Rats!

Before the Sixties turned Day-Glo, there was a cottage industry of movies and TV shows that were set during World War 2. The boob tube's offerings ranged from the ridiculous (McHales's Navy, Hogan's Heroes) to the sublime (Twelve O'Clock High) with the others falling somewhere in the formulaic in-between.  One of these focused on the Long Range Desert Group, which was a British "recon and raid" unit that operated in Africa and, as the name suggested, primarily saw action in the desert.

ABC aired a show on Mondays at 8:30 detailing their fictional adventures fighting Rommel's Afrika Korps, called The Rat Patrol, which debuted in September 1966. Starring Christopher George as Sgt. Sam Troy, his small group of desert rats created big ratings in their debut season.  They weren't so lucky in season two as serious war shows were starting to fade, due in part to negative reaction to the Vietnam War. But before things turned south, Topps commemorated the series with a 66 card set.

Featuring full color fronts with no distracting graphics, the look was clean:

The backs used the combination puzzle/text look Topps was moving towards at the time:

As nice as the set looks, it's really no great shakes. The wrapper though, was an eye-catcher, and just pre-dated the commodity codes being added following the year's move by Topps to Duryea:

The retail box was awesomely action-packed-check it out:

The cards can be found with ease and are not all that popular.  However, that ring shown on the wrapper splash is a whole 'nother ball o'bullets.

The Insignia Rings used the same form as 1966's Funny Rings (about the oddest Football set insert that ever existed) but added a metallic gleam. Since they were essentially designed to be destroyed, the rings are quite hard to find in nice shape today. Here's my example, which is fairly typical of what's generally available condition-wise:

An uncut sheet of rings, likely a partial, exists:

As tough as the rings can be, there is another Rat Patrol item that's exponentially more difficult, a test of the cards:

Topps originally used the red silhouetted modified Jeep (partially shown in the card image) as a logo but scrapped it for the retail release.  The back is identical in both sets (I'm pretty sure they didn't use "darn!" as an expletive in the real war):

It's not clear how many subjects were used in the test but not all 66 are known, or even close to it, at least as cards; there is a partial sheet showing the full set with the red logo however. It's not clear to me when knowledge of the test cards first surfaced but they are not listed in either the Benjamin guides nor the Non-Sports Bible and I don't know if PSA would even grade them. The test cards are very, very hard to find.