Hey gang, today we take a look at the very oddball Blockheads issue that makes last week's subject, Wise Ties - a product Topps appears to have pulled or curtailed due to a perceived choking hazard - look like a national safety award winner. I've taken only the briefest of glances here at the set, which is also related to 3D Monster Posters, and therein hangs a tale (of terror).
As with the Wise Ties, Blockheads is thought to have been quicky withdrawn from the marketplace as they were intended to be opened up and used as Hallowe'en masks, like so:
While undeniably cool, you can plainly see that a safety hazard was presented by Blockheads miniscule eye slits. But here's the thing, thanks to some serious detective work by Fiend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins, it very much seems like 3D Monster Posters, long thought to have been a reissued or reconfigured re-release of Blockheads, came first in a test format, then was changed over to a mask.
I get the distinct feeling that any safety concerns were back-burnered at Topps in favor of a set's "cool factor," which to my mind could have been somewhat related to the way they lab tested things with kids. It's not hard to envision some young tyke holding the original test issue poster to his face and saying how neat it would be if instead it was a mask.
Lonnie's theory is based upon disappeared or changed indicia from 3-D Monster Posters compared to Blockheads, and while I love showing that stuff, I'm limited due to some low-res images but it sure seems like a solid hypothesis. Poster first, the mask:
You can see how the left side of the white box is blank on the mask example, as two lines of information were apparently excised from the poster, as seen at left. Lonnie has also found some subjects where there is just a blank area on certain Blockheads that matches were indicia would or should have been. And that fuzzy word next to the "12 " on the poster example sure looks long enough to say "poster." All of this points to 3D Monster Posters being the first issue, closely followed by Blockheads.
Here now, the boxes:
3D plus three uses suggested, nice reinforcement! The redesign added five cents to the price and added some wonderfully gruesome artwork. What's abundantly clear is that Topps explicitly gave instructions right on the retail box for wearing the Blockheads:
This means they changed the product from being somewhat hazardous to fully hazardous ON PURPOSE!
That top box was courtesy of Lonnie by the way, the bottom two from another Fiend o'the Archive, Terry Gomes. The box front displayed a helpful visual checklist of all twelve subjects (more on that in a sec) while the bottom indicia rocked a 1967 commodity code.
I do not have a 3D Monster Posters box bottom to show unfortunately. On a related note, longtime Topps consultant Mark Newgarden recalls finding these at what turned out to this Brooklyn test store:
He found them well after 1967, so they languished a bit until he came along. Now, did Mark find a Blockhead or a 3D Monster Poster? I'm guessing both were possible (Update:5/9/25: It was masks only. Full poster indicia has yet to be sighted based upon messages I've received since this was posted). He advised there were no wrappers either, they were just loose in the box.
I originally intended for this to just be a visual checklist covering both sets (the artwork itself was never altered) but realizing I had never really addressed either in full, things kind of ballooned on me. Yet another Friend o'the Archive, Jeff Pace, sent along this shot of all twelve images. It's got some glare, so let's regroup below:
The checklist is as follows, going left-to-right, then top-to bottom:
The Hippie
The Ape
The Giant Fly
The Pirate
The Mad Scientist
The Witch Doctor
The Martian
The Three Eyed Monster
The Bleech
The Skull
The Moon Creature
The Green Monster
Some of those names may be from old checklists and might contain too many "the's"; these are tough finds and I do not have any scans of the subject names beyond The Bleech to go with indicia-wise. Here's non-glare views of The Mad Scientist, The Three Eyed Monster, The Bleech and The Green Monster:
Topps seemed to love three-eyed monsters as several have appeared in sets over the years. Pee Wee's Playhouse had an example, two in fact, twenty-two years later:
Yecch...the Bleech!
I'll conclude with something I've shown before, namely the full artwork for The Witch Doctor. It might be the best single example of artwork I've ever seen from Topps, quite close if it isn't, as it's hard to rank the really, really top ones:
These were all created for kids to essentially destroy then toss. How monstrously crazy!
