Boarding Process

A trove of Topps Presentation Boards was auctioned on eBay a couple of months ago and it was, to put it mildly, a diverse lot.  These do pop up from time to time but this batch was particularly large and also had a geographic reference to its location in Honesdale, PA (in an attic, no less), which is about 40 miles from where the Topps plant was in Duryea.

I'm not sure about the process of presenting with these boards-it seems likely they were meant for Topps brass in Brooklyn, but most seem to originate near Duryea so I could have that backwards.  Or they just ended up in Duryea for storage and went home with people at various points in time.  This latest batch looks to cover a period beginning in the mid 70's and running into the mid 80's.

Here's the full Monty-you can plainly  see the wide range of products and years:

Let's start with the baseball proposals.  The first is, without a doubt, what evolved into the 1974 Baseball Stamps issue.  It looks to me like the stamps (or stickers, depending) were already designed and the presentation was to nail down the album concept:

The stamps would ultimately be issued in a 2 x 6 array and the albums ended up being shrunk down from the proposal, which went as big as looseleaf pages.  We know Topps had been working since 1970 on a full size sticker release and it looks like the 74's got pretty close to realizing that concept.  What's unfortunate is that the stamp set seems like it failed-stamps were dumped or had issues in production and the albums were not produced in quantities to match.  In fact, the 1974 Baseball Stamp Albums are pretty tough to find these days while the stamp sheets are a breeze.

Meanwhile, we see an intriguing Hit to Win mockup that closely resembles the (different) contest cards inserted in the 1980 and 1981 Baseball packs.

Check out the Guidry mockup-Did Topps intended for the cards to also include a player insert or have a two sided insert?  Seems like the Guidry part of the pitch came very late.  Or maybe it was intended to show some detail from the Baseball Guidebook offered as a prize for hitting (scratching off) a single in the game.  Either way it's a neat, unique Yankees piece. Never seen the guidebook?  Here ya go:

This concept seems a bit mundane:

More intriguing, although out of my wheelhouse in terms of scope (I tend to end things here at 1980 so don't profess much knowledge beyond that year) and subject (Smurfs? No....) but the gum sure resembles some old Topps product like Rock's O' Gum.

To me though, the most interesting proposal had to do with a 3-D set:

Those are the fronts of two 1953-54 Topps Tarzan cards being used to show a new concept-check out the artwork for the proposed 3-D glasses:

That very much looks like Jack Kirby's work, or heavily inspired by it. Joe Kubert actually did the line art for the Tarzan sets (note-under investigation, see comments) so if it is by Kirby, it's a nice tie-in of two legendary comic book artists. Can anyone ID the superhero? He looks like a Marvel product of the times but my comic book knowledge is pretty much kaput these days. The original title is no longer with the board so it's anybody's guess what the product was supposed to be I guess.

Decades after they were created, the boards show the creativity and thought processes that went into designing and issuing a set of cards or inserts in the pre-digital design days.

Puck Buddies

Moving on from baseball today we close out an amazing run of Topps mockups presented by Friend o'the Archive Keith Olbermann. The general theme is hockey but we'll work in a little football and basketball (sorta) as well.

I'm a little out of my element on hockey card graphics and photos so bear with me...

Marcel Pronovost was a Hall of Fame Defenseman for many years with the Red Wings and Maple Leafs.  Most of his 1964-65 tall boy image is used here which seems odd until you realize a large portion of those cards consisted of the team name atop the player image:

That color scheme did not see the light of day until the 1971 All Star Football cards subset came out:

More 1964 Tall Boy action on this Ed Westfall mockup:

I see more in common with 1969 Topps baseball than I do with an issued hockey design there. By now you're probably thinking that the hockey mockups are a lot more accurate than the baseball ones, which almost never depicted the correct combination of player, team or logo. Well, you would be wrong:

OK, Red Kelly was a definitely a Defenseman for the Red Wings and like Marcel Pronovost was also a Hall of Famer but he was traded to the Maple Leafs in the middle of the 1959-60 season.  Then there is the matter of that not being Kelly and, in fact, not even being a hockey player at all but rather Vince Promuto, a football player for the Redskins and whose 1961 Football image is used above. The design looks like it was progressing toward the 1962-63 Hockey cards though.  Here, check it out:

I chose Murray Oliver's issued card as that image pops up on the next mockup, although it's cropped a bit tighter, which is interesting, so the source is likely a photograph and not a paper proof:

That's more like a stab at the 1964 Baseball cards I think, although obviously those are a lot blander.

Now we will close with something that is the opposite of bland, much like the 1964/72 Pete Ward psychedelic freakout we saw last time out.  These are some bold, bold graphics, although there is a twist:

OK, I know that's a basketball dominating the background but it's clearly meant to be a football.  This looks like 1968-ish graphics that were adapted for use here (the logo and player name are correct for 1968).  I think this is from 1969, which is the last year that team logo was used.  Sorry but I am whiffing on the Chargers player shown here. (Note: As per the comments, it's Jim Warren, shown on his 1968 card in a Chargers uni but as a member of the Dolphins).

Hope you have enjoyed this peek inside the vintage Topps design process as much as I have.  Many thanks to Keith Olbermann for all the fantastic scans!

Super Seventies

If you can stand it, there are still a number of Keith Olbermann's mockups to go through here.  We're getting into the later stuff here and by later I mean 1970's which makes perfect sense in vintage terms.

We'll go from mundane to spectacular (trust me) in six easy steps. First up is "Tom Siever", obviously spelled by a Yankees fan. Tom Terrific is, of course, nowhere to be found:

Clearly they were working toward some kind of subset or insert issue. Here is a little bit more of a refined version, although not by much:

We move on a bit in terms of color with "Wes Parker" being portrayed by Jim Fregosi on what is a pretty spiffy design, at least to my aging eyes:

That's a 1963 Fregosi image but a decidedly more modern graphics package. They must have kept the paper proofs that were used for so many mockup images around for ages.

I would say things are progressing nicely toward 1972 with this Sports Illustrated swipe used as the basis of a Reggie Jackson mockup, with the original Mr, October standing in:

Nice, but the next iteration is even better, a 1971 John Mayberry used to propel the graphics toward finality in 1972:

I think that's the only mockup I've seen with all the elements (name, position, team and player 100% correct.  Ironically, Mayberry was depicted as a Royal in 1972.  I do like that design but I'm guessing the borders were too "busy" for the Topps brass.

Speaking of busy.....

Mundane 1964 photo of Pete Ward? Check.  Name checking hottest pitcher in the game in 1971? Check.  Going supernova with the background graphics? Yikes! 

That is some eye-popping design!  I don't think it would have worked over the full 787 card set in '72 but it would have made a killer subset or insert, although baseball inserts were a thing of the past once the 1972 cards were issued. That background is just stunning.

That's about it for the baseball mockups.  Some other sports will be coming your way next time out.

Summer Daze

Can you stand it?!  We have even more Topps prototypes to look at today buccos!  Once again courtesy of Friend o'the Archive Keith Olbermann, today's peek is a little more lighthearted than our previous two entries.

Topps could be a goofy place to work at sometimes, not an unexpected thing since they were in the business of entertaining kids. So these baseball mockups are not at all surprising in that context. Here is Walt Alston, errr.......Topps Creative Director Woody Gelman:

Nice tape job...not! As you can see, Smoky's 1963 Topps card formed the basis for this mockup, which looks very much like a stab at what the 1965 cards became.  Here is the actual '63 card:

Gelman's old art agency partner and then-current Topps Art Director Ben Solomon was also immortalized as part of a mockup using a 1964 Eddie Mathews:

Eddie may have had multiple personality disorder; he's Bill Freehan in a different mockup using the same 1964 base:

That looks like an early go at the 1972 design, doesn't it?  Sometimes it took multiple mockups over a number of years to get to the final set design.

There are also some designs that were not taken from existing cards but likely were based upon photographs in the Topps player files.  I think the Yogi shot looks like it was taken from the same series of photos used to produce the 1973 World Series program actually:

Len Brown of course was Woody Gelman's mentee and the man who wrote a lot of card backs for Topps over the years. He got a second chance at infamy on this Dave Kingman kludge:

That's another picture I can't trace to an actual issued card.  I do wonder if it's from the same batch of photos his 1974 card was taken from as there is heavy shadow there as well:

Topps in-jokes are a common theme in the history of the company, from card backgrounds, to actual issued products like Rocks O'Gum to these mockups. Seems like it might have been fun working there (or not).

Here is yet another Len Brown:

That's actually Mike Epstein, giving it his all.

Stay tuned folks...

9/6/15-Update from Mr. O:  All of the "Len Brown" images are created from pictures originally published in Sports Illustrated in the early 70's and used by Topps to create the mockups. 

Weaver? I Hardly Even Know Her!

It's time to visit the Swingin' 60's today kids as we continue our look at Friend o'the Archive Keith Olbermann's extensive collection of Topps concept art and mockup designs. We are into a group now where Mr. O thinks some of these may have been taken from negatives or proof sheets which, for some reason, are fixated on one Jim Weaver, a pitcher who appeared in 27 games over the 1967 & 1968 seasons with the Angels, where he went 3-1 with a 2.55 ERA. He was depicted on two real cards by Topps: #328 in the 1968 set and #134 in 1969.

Nicknamed "Fluff" it's not clear why a fringe player such as Weaver was semi-immortalized by Topps but it may have been an inside joke whereby the most insignificant player possible was selected as the name for these.

In order from top to bottom, Bubba Phillips, Carl Warwick and Grover Powell all stand in for old Jim.

The bottom area looks pink but I'd wager given the patriotic theme that it would look better in red, unless Topps felt that the red in the neatlines would suffice. The Bubba Phillips image is from his 1964 card, where he was depicted as a Tiger. 

Carl Warwick was a Colt on his 1964 Topps card, from whence this image came. As to the team logo, I have no idea what is going on there.

If you guessed that was the picture from Grover Powell's 1964 card, you would be correct. That is clearly a design that was working toward what the 1970 set developed into. The Roberto Clemente mockup in this old post (bottom left) shares the home plate vision.

Just so Jim doesn't feel left out, here is his 1969 card:

Backs received the same treatment.  It can't be read but there is a penciled notation on this one indicating the cartoon could be replaced by a black and white picture, something we saw, of course, in 1971. Osborne's last year in the bigs was 1963 so there was some long range planning going on in Brooklyn for sure. That back is a little reminisent of a '63, come to think of it.

Now we have something that may be an early stab at the 1970 Story Booklets.

It's hard to make out but the penciling says "Pete Rose Story".  What's a little baffling though is it looks like the player shown is wearing a Brewers Helmet and they didn't start playing as the Brewers until 1970 (and it was a last minute move at that), so maybe this is something else. It doesn't seem to be a Milwaukee Braves helmet either.

The "Willie McCovey" below may also be an ur- Story Booklet.

You think all this is strange?  Wait until next time!

Mocking Day

We're about to hit the stretch run across six divisions of Major League Baseball, a period when teams with no chance of making the playoffs start looking toward next year.  It's an appropriate time, I think, for a look at some intriguing and amazing mock ups and concept art that Topps used to design sets for the coming year.  Thanks to a trove of scans provided by Friend o'the Archive Keith Olbermann, the stretch run this year will coincide with a series of posts covering these very strange-but-important artifacts that allowed Topps to refine their graphics and artwork in what is increasingly looking like a complex and well thought out process.

First up are what appear to be the oldest versions of these mockups, covering the 50's and early 60's. Compared to later mockups, these early examples display a little more freestyle artwork. This was clearly close to a final design concept for the 1958 baseball cards:

A few points here. Most mockups have a mashup of images and names that rarely reflect the actual subject depicted. The player above is Pete Whisenant (more on him in a minute) and the team logo is probably taken from a 1955 card (or paper proof), although its a Braves logo, not an Indians logo or even the Redlegs logo (which was Pete's team at the time) nor is that Herb Score.  Amusingly, Whisenant had played previously for the Braves and in 1960 would become an Indian.  I'm not sure why the team name is incomplete at bottom right either as I can't tell if those are press on or drawn letters. For reference, here is the actual 1958 card of Score:

Next up is a design concept for 1962 Baseball:

Once again a 1957 card was used to create the mockup.  However, Roy Smalley played his last MLB game in 1958 as a member of the Phillies so it's possible this was created a few years prior to the beginning of true design work on the 1962 cards.  Perhaps it was saved for a later day.

Now, the most interesting thing to me about these mockups is the use of 1957 paper proofs to create them.  We've seen the Whisenant paper proof before:

Purkey is also a 1957 paper proof subject, although a scan of his particular proof is unknown at present.  He is a subject (#368) however, listed in a Card Collectors Company ad from 1979 which I have previously written about.

The paper proofs were, I have been told, printed just before the cardboard proofs and were a final check before loading in the cardboard.  Whether that's true or not I can't really say but it certainly appears the creative and art departments at Topps had access to these proofs as they were used as part of the building up of the two mockups shown above.

On a related note, Mr. O advises there exists, outside of his collection, a 1971 mockup featuring a 1967 Jack Hamilton card.  Hamilton is a paper proof from that year and in fact one example resides in my collection:

The proofing process could have yielded a bunch of paper versions, so many that the mind boggles! Given how survived though, most were probably cut up by Topps or just destroyed.

We'll take a look at some more mockups next time out.

Non Exacting X-Acto

I was lucky enough to snag two Topps mockups recently, one from a stab at Laverne & Shirley and another from a failed Hardy Boys adventure.

The Laverne & Shirley I obtained has been shown here previously but it's definitely worth showing again:

The mockup was assembled on card stock and measures 2 1/2" x 3 1/2", or standard size. The underlying stock is white and everything else is layered on top.  The sepia toned photo looks like it came from a promotional issue but that blue border is strictly cut and pasted strips of sticker material. That L&S logo probably took some finesse to cut and the text balloon is hand lettered and bordered. Have a closer look at both of these elements:

The lettering was done with reasonable care, although a couple letters look redrawn:

The back shows some residue from what was most likely rubber cement, no doubt once used to affix it to a presentation board:

L&S first aired in January of 1976, so this mockup likely was created in 1975.

The Hardy Boys mockup has a couple of differences but looks similar:

The design resembles Charlie's Angels wrapper art to a degree, check it out:

The Hardy Boys mockup is made up on very thin (possibly sticker) stock and Parker Stevenson overlaps Shaun Cassidy a little. No official logo here, those are paste on letters:

The reverse shows remnants of masking tape:

I believe there was a corresponding Nancy Drew mockup as well. Since the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries first aired in 1977, that's how I would date this mockup as well.

There are, however at least two other Hardy Boys mockups known to exist:

Poor Shaun got cropped a little too tight there-yikes!

There are assuredly some other TV shows that were done up by Topps in this manner.  In addition, rumors of three test issues from the mid 60's means the following shows may have been tested : F Troop, Green Acres and I Dream of Jeannie. These were probably tested as black & white cards but presentation boards started around 1966 so they could be actual mockups (if they exist).