Flip Your Lids

I've mentioned an uptick in uncut Topps material hitting the auction circuit of late, much of it of the test variety. Today's treat features the 1970 Topps Baseball Stars Candy set, which marks their initial attempt to market a tub full of small confections with a lid featuring a collectible novelty on the underside. Memory Lane recently offered this piece, which may have been first hammered in 1992 at Christie's, then locked up in a collection since:

I've covered the set in some detail previously (you can click on the label at right to see) and it's nice to see this sheet surface. The idea of filling the little tubs with candy soon morphed into cramming them full of bubble gum, which suggests to me the candy may not have tested all too well. These next-phase products featured various fruit-flavored Rocks o' Gum and Gum Berries which began rolling out the following year, with humorous illustrations adorning the lid bottoms:

Rocks o' Gum may have been based upon an even earlier version of the product but that's something uncovered by Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins and he's still on the trail.

From rocks to berries (well, grapes):

And purple (1971) to red (1972):

I believe all these related sets used the same illustrations, so Topps was playing around with the gum format a bit. Here's another: 

This of course, all culminated in the 1973 Baseball Stars Bubble Gum issue, which was apparently redesigned from a proof-only set started a year earlier.  Here's how "1972" (as its often referred to) displayed to the world.  This version seems to be part of a design phase where Topps tweaked some of the colors:

(UPDATE 6/22/25:To clarify, these are generally referred to in the hobby 1972's but they are early phase 1973's). A handful of these have been found in "rounded" form but they mostly come squared off:

This transitioned to the final 1973 release, where some green stars turned red::

It was a long road but they finally got there:

So many twists and turns for sets that never really sold all that well!

Berry Bad

So I've quite inadvertently compounded a longstanding mystery, thanks to a couple of wayward scans I stumbled upon back in April on eBay.  Perhaps only the nerdiest among us recall my posts concerning 1971 Topps Rocks O'Gum and 1972 Topps Grape Gum Berries way back in 2017. There were also Raspberry Gum Berries offered, which I've not touched upon (until now). 

Well one of the perplexing things about the colorful set of 55 humorous lids that were used, so I thought, to top off the little Dixie Cup that held these three related products was that the Rocks O'Gum lids often showed up in years past as complete sets and pretty much mint ones at that, while the Grape and Raspberry lids are very hard to find. In fact, I still need an example of the Grape lid and since my want list for Topps type cards is pretty much down to the scarcest of subjects, I have to think I'll be looking for awhile. 

Some Rocks O'Gum lids do show signs of use but the majority of examples I've seen and owned over the years never topped a container, such as this one featuring Topps Creative Director Woody Gelman:

Not an exact likeness LOL. The outside has the ingredients and some added flair:

Rob Lifson unearthed a sell sheet some time back, it's pretty groovy:

You get a very good idea of the packaging from the sheet but for reasons we'll get to in a minute, I don't think the gum looked like actual little berries. First though, two more fruity lids, Raspberry first:

This too has the cartoon underside:

And while I only have a topside scan featuring a proof, I'm sure the Grape version also sports a cartoon underneath:

You will note both of these flavor variants come with the ingredients prominently displayed.  Which makes these next two scans quite perplexing:

OK, there is a clear plastic lid sitting on top, which thinking about it, is not all that odd.  Then there is this image:

I doubt it was placed over a cardboard lid as it contains the ingredients, just as they do. Which begs the question then: what are we looking at?  Is it a test or a redesign?  I lean toward the former and tend to reject the latter but as it turns out, Topps supposedly stopped making the little gum nuggets that came in these containers in 1974 due to their shape and a rather far-out development, so there could be more to the story on the clear lid. (Same day update-there is, Mark Newgarden recalls seeing the clear lid version around the Topps offices in the 80's and it indeed seems like it could have been a "reboot" test.)

What happened was their Block Buster, Bazooka Bits, Presto and Gumniks brands also deployed candy-coated gum in this small shape (the latter brand was key to developments) and, I am not making this up, Topps succumbed to a concerned mother in Florida, who complained that her kids, who were carrying the little gum nuggets around in a medicine bottle, were treating them like drugs. Furthermore, pharmacists had told her that the gum resembled brightly colored amphetamines and barbiturates!  Putting aside the mom of the year that let the kids put the gum in used pill bottles in the first place, this seems really, really dumb and also really, really staged. But I digress.

Remember Gumniks?  The colors, man...

Anyway, here's the lowdown from the Orlando Sentinel, February 8, 1974.  Oddly her name is not Karen, although I express no surprise this happened in Florida:

No matter, a Topps spokesman at the time indicated they would change their little bits o'gum into something closer to a jellybean but acknowledged that it was "almost impossible to make candy that doesn't in some form or other represent a pharmaceutical." 

This pressure campaign may explain why the Grape and Raspberry lids are so hard to find and possibly too the use of a clear plastic lid as Topps, being Topps, would have almost certainly sold off any remaining "drug gum" still in their warehouse. But maybe they decided to show what was in the container before killing the brand. Or maybe it was already dead as I suspect these...

...were just repurposed Grape Gum Berries they were possibly burning off as well.  Aye, more mysteries!

Whistlin' Dixie

A little bit of fun today folks as we travel in the WABAC machine to the early 70's.

Topps was in the midst of a run of Dixie-lid style sets from 1970-74, where they would issue a small tub of candy or gum with a circular, tabbed lid that had a picture or drawing on the underside.  The most well-known examples of the form are the 1970 and '73 Baseball Candy lids, the latter of which was a full blown retail issue as opposed to a test or small regional issue three years prior. The 1970 flavor had team logos present on the uniforms and caps and these are prized  by advanced collectors and the like, while the 1973 version had airbrushed away all logos as Topps attempted to skirt some licensing fees with MLB.

A non-sports run of these lids, featuring humorous drawings, had no licensing issues of course and first appeared in 1971 as Rocks O'Gum. That 55 lid issue, discussed here, is near to my heart as there is a Woody Gelman card present.  Rocks O'Gum appears to have had a load of returns or sold poorly because you could find the full set for a song not too long ago with some sellers on eBay hawking "9X" sets, where they sold 55 nine pocket sheets full of 'em, nine of each lid per sheet. Undeterred, Topps came out the next year with something called Gum Berries, featuring the same artwork. This seems to have been a grape flavored product and it sold well enough to allow a 1974 raspberry flavored product of the same name.  I've shown some grape varietals here but this is the first chance I've had to examine the raspberry vintage.

If you clicked that last link, you will see the raspberry gum was featured in a 1974 confectionery product catalog.  A winning bid on a recent eBay auction allowed me to bring an example of this fruity concoction home and what follows is a wee bit interesting.

The set itself is on a tabbed lid, of course, with what looks like Wally Wood artwork:

These are clearly raspberries:

Here is the full tub, which is 1 3/4" inches tall (the lids are 1 7/8" in diameter):

 I was quite amused to see that the tub itself came from the American Can Co., makers of Dixie Cups!!

American Can was based in Easton, Pennsylvania, an hour and a half south of the Topps plant in Duryea, as this Wikipedia shot shows:

It's not clear to me if the lids were printed by Dixie or if Topps had them done somewhere else.  I assume the empty tubs were shipped to Duryea sans lids so it's likely the latter. The tub is waxed like a regular Dixie cup but the lid is thicker, unwaxed cardboard.

The Topps commodity code is 5-556-30-01-2, indicating a 1972 issue, or at least creation.

In case you were wondering, the grape version's code is 1-557-37-01-2.  Both were developed in 1972 so they were created around the same time.  What is not clear to me is if grape was ever retailed as the examples I have seen look to be proofs.

Here is the grape lid for comparison:

That was a smart move, just changing the picture so no additional artwork had to be amended.  I'm sure there is more to this story, we'll just have to see what pops up in the future.

Berry Good

Well kids, I am back from The National in Chicago and while I have a couple of blog-worthy items obtained at said show, I'll be posting about them shortly.  Today I want to take a look at a 1972 issue called Gum Berries.

Usually identified as a 1971 issue as they replicate that year's artwork from Rocks O' Gum, previously covered here, we'll see momentarily Gum Berries came out in 1972.

55 lids make up a set and here is a scan, courtesy of Gina at Net54, of a lid proof:

Here are a few proofs from eBay:

A box flat just sold cheap on Ebay as well:

If you look at the manufacturing information planned for the bottom of the box, you can see this was a 1972 production:

There is a 1974 Topps product catalog that shows a raspberry version of Gum Berries so I think it's possible the 72 version was a test of sorts and reused the Rocks O' Gum artwork as it was handy and of the proper configuration. Topps tested all sorts of products and materials, not just trading cards, and it appears it took them a few years to be happy with their "rocks".

Gum Berries are harder to find than Rocks O'Gum, which are among the most common of Topps issues.  I suspect there was a massive find of the latter at some point as you could buy sets in groups of 9, all in plastic sheets (55 sheets with nine examples of the same card in each) at one point on eBay for a song.