All Ears

Yonks ago I posted a pretty fuzzy image of a strange and virtually unknown Bazooka box back set called Toppscience.  Recently a series of eBay auctions and an extended plumbing of the depths of my hard drive offered a better look at the issue and I'm here to share the results:

We already knew there were 24 "experiments" in the series and this is the third one (aka the hard drive image):

A desalinization project?  Sign me up! Note too the Parents Magazine seal of approval for the gum. 

Here is number 7:

What I like about these newly hammered pieces is that they can now be dated, as the commodity code has come in with far more resolution than I had previously. It ends in a 7, indicating a concept year (and likely retail year) of 1967.  It's even clearer in this image of number 19, which reveals 1-197-36-01-7 as the full code:

Number 21 was the example I shared previously but this is a better image for sure:

Side panel action below! I'm sure the ability to make chemical magic at home sounded enticing; here's the offer:

Invisible ink is one thing but I'm not sure I'd want to slug down some homebrew cola!

These came on the back of the box used by Bazooka for several years, with these two fresh-faced tykes grinning madly at your mom in the grocery store:

Twenty four subjects is a lot for a Bazooka issue.  If you count the three card panels of baseball cards issued from 1960-71 as being singular items, they maxed out with sixteen of them in 1971. 

I'm guessing they Toppscience subjects were adapted or licensed from an existing book of chemistry for kids and also wondering if they were pulled quickly due to the nature of some experiments.  Just in the examples above we have nails, metal wire and a potential garotte (!) being needed to run the experiments, which was just the type of thing to scare hysterical moms into cowing a jittery Topps into cancelling a set back in the Sixies. Toppscience is a tough set to collect, or even find examples from, which is understandable in the general sense and if Topps did indeed yank it, then the scarcity of extant examples is more easily explained.

UPDATE 7/31/24: Consistent with an anonymous comment about this post, Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins has provided details on box variants.  In addition to the 20 count boxes described above, 25 count boxes were also issued in 1967 (1-190-38-0X-7 commodity codes, likely with three revisions, hence the "X".) 1967 also saw a 90count Hallowe'en Bonus Box (the code there was 1-135-01-7) .The Topps reissued Toppscience in 1969 with a  code of 1-190-38-01-9. Whew!