from 2018 that I think looks sweet:

What comes around goes around again, sometimes more than once!

The Mild Ones

Bazooka was the main Topps bubble gum brand for decades but that didn't stop them from experimenting with some different confections from time to time while still selling oodles of Young America's Favorite. Blony (Bowman's bubble gum flagship at the time of absorption by Topps in 1956) was pretty much the stalwart #2 brand and Bozo gumballs seemingly went off to Canada after going gangbusters in the late 1940's. Topps most famously put baseball cards on the backs of Bazooka boxes for more than a decade but would muck around with other stuff as well, trying to move more and more of the pink stuff. I though we would take a hop, skip and a jump and look at some different things, bubble-gum-wise today.

1968 brought the world (or at least a small part of it) the Wild Animal Surprise Box, a more personal sized box of bubble gum:

Said to measure 2 1/2" x 4 inches by a recent seller, there only a little more than a half ounce of gum inside but I'm not sure what the surprise was. I make the height to be about 3/4".

That gorilla looks a lot more enticing than your standard Bazooka box, since the latter was aimed at moms in the supermarket and not a kiddie consumer. When baseball season waned, Topps would put some odd things on the backs of the Bazooka party boxes.  This Toppscience panel dates from 1966-69 (Update 6/30/24: it's from 1967):

 I'm all for science but..... NERD!!!!  The dating can be derived from the curved Topps logo on the back and the Brooklyn address on the side flap.  Remember I posted a guide to dating Topps items a while back...

Of course nothing beats the 1971 O-Pee-Chee Bazooka boxes with hockey cards on the back, courtesy of Bobby Burrell:

Those are miniature versions of the '71 hockey cards, blank backed, of course. Super rare and often counterfeited, the Orr card is one of hockey's most sought after collectibles. That little logo on the bottom right flap must be the printer:

It Is Balloune

Well, Blogger's little hiccup left thing relatively unscathed here at the Archive, with just a re-date of the last post to make it's mark.  1971 saw Bazooka's last effort for many years in printing cards on the backs of their party boxes.  The baseball effort was documented previously and in addition to those final twelve panels, football and hockey efforts also issued forth.

The football set is exactly what you would expect from Young America's Favorite bubble Gum, a twelve panel, 36 card set in a classic Bazooka design:

 

The marching band figure is classic!  An uncut proof sheet, showing markups, is out there somewhere as well:

 

 Crazy!  But what's even crazier is a hockey set issued in Canada, also in a twelve panel/36 card configuration:

 (From the Vintage Hockey Collector Price Guide by Bobby Burrell)

The use of the same design as the 1971/72 regular issue hockey set was a great idea! That said, they are tough, tough cards to find and the tape on the ends makes finding a nice one ridiculously difficult.  A full set of boxes is a five figure item and even individual common cards are three figure items. You can see how the "Young Canada's Favorite" tag line was adapted form the U.S. Phrase.  The box fron also shows tape galore:

 (From the Vintage Hockey Collector Price Guide by Bobby Burrell)
  

And with that, Bazooka bowed out for a good many years from issuing cards on their boxes.  I think this was tied to the sale of Topps to outsiders, resulting in a true corporate environment for the first time, which also reflected higher licensing and marketing costs making ancillary sets difficult to issue at the time.  I guess Topps finally had their bubble burst (sorry.....)!