Here's The Story...

...of a pretty amazing auction lot.

If you're in a certain age group it's pretty much impossible not to be aware of "The Brady Bunch" and its offspring. The Friday Night ABC-TV show premiered on September 26, 1969 and ran for five semi-fun-filled seasons, often with some pretty excruciating musical numbers thrown in. And this was before things devolved into a lucrative universe of never-ending syndication, spin-offs, revivals and two later very tongue-in-cheek homage movies. Unlike the very adjacent "Partridge Family" show it sometimes ran ahead of and was featured in three plain vanilla series releases with Topps, The Brady Bunch led to two very similar Topps card sets that have confused collectors ever since. The first of these sets was a test and I'll leave that for the latter part of today's festivities, focusing on the full 1971 retail issue to start.  

Back in June of this year, this lot popped up on eBay and went for a strong price:

Starting at top left and going clockwise, we see a dual-display unit sleeve that originally held two 48 count boxes of Brady's, with 240 cards per box. The there is a nicely preserved display box, s set of the cards (88 of 'em), a mysterious schematic of the display and packaging, a waste strip presumably from the outer sleeve and a wax wrapper.  Let's break it down:

To me the sleeve is the unlikely survivor here:

I suspect that little strip somehow secured both boxes inside the sleeve.  There's some shots of the sleeve's interior that I'll spare you from but it's not really obvious how that would have worked. As for the sleeve proper, Topps used this sales method for a few years, starting around 1969, often for sets like their Hallow'een offerings, but really anything they wanted to move in a little more quantity fit the bill.

It's possible this method was used to primarily  boost flagging sales of a once promising product but I'm not at all sure of that and it could also have been intended for sets with a perceived seasonal sales cycle. The ABC-TV tagline that the outer box added seems like it could have been something that made Topps some extra scratch but who knows at this point. Still, the cards and all the display trappings are somewhat hard to find for this set, although it could also have been sold in cello packs, with some vending thrown in. Vending though, was probably the worst-performing member of the Topps retail ecosystem. 

Anyhoo, here's another view:

The display box used an image provided by the show's producers and, while it omitted the Brady parents and their domestic helper Alice, it sure locks in how the kids looked in season one:

As readers here know, I like to show off all the indicia I can find.  I'm especially aware of the need to do so these days as more and more boxes are over-wrapped by a certain third-party authenticator, which generally places a COA that obscures these details:

You can see the stock and other numbering information from the commodity code matches with the sleeve (1-443-XX-01-1). The cards were described as having glue residue on the reverse due to their being entombed in a Topps file book.  

The 88 card full retail set is popular and is often confused with the 55 card test set.  We will get to all that shortly but first, the Topps provenance makes me think the schematic card could have been something made up by Topps and inserted into the file book. (UPDATE 8/5/24: the archive belonged to Philadelphia Gum a.k.a. Swell, which kept tabs on their competitors. Tip o'the Topps cap to Lonnie Cummins for that tidbit.)  

Here's the reverse, you can see it was glued to something for sure:

The wrapper offered in the lot was not pristine, so I'll sub in another scan. Other than the side panel premium ad, it's the same as the one from the eBay lot:

I dunno, that's not a great image for a wrapper in IMO, although Mike and Carol finally get their mugs out there.  Alice (Ann B. Davis) got hosed on the packaging but she does appear in the set:

I'd like to think the color choices there were either the avocado (as shown) or burnt orange!  Here's a back, it's kinda groovy:

You will note that the copyright is from 1969, even though this set hails from 1971.  The original license, according to Chris Benjamin in his Sport-Americana guides, was still valid at the time the set was released, which neatly answers that question and also explains why the set is thought to be from 1969 by many collectors, dealers and even third-party graders (I'm looking at you PSA).  That mismatch plus the test issue of 55 cards that came out in 1970 showing a copyright for the very same year is what gets folks into some additional pretzel logic.  Those 55 test cards have a reverse that looks like this:

The indicia regarding the puzzle numbering from 1971 does not appear on the test cards.  In fact, the 55 card puzzle no. 1, which depicts the fictional family in an ersatz jail cell, is the same for both sets, which means another puzzle or two could be made from the retail set of 88. Sure enough, a second puzzle featured Mike and Carol sharing a milkshake and is made up of 18 card backs, with the image taken from card #10:

The third puzzle is 15 cards worth of Brady kids, in the same pose seen on the retail box. No real effort involved by Topps for these two pseudo-jigsaws.

The test issue is incredibly scarce and is one of the tougher Topps sets to track down singles from. I mean, it's almost impossible and I wonder if it was initially created for a pitch meeting with Paramount. Even John Neuner's old guide to Non-Sport wrappers makes no mention of it. 

But it must have been tested somehow as Topps never released anything without one being conducted. It's not clear if the test was made in cello then, or the more familiar bespoke white wax wrappers used for such things, as it does not seem any of the latter can be found. But it must have been a success or we would not be seeing the regular issue cards.

And that's how they all became the Brady Bunch sets!