You'll Shoot Your Eye Out Kid

OK, today's title is a total Christmas Story cop, with the holiday season firmly in the rear view even, but as we shall see, it's apropos.  I've been mining my old G-mails for content that will span a couple of special projects and am finding all sorts of treasure, much of it from BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd.  Today's adventure brings us a Bazooka Premium Catalog, with a distinctly rugged and masculine tilt.

Dating from 1955, kids could mail away for these and get a better look at some of the premiums offered, although most of these seem beyond anything offered on the newly launched Bazooka Joe comics:

Those illustrations offering fabulous prizes were no joke, there's some major stuff within, much of it apparently military surplus:

We've seen the folding camp knife before and it would appear again and again over the years.  It wasn't a Topps exclusive, there must have been millions of these floating around, with a nameplate that would allow for branding by any entity.  Things get progressively sharper through, that sheath knife looks lethal and that axe looks like it could get you through any kind of wilderness campaign or viscera. For 1,125 comics it should, yikes!

A clear escalation occurs when we get to the last page and what looks to be the world's best cap gun, requiring a mere 1,875 comics.  The notation about choosing a a boy's or girl's leather craft set in no way diminishes the adolescent male vibe here and things conclude with some heavy metal; this surely one of the most industrialized premium offers ever seen from Topps:

The cash to comics ratio in force certainly had some reasoning behind it and you can get a rough idea of how much premium "overhead" was calculated for every piece of Bazooka, also bearing in mind they had some very nice retailer and wholesaler premiums on offer for the adults. Dividing $3.75 by 1875 yields .002 cents per penny gum tab, ignoring the 45 comics also needed to seal the deal.  The ratio on the craft kits though, .75/375 is also .002 though, so the cost of acquisition must have been baked in to any and all Bazooka products.

I did some sleuthing on the Ramar Jungle Gun and the history is an interesting one. Ramar of the Jungle was a syndicated TV program that originally ran from 1952-53 (or '54, sources differ), airing 52 episodes in all, then it was shown in reruns through the end of the decade and beyond.  Four movies were spliced together from the TV footage, two of these premiered in 1953 and the other two in 1955 and there was extensive merchandising as well.  There's a lot more to the story, which I'll leave to others, so the Bazooka offering therefore reflected an active toy campaign tie-in.  The cap gun was really something to behold:

I was thinking some of the offerings in this catalog were sourced from other companies and offered at a higher "rate" than the military surplus items but their yield is also a .002 rate, as are the craft kits. The master Topps strategy here in terms of the cash-to-comics ratio indicates they must have done some heavy duty math to get to the numbers used in the catalog.

Premium Power

Your humble blogger won a sweet lot of two old Bazooka premium catalogs the other day and they have now arrived here at the Topps Archives Research Complex.  Check out the mailing address on the label, it shows the premium enclosed (#105, of which more below) and, as a bonus, the visage of the original Bazooka Joe.  I can't believe this envelope survived all these years but it did:

There were two paper items in there as well. One was a Bazooka College Collection Pennant Club catalog, resplendent yet refined in black ink. I previously showed the blue ink version here and as noted previously, there is no numbering of the pennants on the black ink version like there is on the blue.  I suspect Sid Luckman's star billing had a lot to do with his being an Erasmus High student as the Shorin family would have had several of their children grandkids/cousins/etc. educated there over the years and Woody Gelman was also an alumnus.  Woody, if not already working at Topps when this catalog was put together, was certainly working on their account along with Ben Solomon at their co-owned art service. 

 

The baseball pennants and emblems would be the same ones offered on the early 1950's Topps wrappers:

 

So many teams.....

 

And on, and on, and on.............

 

Riding along was this sweet Bazooka Premium catalog, which I think is only their second one and the first only had eight premiums.  "Bazooka The Atom Bubble Boy" was featured in comic book ads from mid 1948 to mid 1950 but the panels along the bottom seem drawn just for the catalog:

 

More baseball emblems can be found here and, ta da!, premium #105, the Mexican Coin Bracelet:

 

Such a clever lad, that Bazooka and dig the O. Henry ending-he usually blew a ginormous bubble, chanted his name backwards (Akoozab! Akoozab!) and flew into the sky to perform a feat of lifesaving derring-do. Not here though, turns out he just some used typical J.D. skills of the day:

 

As I mentioned above, the freckle faced kid below was the first Bazooka Joe:

 

I kind of wish the Mexican Coin Bracelet was still hanging around with the paper items but most of these premiums didn't last too long and those that did have, for the most part, simply been lost through attrition as time marches on.

Best Of Luckman

You have to give Topps an A for Effort in their postwar business plan.  After perfecting Bazooka in 1947, a flurry of promotions, premiums and advertising followed in the wake of its retail debut that summer. Very early on Topps hit upon the premium as a way to boost sales and visibility of the brand. Premium offers didn't really appear on the comics until the early 1950's and Topps used small brochures to advertise their earliest premiums.

The first Bazooka packs were five cent rolls; the one cent tabs did not appear until 1949 and while I have seen separate inserts advertising premiums from the penny packs, I can't recall any from the nickel versions. They did have some small ads for the catalogs alongside some of their their first comic strip efforts, like so:

Topps also had many ads in comic books and magazines such as Boys' Life for a variety of cards and premiums and when they mailed them out a brochure tagged along. This trade ad shows the strategy:

he first brochure was a thing of simplistic beauty but you had to use your imagination to picture the premiums:

A strong military connection was a hallmark of Topps cards and premiums until the great Freedom's War debacle of 1951 when Topps temporarily derailed their association with the military after groups of mothers and veterans protested that they were glorifying combat.  There were always one or two items for the girls as well.

Their first multi-premium catalog was a huge success and they had to send out mailers to people when the first run ran out:

The window display is unrelated to the postcard, it just came along for the ride on the scan.  As noted on this file copy kept by Woody Gelman, 15,000 postcards had to be printed up to meet demand. The original Bazooka Joe was 180 degrees removed from the later, familiar character but this early iteration is from October of '47 or earlier. Some premium numbering would be changed in the years to come but the sequence locked in pretty early in the 50's.

By 1949 Topps was hoping a connection with college football would be the ticket to glory as they marketed Varsity gum. As a tie in, they started pushing letters and numbers to let the kids make up their own football jerseys (see #111 in the middle; the other inserts date a little bit later):

The biggest promotion though, possibly their biggest ever, was for college pennants (or banners, in their parlance).  Check out the bottom of this ad:

If I'm not mistaken that ad states 1800 colleges were available on a 5" x 15" pennant.  However, I think that may have been an exaggeration as this wonderful late 1940's brochure shows:

The mere 708 possibilities on the helpfully numbered brochure could be closer to reality but who knows? The pennants must have just featured generic lettering to pull this promotion off. And did you note the offers for baseball emblems and pennants?  The promise of a new catalog makes me think they also came along with other premiums delivered to the suburbs and cities of America.

The Luckman fronted brochure also came in black:

I have no idea which color came first but do see that no numbering appears on the black version.

Identifying these pennants could be tough today; I don't think they were branded like the 1950's versions but there must be quite a few out there.

Premium Time

I have been digging deep into the Bazooka back story of late and finding all sorts of interesting things.  As many regular readers here know, there was a wealth of premiums offered over the years by Topps and Bazooka comics were the source of many of these trinkets and gadgets.  I thought a look at some of the more offbeat Bazooka Joe comics and premium offers would be a fun diversion today.

First up is a 1957 Bazooka Joe one cent comic exhibiting signs of the high speed cutting process used by Topps at the time.  I believe the comics were folded (the diamond marks the spot) and then cut, which explains the Rorschach like pattern.  I especially like the black-and-white first panel and the entire comic seems a bit noir-ish.  Geez, that Jerry Mahoney keychain charm is frightening!

Another 1957 comic with something for the ladies.  You don't often see premiums (or much else) from Topps, so this bride doll is a head turner.  It's alsoan expensive premium by the standards of the times.

This 1965-ish comic possibly features the Topps Gum Card Album discussed here many yonks ago. I don't know why the one above only holds 180 cards when the most common one can house 208. There were also some albums produced in 1965 and 1966 by third parties designed to hold Topps baseball cards but I have no idea what this premium looks like as the graphics are less than helpful!

This "roll" comic (it came with the five cent roll of Bazooka that looked a little like a cigar with score marks) does not have a code that speaks the date to me but the premium represents overstock of the only two issues of Topps Fan Magazines from 1965. A $1.00 value on distributor returns?  Hah!

Sometimes Topps would sneak in something that wasn't a comic.  Here is an insert for the famous Exploding Battleship:

I guess they had a lot of those in the ole warehouse and I suspect they may have tried to move them all out before the big move to Duryea, PA in early 1966.  Other premiums are featured on these as well. Topps had been recycling series of Bazooka Joe's for years, peppering in what stock they had remaining of the Wesley Morse originals but they were drying up by the end of the 70's (Morse had died in 1963).  It would be another decade before they commissioned a redesign but Topps became expert at repurposing the exisiting artwork and stretching out the series as this 1972 one-panel shows:

Those felt baseball pennants go back to the origins of Bazooka, although these are probably the latest in the redesigned series that commenced in 1958-59.  Still #121 was an ancient premium number by 1972 as the most common ones seen were from the "400 series".   

I think the below comic dates to around 1980 and it's a hybrid of Morse's and another artist's work:

The Little Creeps were, accoring to this site, the forerunners of the Garbage Pail Kids:

Things were getting pretty thin in the idea department by 1983, so Topps had Howard Cruse develop a whole new look for Bazooka Joe and His Gang:

This redesign gave the World Metal Dude:

And since I have nowhere else appropriate to show this at the moment, check out this point-of-sale decal for Bazooka: