Retail Recycled

Your intrepid blogmaster was fortunate enough to land this prize piece of Topps retail history a couple of weeks ago:

That is an unopened, albeit poorly wrapped, 1949 Tatoo gum tab alongside (it also came with a '48 tab) and I can report that, despite the wrapper in 1949 being a bit longer than the 1948 version, the tabs are the same size. The colors in 1949 seems a bit muted though. The canister is scarce with possibly only one other example known. Comics, Army and Sports are advertised subjects on this hemisphere while G-Men and Mystery appear around back.  "Every Wrap - Another Tatoo" ballyhoo also appears twice along with the 1 cent price advisory.

Strangely, neither Bubbles Inc. (1948)  nor Topps (1949) manufacturing information appears anywhere on the tub, nor is there any other indicia. There was also a 1953 Tatoo issue but it was in a larger pack that I don't think retailed in these type canisters.

The bottom is pretty blah:

So no indicia but something is printed there on the nonetheless:

BFF o'the Archive (and seller of this piece) Jeff Shepherd thinks the materials used to manufacture this canister were recycled or pulped, hence our two letter vestigial word.  The tub is quite flimsy, especially compared to the snazzy 1946 foil enhanced Topps Gum canister:

There are at least two earlier versions of this other canister by the way, one foil and one plain, and it would not surprise me if even more varieties are out there. All of the Topps Gum canisters I have seen carry dated copyrights.

Wild Things, I Think I Like You

When I started this blog almost six (!) years ago, I envisioned baseball-centric content primarily focusing on the 1960's and 70's test and limited issues and various pack inserts.  The baseball theme has been largely abandoned in favor of an all encompassing millieu and the time frame has stretched back to the 19th century and occasionally forward to the 21st.  Today's subject, 2014 Topps Archives Baseball, is easily the most modern set I have opined upon, mainly due to some good retro-design work by the current creative team at Topps.

Don't get me wrong, I am not a huge fan of the modern retro sets' doodads and geegaws, even if the base sets are well done and appealing.  The fake shortprints, chase cards and autograph inserts generally leave me cold. But it seems like once or twice a year now, Topps comes up with a nice subset that speaks to me.

Today, that subset is Major League. Honoring the amusing, if slightly hackneyed movie in its silver anniversary year, Topps used their 1989 baseball set as a template.  There are four cards in the main subset, which is an insert and I'll start with Roger Dorn (Corbin Bernson), the star third baseman who is reluctant to field ground balls:

Eddie Harris (Chelcie Ross) is devout, a journeyman junkballer:

Then there is Jake Taylor (Tom Berenger), an aging catcher:

And last (in the base insert set), but not least, the Wild Thing himself, Ricky Vaughn (Charlie Sheen):

There are chase cards and autograph inserts as well, which you can read about here. However, the autograph inserts include a fifth subject from the movie, the evil owner Rachel Phelps (Margaret Whitten):

There are some other inserts in the series as well, including a 1969 Deckle-ish one but the Major League cards are the real stars.  It's just too bad Topps could not manage to have cards of actual players who appeared in the movie such as Pete Vuckovich, Steve Yeager and especially Bob Uecker.

This is not the first time Topps created a card to salute a movie.  In 1984 they issued a special card #801 of Daryl Palmer (Michael O'Keefe) in The Slugger's Wife. This card appears to have been a prop in the movie and there may also be promo versions (ed. 7/17/23-it's doubtful they were promos):

(www.cardboardconnection.com)

Kid looks like he needs some steroids!

The Mild Ones

Bazooka was the main Topps bubble gum brand for decades but that didn't stop them from experimenting with some different confections from time to time while still selling oodles of Young America's Favorite. Blony (Bowman's bubble gum flagship at the time of absorption by Topps in 1956) was pretty much the stalwart #2 brand and Bozo gumballs seemingly went off to Canada after going gangbusters in the late 1940's. Topps most famously put baseball cards on the backs of Bazooka boxes for more than a decade but would muck around with other stuff as well, trying to move more and more of the pink stuff. I though we would take a hop, skip and a jump and look at some different things, bubble-gum-wise today.

1968 brought the world (or at least a small part of it) the Wild Animal Surprise Box, a more personal sized box of bubble gum:

Said to measure 2 1/2" x 4 inches by a recent seller, there only a little more than a half ounce of gum inside but I'm not sure what the surprise was. I make the height to be about 3/4".

That gorilla looks a lot more enticing than your standard Bazooka box, since the latter was aimed at moms in the supermarket and not a kiddie consumer. When baseball season waned, Topps would put some odd things on the backs of the Bazooka party boxes.  This Toppscience panel dates from 1966-69 (Update 6/30/24: it's from 1967):

 I'm all for science but..... NERD!!!!  The dating can be derived from the curved Topps logo on the back and the Brooklyn address on the side flap.  Remember I posted a guide to dating Topps items a while back...

Of course nothing beats the 1971 O-Pee-Chee Bazooka boxes with hockey cards on the back, courtesy of Bobby Burrell:

Those are miniature versions of the '71 hockey cards, blank backed, of course. Super rare and often counterfeited, the Orr card is one of hockey's most sought after collectibles. That little logo on the bottom right flap must be the printer:

A Tale Of Two Cities

Here we go again pilgrims, with another tweak to the Topps timeline.  I thought I did a pretty good job with keeping errors to a minimum when I published the The Modern Hobby Guide To Topps Chewing Gum: 1938 to 1956 last year but knew some changes and updates would inevitably occur. I've already listed a few at the blog for the book and this will appear there as well.

In the book I noted there were two variants of the 1939 Topps Gum tab wrappers, each showing a different place of manufacture: Brooklyn and New York City (I know, Brooklyn is in New York City but it is a world apart) and a different style on the bottom or back part of what would be the wrapper when sleeved to the tab.  Furthermore after intense consultation with Jeff Shepherd, the king of all things chewing gum, we both believed that the New York City variety came first as it featured short lived Ginger flavor which we theorized had fizzled out and been replaced by Pepsin:

(Courtesy Jeff Shepherd)

As it turns out, the story is far more complex than initially thought.  Here are the backs of some 1939 NYC wrappers which I believe could still have come first:

(Courtesy Jeff Shepherd)

The wrappers from Brooklyn that have a 1939 copyright were, we thought, all like this:

(Courtesy Jeff Shepherd)

I think that glassine inner wrap dates this to World War 2, so 1942-45 period.  However, I recently picked up this lot of two 1939's on eBay:

I can't say if these examples were produced at the same time but they look like a hybrid of the two previous types. Oh, and Shapiro Candy Manufacturing Company manufactured the one on the right. Shapiro, for those not in the know (and that is almost everybody on the planet given the minituae involved) was acquired by Topps sometime in 1944.  Shapiro's plant was also in Brooklyn and it was clearly a wartime play to stretch out their sugar quota but their new acquisition did also make candy products which Topps was already into at the time.  Topps slowly absorbed Shapiro and it was fully digested by 1946. In addition a new copyright date for Topps Gum appeared on redesigned wrappers in 1946 so the Shapiro example above must date from 1944-45 or maybe just into 1946.

So the big question I have is: when did the 1939 Brooklyn wrappers come out?

In 1946 the wrapper/pack bottoms  looked like this:

(Courtesy Jeff Shepherd)

Also of note is the variant without the asterisk (indicating Registered with the U.S. Patent Office) if you look closely at the indicia. 

And then we have these two types of 1949-ish tabs with two gum nuggets (this is what Topps Gum turned into once Bazooka started running rampant) from military field ration kits (not sure if they sold these commercially) and which I think differ ever so slightly:

: 

(Courtesy Jeff Shepherd)

Let us not forget this bad boy as well:

(The Sport Americana Price Guide to the Non-Sports Cards 1930-1960, by Christopher Benjamin, 

Edgewater Book Company, Cleveland, Ohio, 1993)

Shep has never seen one and the only place it has popped up so far as I know is in the Benjamin price guide but it looks like a true 1946 wrapper.

So we have seven potentially different Topps Gum tab wrappers, with up to six flavors potentially out there for all but the later, Chiclets-like products and it would not surprise me if more pop up. 

Old Lists and New Info

More Card Collectors Company related goodies today cadets!

It's quite rough and it looks like a mouse got to some of the page corners but I am happy to add this little sucker to the hobby publication library I maintain here at the Topps Archives Research Complex:

Issued in 1960 for $1.25 plus 10 cents postage, this 64 page pamphlet was bare boned but contained complete checklists for all main Topps sets through 1960, the 1955 Double Header and 1956 Baseball Buttons plus the two existing Bazooka sets.  In addition, there were complete checklists for Bowman (including the 1949 PCL issue), the 1959 and '60 Fleer issues, 1949 and '60 Leaf and the Dormand Postcard set (described as the "finest reproductions ever made of baseball players").  

I like to get as close to the original source as I can when writing about various sets and while the writeups in the pamphlet are sparse, there are indeed some nuggets within:

1949 Bowman PCL - "The series is so difficult to find that most collectors will never see one....the bulk of the print run was destroyed." The reproduction of an example, front and back, was likely the first time 99.9% of the hobby had ever seen one of these.

1949 Bowman (Major League Baseball) - "...the scarcest of the Bowman major league sets...all full sets are extremely rare."

1953 Bowman - "In order to lengthen the series to compete with the long Topps series on the market, Bowman issued an additional set of black and white cards."

1955 Bowman - "...the beautiful television design was extremely popular and remains among the most desired of all baseball sets."

1959 Fleer Ted Williams - No mention of card #68 being scarce.

1949 Leaf - No high number short prints are listed, only the 49 low numbers.

1951 Topps - "In addition there were a number of larger cards of exceptional interest...another group was a Current All-Star series.  Though the cards were issued only a few years ago, it is virtually impossible to complete the set." No mention is made as to the scarcity of the three super short prints in the Current All Stars, they are listed along with the other 8 cards. All five of the intertwined sets are listed together under this generic heading.  The two Red Back variations are incorrectly ascribed to the Blue Back series.

1952 Topps - "Number 311 to 407 were issued in a much smaller quantity and as a result these numbers are exceedingly scarce."

1955 Topps - "The cartoons on the reverse side were drawn by Irwin Hasen, who draws the famous cartoon strip 'Dondi'".

1956 Topps Baseball Buttons - "These unique Buttons are getting scarcer all the time."

Incidentally, Irwin Hasen is still with us at 95......

The CCC Check List was issued and updated through sometime in the 1970's I believe and would have been a key, early hobby resource.

3DBB Meets 2FB

OK, it appears I managed to completely miss a truly epic Topps 3D prototype in the latest Huggins & Scott auction. Forgive me for repeating myself a bit here but what I believe to be a third example of the ultra-rare Brooks Robinson prototype was gaveled recently and it's a sight to behold:

Looks like Brooksie has a mouthful of crease, no?  There is also a scuff running at 45 degree downward angle from the E in Orioles toward the right border plus a dog eared lower left corner and a few other assorted scrapes and bruises.  The SGC 20 grade certainly appears accurate. I think the dog ear is the easiest was to ID this particular example:

To refresh your collective memories, here are the other two Robinson prototypes, the first an SCG AUTH and the second an example that was probably the first one to be seen:

 

The AUTH example at top is the cleanest of the three while the one at the bottom has a wavy little crack going through the La nd E of Orioles.  The back is known for the AUTH version and is clean but with a lot of foxing, just like the Dog Ear version, which I will show here:

The AUTH back is here and it's a little cleaner:

The Wavy prototype's back is unknown, which is important since there is at least one out there with a Xograph stamped back as shown in The Standard Catalog:

I can't tell if that is the same card as the Wavy one, so it's unclear if three or four examples are now known. I'm going to name them now:

1) Wavy

2) Clean (The SGC AUTH)

3) Dog Ear

4) Stamped Back* (asterisk as it could be the same as #1 but I don't necessarily think so).

In addition to the soccer card prototype previously discussed here, there are two other prototypes from the world of Football, albeit American style.  Friend o'the Archive Mike Blaisdell has sent along a couple of righteous scans, the first of Bart Starr and the second of Tucker Frederickson, which would date from around the 1967-68 era I think:

I'm not sure on sizing but Starr seems more square than ol' Tucker (who in turn appears handcut).  Keith Olbermann's authoritative article on the 3D cards in an SCD article dated March 23, 2007 does not mention the two cards of Starr and Frederickson but does mention the Cane (soccer) prototype.  Frederiskon is in an SGC AUTH holder so the registry over there should hold some additional information. I wonder if more are out there waiting to be found?

The Topps Set That Almost Was

In 1950, just as Topps was rounding into form with their card sets, there appeared on the store shelves a little number called The Lone Ranger. Clayton Moore was riding high as John Reid, the lone survivor of a terrible ambush (and incidentally Grand Uncle Of Britt Reid, a.k.a. The Green Hornet--I'd link it but it's more fun to Google it!) along with his faithful sidekick Tonto (Jay Silverheels) and in 1949 saw his fortunes rise as The Lone Ranger transitioned from radio to TV.

1950 saw a set of 120 cards issued by Ed-U-Cards, whose wares were generally sold in the toy and variety stores of the day in "decks". These cards feature garish coloring of black and white shots taken from four episodes that aired early in the 1950-51 season, each episode being allotted 30 cards.  The set was sold in a series of brightly colored envelopes each holding five panels of three cards although it is not clear if these were sequentially collated.  Here's a look at a typical panel from the set, which carries an ACC number of W536:

If you think those cards look a lot like Topps' Hopalong Cassidy high numbers you're right. 

Now compare the backs from each set:

Pretty close, right?  Now look at a 1950 Topps Freedom's War reverse:

The font used for the set name is identical to that of The Lone Ranger and there are just too many stylistic similarities for this to be a coincidence.  I've previously documented some common elements between Topps and Ed-U-Cards baseball deck games and this is just more evidence of a link between the two companies (Ed-U-Cards was based about ten miles from Topps in Queens).  Topps either clearly designed the set for their competitor or had created it for their own purposes and decided to sub-let it instead. Either way, it's a fascinating little slice of Topps history. The Lone Ranger cards individually measure 2" x 2 5/8", a little smaller than the 2 1/16" x 2 5/8" measurements of Hoppy and Freedom's War. The perforations are much finer on The Lone Ranger than on any Topps cards that were issued in (two card) panels of the era to boot.

I said the set was issued in envelopes, here they are in all their glory from eBay:

Here's what could have come in one of the envelopes:

The Lone Ranger was not a typical Ed-U-Cards product and they would not issue anything else that was close in style. Whatever the reason, they deviated this one time and never did it again.