Hopped Up

Way back in 1950, when television was really starting to take off, a need, quickly voracious, for content developed. With some foresight in this mad scramble, William Boyd, who had gained fame by portraying the good-guy cowboy Hopalong Cassidy in dozens of old "oaters" that were staples of Saturday movie matinees in the Thirties and Forties, acquired the rights to and packaged up a gaggle of his old movies and had them formatted for the boob tube.  If Hoppy wasn't the first kids fad fueled by Tee Vee it wasn't far behind.  It also set the stage (sorry), along with the Lone Ranger, for a phalanx of kiddie TV Westerns to follow.

Topps took advantage and made their first major foray into licensed character products with Hoppy.  A long series of cards were issued (stay tuned for a post on these), along with a virtually unknown saddle bag pack with candy inside.  I've posted, albeit briefly, about the saddle bag before, which is a thing of wonder:

For a product made of thin carboard, it's very well-designed.  Check out the back:

Given the ingredients, I suspect the candy was like Sugar Babies, or very similar. The one thing the packaging lacks, despite the ornateness, is color. Topps took care of that with a product called Hoppy's Wagon Wheel Pops. You got fifteen pops, in a box that had some other features beyond lolly-holstering:

Friend o'the Archive Dan Bretta, provided the above color image and most of the ones below.  Here's the all important indicia:

Topps made a go of selling candy for about eight years, including a run of Christmas-themed lollipops, but shut down their Candy Division in 1951. Thanks to Chris Benjamin's Sport Americana Guide to the Non-Sports Cards, we know what the lolly wrapper looked like:

There was a nice surprise inside the box as well:

As you can see, that is puzzle number two.  California Carlson was one of Hoppy's sidekicks and a kid could have a rootin' tootin' good time connecting the dots there to cipher what he was up to with that lasso. We'll get to a count momentarily but the big prize was the advertised picture of the star of the series on the box back. Mr. Bretta sent me images of two of these. I think I'll dub this one "Hoppy Gazing":

Here's Hoppy atop his horse, Topper:

You can see how the box lid fit over the box bottom, like old sets of record albums.  I have one of these myself, (a proof) and scans of two others:

It's muddy but that upside down wording states: "Please note: Every box of Hoppy Wagon Wheel Pops features one of six Hopalong Cassidy portraits and one of six Hoppy Pop Puzzles"

So good clues there, although I'm not sure why that statement isn't on all the other portraits I've seen so far except this one:

The pictures with the statement are all smaller and show a lot more white border than the ones without it and I wonder if Topps reissued Hoppy Pops again in 1951 before their license ran out. This one doesn't look cut down but check out Hoppy's gun-it looks hand drawn! There's a lot of added whites on the jacket and hat too, which is quite possibly the handiwork of Ben Solomon.

It's plausible they each come both ways but that needs to be verified somehow and these are now hard things to find.

Right now we have one Puzzle:

#2 California Lassoing

While 5/6ths of the portrait checklist is as follows:

• Hoppy Gazing
• Hoppy Atop Topper
• Hoppy Next to Topper With Gun (and Topper looks partially illustrated to me)
• Hoppy in Relaxed Pose
• Hoppy Pointing Gun In Front of Mountains

I'd love to get the portrait checklist finished off if anyone has the last subject handy but think finishing the puzzle checklist off could be "California Dreaming."

Batting A Thousand

Well the inevitable has happened-this is post number 1,000!  September 12, 2008 saw my first post - a short introduction as it were - and a whole lot has happened since then and hopefully a lot more will follow. This blog is essentially my experimental lab and I end up circling back and updating things as developments occur. Really, a major reason I started this project was just to keep track of all the myriad things Topps, in their "vintage" era, was involved with in one place. 

There would be far fewer discoveries over the past fourteen years if not for a good number of folks who have contributed leads, scans, links, cards and wrappers, publications and the occasional reprimand or correction to whatever my fevered mind relays to my fingers.  I sometimes wedge the posts in here among a gaggle of other activities occurring in my day-to-day life and time and again (and again) the eagle eyed among you have caught errors big and small.  So thank you all!

The whole Topps vintage era (which ended sometime in the 1970's I say) suffers from a lack of documentation and small details from readers often lead to big discoveries and aha! moments. Special shout outs and thanks do need to be extended then to various Friends o'the Blog: Jeff Shepherd, Lonnie Cummins, Keith Olbermann, Mark Newgarden, Len Brown, Richard Gelman, Bobby Burrell, Tom Boblitt, Bill Christensen, Al Crisafulli, Al Richter, Bob Fisk, Peter Fishman, John Moran, Anthony Nex, Roy Carlson, George Vrechek, Josh Alpert, Doug Goodman, Dan Calandriello, Rob Lifson, Dean Faragi, Brian Dwyer, Jason Rhodes, Jon Helfenstein, Larry Tipton, Spike Glidden, Terry Gomes, Marty Krim, Mark Hellman, Mike Thomas, Jason Liebig, Jake Ingebrigston and a gaggle of others.  If I missed you I'm sorry, names don't come to me like they used to 14 years ago but thank you one and all for your insights big and small over the years! Will I make it to 2,000 posts? Beats me! 

Meanwhile, to illustrate the point that all sorts of things come my way thanks to this blog, a recent eBay auction featured what I consider to be the "missing" Topps Candy Division wrapper from their Brooklyn-Chattanooga years.  Here then is a unicorn, their 1947 Cocoanut-Marshmallow Roll wrapper that turns out to have been swathed in foil. Jeff Shepherd alerted me to the auction but as it turns out, we both missed it and it went to a good home with someone in the thanks list above! 

Dig those graphics! That bad boy joins ranks with the Caramel Nut Roll, Mairzy and Marshmallow Opera Bars with known wrappers. How something like this survived from 75 years ago is beyond me but there it is, resplendent despite my wonder!

See ya in post #1,001!

Pop, Pop, Pop

I stumbled across a bit of an oddity involving Bazooka the other day and since it's something I've never seen before, figured I'd throw it out there to see what might stick (*groan*). 

In 1977 Topps introduced the Bazooka Lollipop. It sold for a nickel and according to a source I found, tasted like bubble gum (which sounds fabulous, actually):

15 comics worth of premium power for five cents?  Deal! Ring Pops were coming, though and I'm not sure where this particular product lies in the evolution of those persistently top-selling Topps pops. As I detailed a couple of months ago, Ring Pops were either introduced in 1977 or 1979 but I can't find a source to confirm this either way. I suspect their introduction was closer to 1979 than 1977 and perhaps this lolly was a precursor or even a test. Or just a failed, separate experiment...

(EDIT 4/19/21): Lonnie Cummins advises Topps filed for a Ring Pops trademark on March 17, 1975.  I suspect that is the date to allow for test marketing purposes.  It would seem then that 1977 is probably the operational year full retail commenced.  If the Bazooka lolly was a test, it wasn't for Ring Pops.)

Ring Pops became (and remain) a monster seller for Topps and they have also been selling Bazooka Pops, which have a bubble gum center, for many years now.  The 1977 Lollipop though, had no such chewability within and echoed back instead to some very early Topps products.  I'm not sure which came first but it was one of these two products, one with a Christmas theme and one with Western flair:

I lean toward Rudolph being the uber-Topps lolly as there was a 1948 movie followed by the massive  smash hit song recorded by Gene Autry that hit number one during the holiday season in 1949. The luractive but fleeting licensing deals for the franchise would probably have occurred prior to one of those events, so I make it either '48 or '49.  I cannot make out that copyright on the box and have never seen another example where the indicia might be deciperable.

As always, there's a chance Topps played catchup with Rudolph and Hopalong Cassidy was the first one in 1950, the year Topps procured a license as Hoppy-mania kicked in over his chopped down kiddie flick rerun fare that ended up as the number one filmed show on TV.  But I don't really think so.  Here's Hoppy again.

Topps had Santa Claus lollipops ready for 1951 and possibly also the year following but they shut down their Candy Division at some point soon thereafter and have to confess I'm not exactly sure when they made a pure candy play again, although it was well before the Bazooka lolly saw the light of day.

Sometimes You Feel Like A Nut Roll...Sometimes You Don't

I managed to snag a tough Topps Candy piece off the 'bay recently and thought I'd show a little parade of their hybrid Brooklyn-Chattanooga wrappers that appeared following their purchase of Bennett-Hubbard in 1943. A smaller procession of penny gum tab variants made in Brooklyn will close things out today.

The latest addition to the Archives is this impossibly pristine candy wrapper.  It looks like a pretty yummy candy bar if you ask me.  Note the 1943 Copyright:

I've been trying to determine if the Opera Bar below was originally a Topps product. Newspaper reports at the time of the Bennett-Hubbard acquisition indicated Topps would continue producing "their" product in Chattanooga at their new plant. Tempering that is the fact I've never seen a reference to Topps producing candy prior to the purchase, although it's only a four year period or so and one that included some WW2 paper drives.

This is another wrapper in amazing shape, I think it and the one above came from a sample stack used by salesmen.  Once again, a 1943 Copyright, obviously obtained for package redesign purposes after Benn-Hubb was in the fold:

Marshmallow could stretch scarce sugar supplies, which were about to be rationed in the U.S. as the war raged on (and probably spurred the acquisition) as this next piece, which looks to have actually been wrapped around a candy bar, attests:

I don't really like the look of that wrapper (it's even uglier in person) but imagine the yellow was thought to be snazzy enough to grab a kid's attention. At a guess I'd say Topps didn't bother waiting for a new copyright for the wrapper meaning this was likely a new product sold during World War 2 whereas the Caramel Nut Roll and Opera Bar could and likely did continue in production for several years after 1943.  Topps would eventually re-brand their candy production operations as Topps Candy Division, until the early 1950's when they just snugged it under the main Topps Chewing Gum umbrella.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Topps bought out Shapiro Candy Manufacturing in 1944 which netted them not only a better sugar ration and more manufacturing capability, it also presented access to waterborne transportation via the 4th Street Basin, right across the avenue and which connected to the Gowanus Canal and eventually the Atlantic Ocean.  A mere three miles from Topps HQ at 134 Broadway in Williamsburg at the time of the purchase, it became an additional warehouse for Topps after they moved all executive and manufacturing functions into Bush Terminal in mid-1946.  It appears all the prior Topps plants and offices in Brooklyn served such a purpose until the 1966 Duryea move, when only the executives and office staff remained behind.

This is a rare 1939 Topps Gum tab wrapper with Shapiro shown as the manufacturer and would have barely outlasted the war as Topps went for a slight redesign and new copyrights in 1946:

I suspect Topps still manufactured this product at their original Gretsch Building plant location at 60 Broadway but named Shapiro as manufacturer to allow for expanded sugar ration compliance.  The normal 1939 wrapper looked like this-I imagine amending the indicia slightly was no reason to obtain a new copyright.:

That little notch at the top is what leads me back to the Gretsch Building!

There's a 1939 Topps/Brooklyn variety as well.  I'm not sure which came first and this is actually BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd's as I don't have this variant yet:

That'll "wrap' things up for today (groan)!

Greetings And Salutations

Little odds and ends keep getting dug up that help fill in some gaps in the Topps archaeological record. Today we have an auction entry from Vintage Non-Sports Auctions, run by Friend o'the Archive Tom Boblitt featuring some greeting cards thats hows just how far afield Topps would range in promoting their nascent card issues in the late 40's and early 50's.

Some of you may recall I posted a long time ago about a 1949 Topps Varsity pack that had been stuck to a greeting card, which likely have been issued in 1950. I thought at the time it had been issued by the Barker Greeting Card Company as my book described how they struck a deal with that firm in '49 to affix Magic Photo packs on some of their greeting cards but as will be seen momentarily, it was another manufacturer that did the deed.  Penny Packs of Hopalong Cassidy would be burned off this way as well in a deal made with a company called Buzza Cardozo but they were not involved with the Varsity promotion as it turns out.  Tom has a lot in his June auction that sheds more light on this oddity.

The card below is the same as the one I posted about eleven (!) years ago but the 1949 Varsity pack affixed to is is legit and not clumsily restuffed with foil like my prior exemplar:

However, it turns out to be one from a box of 14 (wow) different cards -- with matching white envelopes of course -- measuring about 6" x 6" that was sold around 1950-51. Not all of these had confections attached and only nine remain from the original packaging but it's a neat little find.  Here's one with a lollipop attached:

I would not be surprised if it was a leftover or excess Rudolph Pop as the lolly looks like it was wrapped in a similar fashion to these:

My research dates Rudolph Pops to 1950 and Topps Candy Division, at least under that specific name, started either that year or a year prior I believe. However, I need to try and date this image BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd recently sent me from a stereographic promotional slide that prominently features said lolly's:

Look at all that candy!  And Cigars!  And Vitalis? Anyhoo, I digress.

Not everything came with candy in this box of greeting cards, here's a hippo with a monocle!

Other cards are described as Get Well or for other occasions.  What a fantastic little package of fun! Here's how they came originally, as "Toycards":

As it turns out, the manufacturer was Doehla Fine Arts:

Neat-o!

Now, speaking of Christmas, I think a different manufacturer came up with these, which I have also blogged about previously Note the more traditional greeting card size from a boxed series called Christmas Fun's A Poppin':

Here's more on that, check out the card in the middle:

And here is the aforementioned Hoppy:

Hoppy had Pops as well, plus as a candy issue from Topps if I may digress again:

"Hoppily" that saddle bag is mine!

I'm bereft of a scan for greeting cards that attached Magic Photo packs but it's interesting how these are all centered around 1950 give or take-I suspect Topps had a marketing plan that covered third party sources of revenue for a year or two involving the greeting card trade.

In The Bag

I keep trying to move this blog into the post 1956 era at Topps but sometimes there just seems to be so much cool stuff prior to that things don't go as planned.

A little while back Hake's had a neat Hoppy piece that no one had really seen before, at least in the circles I trade information within.  This little bugger was quite the item:

Like, wow.......and as it turns out, it's a Topps Candy Division piece (one of their very few):

The Chattanooga reference that was on some old Topps Candy products is not present here so I wonder if, despite the 1950 copyright date, this bag came out after the closing of that plant in 1951. The ingredients list is the same as the one on the Hoppy Pops wrapper illustration that appeared in Chris Benjamin's Sport Americana Price Guide to the Non-Sports Cards so I surmise it held an abundance of said lollipops, likely quite stale ones if this was used to sell old, unsold product:

The Saddle Bag sold for just over $200.00, which I thought was a steal considering how scarce an item this is.  You can see the listing for yourself here.  The (authentic) Topps Archives continue to surprise!

Christmas in August

There is a nice auction up at Legendary right now that features some late 40's and early 50's Topps corporate materials in one lot.  One of these lots, has an ad sheet for Santa Pops and it helps date the issue as a 1951 release.

Here is the sheet in question:

The back of the box has a "report card" for 1952 so kids (or their parents most likely) could keep track of their good deeds and hygiene habits to plan for Santa's visit in the next year.  This dates Santa Pops to 1951 then. There is also an ad sheet for the closely related Rudolph Pops but dating that is trickier.  I would say that release was from 1950 but it could just as easily have been sold in 1949. Here, you can see for yourself:

Note too that the case size for Rudolph Pops was smaller than the one for Santa Pops, which also points to it being an earlier issue, although that is not necessarily rock solid imperial evidence. With a lack of actual boxes to inspect, such little clues help with dating.

Wonder Wheel

Well pardners, a couple of Google searches with slightly altered search terms has resulted in a really neat shot coming your way in living color.  We first visited Topps 1950 Hoppy Pops about six months ago, where the wrappers for the lollipops were the main attraction.  But first they were the subject of a short article in a trade magazine in their year of issue:

The black and white photo does not do the box cover justice.  Have a gander at this:

Someone replaced the Hoppy Pops with Dum Dums for the auction (it was sold in 2010 for $720) but this is indeed the box in question.  The back has a nice photo of Hoppy that would have made a handsome display on a feller's dresser:

Now, can we find color scans of Rudolph Pops or Santa Pops? You can click that link for Rudolph but I haven't written about Santa Pops yet..  Since Christmas is still eleven months away, an out-of-season peek will have to do:

Pop Secret

Well Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukah folks!  Just a real quick one today, albeit holiday themed.

One of the most obscure Topps issues was sold at Christmas 1950 and featured everybody's favorite reindeer:

That is from Chris Benjamin's The Sport Americana Price Guide to the Non Sports Cards 1930-1960, the only place I have ever seen one.

You can barely make out the manufacturer information but it's clearly a Topps product; it was made by Topps Candy Division, which would only be around for another year or so.  This was a close copy of Hoppy Pops and Santa Pops, and a distance cousin of Play Money Pops.  Here, maybe you can read all of the fine print, I only verified the Candy Divison details:

Green Trails

Well the 62nd anniversary of the premiere of Hopalong Cassidy has come and gone with nary a nod from the media.  In 1949 it was a different story and when Hoppy was a certified marketing miracle a year later there was press coverage galore.  As we saw last time out, Topps took full advantage and also had two price points on the cards. Since we are in penny arcade mode these days, a look at the penny pack seem appropriate:

The graphics are great, huh?  The copyright belongs to Willam Boyd (who played Hoppy) and we get Topps Chewing Gum as manufacturer, naturally.  Actually, I shouldn't say naturally since Topps ued about four different corporate identities in the early 1950's but that is another story!  There's also a tougher green version of the wrapper:

I'm not certain but the green packs may have held the high number part of the release with two additional episodes chronicled.  Topps though, was not don with Hoppy after the highs came out and marketed a short series of lollipop boxes.  The only two good pictures I can find are from Chris Benjamin's Sport Americana Price Guide to the Non Sports Cards Volume 2, published about 20 years ago:

There's at least one other box type out the based upon the puzzle numbering but I'd wager there were a couple more puzzles than that.  The boxes made it to the street in time for Hallowe'en in 1950.  The wrappers limned those used for the cards but with a small difference:

Those would have been twisted around each individual pop. Curiously they state "Made for Topps Chewing Gum" which is odd since Topps owned a plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee at the time that produced candy and table syrup.  While that plant was winding down around this time, I believe it was still quite viable for another couple of years.  They may have had a Brooklyn candy plant as well, still working on confirming that but Topps may have just decided it was easier to buy lolly's than to make them.

Next time we'll look some third party cross promotions that Topps used with Hoppy.