Window Treatment

The advertising materials used by Topps in the early days of card and novelty production were quite varied.  Television was not yet entrenched in homes when the first Topps sets started coming out in 1948, so radio and print ads were really the two biggest methods available. Topps would provide their jobbers with advertising materials to be passed on to the retailers to help sell product and the earliest example I can find comes from 1949-a window display for Flip-O-Vision:

There are some big stars used to entice the kiddies to spend their nickels: The Marx Brothers, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby are still well-known today and Burns & Allen, Johnny Weismuller and Margaret O'Brien would not be far behind.  Kay Kyser though, the bespectacled middle aged gentleman above Harpo and Chico, would not be a name known to many.  Kyser was a bandleader in the swing era who had a TV show that was enjoying some popularity in 1949 but just a year after this set came out, he walked away, never to return.  He eventually ended up becoming President of the Worldwide Church of Christian Science.

Four years later Topps had taken the muted tones of 1949 and turned them into the bright colors of 1953:

Color movies had started to appear more frequently by 1950 so bold colors were showing up more and more in Topps packaging and ads.  This took another 22 years to reach its logical conclusion, when the crazy quilt 1975 Baseball window display was unleashed on an unsuspecting public:

The Topps Sports Club has been covered here previously but the use of the window display to push yet another Topps product is a little brash, no?

They Might Be Giants?

I got an e-mail from Scott Gaynor (of Gaynor & Dent Auctions) the other day, inquiring about certain aspects of the 1980 Topps Superstar and undated Puffy Stickers (more on this anon) and as we got into back-and-forthing, Scott sent along some scans of items he had been consigned in 2001 by a Topps salesman. These scans were of different mockups and prototypes used by Topps executives to develop new product and some made it into production, altered sometimes but sometimes not.

These scans will provide fodder for a few upcoming posts but I'll start with an interesting 1975-76 idea for Giant baseball cards:



So not only was Topps thinking small in 1975, they were also thinking big! They didn't issue big baseball cards until 1980, and then they spent the better part of the first half of the MTV decade putting out supersized product. This timeline from development to execution was not unusual for Topps back then.

Stay tuned for more mockups and prototypes in 2010!

QUICK UPDATE-An intrepid reader has noted that the back of the prototype is from 1976. In my haste to post, I missed this important detail.