A Dicey Situation

There is some seriously interesting Topps test material popping up in uncut form of late.  The latest entry in the clean-out-your-checking-account sweepstakes is a 1961 Dice Game (really 1963 it seems) production sheet.  Those of you familiar with this 18 subject set are aware of its extreme rarity and high percentage of Hall of Famers, offered recently by Collect Auctions.

Here it is in all its black & white glory:

I count eight Hall-of-Famers on there, nine if you count Camilo Pascual's Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame enshrinement (and excluding specific team Halls-of-Fame).  You can see the centering lines at all four cardinal compass points above, and also on the back of the sheet:

I believe this sheet has belonged to the (Larry) Fritsch family for decades.  The February 1974 issue of Sports Scoop had a piece by Ron Greenwood mentioning Fritsch had a set of the cards:

An ad in the January 1978 issue of The Trader Speaks offered the set...

...but as PSA notes in this article, it was merely a test by Fritsch to gauge interest and determine values. They speculate, as do I, that what was being offered in 1978 was the uncut sheet featured above.

While there is nothing to indicate they produced the set, which was never released in any form, the look, typefaces and a later Heritage-type lookback set all scream Topps. I believe, albeit without concrete proof, the set was reconfigured and eventually turned into what we know as the 1967 Baseball Punch-Out set. Sometimes development of a non-mainstream set took several years to accomplish at Topps.

Carved Out

Last time out I promised a look at Zorro, which was an ABC-TV show that ran for two seasons from October 1957 until September 1959, occupying the Thursday night time slot from 8-8:30 and produced by Walt Disney Productions.  The show was set in 1820's Los Angeles and centered around Don Diego de la Vega, scion of a wealthy Spanish landowner who became the masked and caped Zorro when it was time to fight injustice. As they did with Davy Crockett, Disney spliced together pieces of several first season episodes to create a feature length film called The Sign of Zorro that was exhibited overseas before being released domestically in 1960. 

Unfortunately, despite robust ratings, the show had been cancelled by then due to a dispute between Disney and ABC, although four specials, the last airing in April of 1961, would follow on what was called the Disneyland show at the time, later known as the Wonderful World of Disney.  All ties were then severed and Disney bailed on ABC, which it had literally saved from financial ruin, shortly thereafter. Zorro the TV show lived on in syndication for many years thereafter though. And if you're thinking Batman lifted many elements from Zorro, who was featured in dozens of books and short stories and even a handful of movies starting in 1919 (the character was created by Johnston McCulley) when it debuted in Detective Comics in 1939, you would be correct.

Topps put out an 88 card set covering the show in 1958 that relied heavily upon images of series star Guy Williams, who portrayed the namesake acrobatic swordsman with panache and grace. While filmed in black-and-white, the cards were printed with muddy-ish looking color, heavy on browns and greens; it's not clear to me if WDP or Topps did the colorizing but it's not done very well:

The swashbuckling action scenes were a real high point of the show, which was kind of boring, at least to me as a kid, otherwise.  The backs are fairly pedestrian and reflect the semi-standardization Topps was embarking upon at the time:

The images all seem plucked from the show's first season, which is a shame as it robbed the world of seeing the pre-F-Troop Krazy Kat actor Don Diamond, who played Corporal Reyes in season two, on a  Topps card.

Sold in one and five cent wax packs along with ten cent cellos, with some vending thrown in, the set was massively overproduced and cards can be found with ease today, quite cheaply at that. The one cent pack is a mundane repeater:

While the five cent version is a lot more dramatic:

Box graphics were also bold, with some added elements and very nice photography worked in:

Indicia for fun, I like the Disney reference:

Zorro means "fox" in Spanish by the way. A succinct and pretty great history of the character can be found here.

Lost In Spacetime

If you are of a certain age, like moi, you probably have fond memories of watching Irwin Allen's Lost In Space, either during its prime time run or in reruns in the after-school programming block on one of your local TV stations.  It unleashed some meme-worthy catchphrases during its three year run and it later led to a rather meh feature film and then an awesome rebooted streaming series on Netflix. In short, it's ingrained in the popular culture and has been for quite some time.

The show, featuring the future (1997!) misadventures of the spacefaring Robinson Family, who made up the majority of the crew of the good ship "Jupiter II" along with Major Don West, the simpering saboteur stowaway Dr. Zachary Smith, and an occasionally untethered robot premiered on CBS in September 1965, airing from 7:30 to 8:30 on Wednesday nights, a time slot it never strayed from incidentally. Topps commemorated the set with a 55 card release in 1966 that featured some wonderfully colorful space-y artwork.

Here's the eye-catching wrapper:

Simple but effective.  The retail box was even better:

That Cyclops is about to get zapped!  Our furry friend was also featured on an Aurora plastic model kit, so he got around:

The bottom of the Topps box has a very, very late "Brooklyn" 32 postal code, possibly the final one and I assume they had flats on hand for certain retail configurations, with just the black bottom indicia still lurking when Lost In Space was released:

That oblique view has all of the main human cast save Dr. Smith present as well.  Like I said, it's a nice display and popular too as sci-fi fans and card collectors both pursue the set and its packaging materials.

This card features Guy Williams, who starred as Professor (and Commander) John Robinson, along with June Lockhart and Mark Goddard:

The publicity shots used by Topps were exceptionally sharp; the detail on the card above (set-ender #55) is superb.

A orange and black design took up a large portion of the reverse which was capped with a text block.

The cards bear no Topps markings, just a copyright from the production company. This dates the set but I believe there is an associated wrinkle in time (groan).  If you click over here to Todd Riley's non-sport.com site and dig in with a set search, you will see that the shipping carton bears a commodity code of 470-10-1-6, which is lacking on the wrapper and retail box. This is a primeval code for Topps, one of their very earliest and not quite formatted in the way that would follow and stick for a few decades. They must have hit on the format after the wrappers and boxes for the set were printed but before it was shipped.

Pondering this, I'm guessing the set was greenlit in late 1965 or early 1966, before Topps had fully implemented and refined the codes, which related to the move of their main plant from Brooklyn to Duryea, PA.  The shipping carton over at Todd's site has a packing date of July 26, 1966, so it seems Topps either waited for the show to have some ratings action before fully deploying it or there was an unspecified delay as Summer was a TV-dead zone back in the Sixties.

A major snag out of the hands of Topps may have helped snafu production, as the available cards seem just a smidge less than similar TV themed sets of the era, with  22 overprints making it appear a little more abundant than it actually is, I'd say. Chris Watson's Non-Sports Bible mentions the overprints being nos. 10,14,16,17,19,20,21,22,23,24,27,31,33,37,38,40,42,44,47,51 "plus two additional cards." I was hoping, based upon this uncut partial sheet, his information checked out in terms of all these being in two rows of 11, as is usually the case with 55 card sets, but alas.  In fact, it's not matching up at all, as all four vertical columns (rows when reoriented to match the fronts) here show one or more of the supposedly over-printed cards, although I guess there's a slightly better than non-zero chance they could have been randomly arrayed:

So the OP's remain a mystery!

As for that snag, ABC plopped the "A" episode of the brand new Batman series in the same time slot as Lost in Space in January 1966 (replacing the old chestnut The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) and it immediately dinged LIS in the ratings, seemingly helped by the fact the Caped Crusader's "B" episode aired on the next night each week. By the time the Topps Lost In Space set debuted, Batman had become a nationwide fad and the 1965-66 television season would have already concluded, neither of which was ideal. Batman, of course, was a cultural phenomenon and would lead to no less than five Topps sets in '66.

Here's a fun Fact, Guy Williams was also the star of the late Fifties show Zorro and a bit of a rarity when it comes to Topps vintage television related releases: an actor featured in sets covering two different shows:

There's not much to the set but I'll take a look at Zorro next time out.

Double Dipper

A truly rare piece of Topps history was recently hammered down at Heritage Auctions and it was a real doozy.  Yup, an uncut sheet of the 1968 Basketball set popped up out of nowhere and went for just over an eye-popping $128,000, or a cool $2,900 per subject!

The sheet has the set printed twice:

Nuts, right?  I believe it's a final production piece as the only markings are centering lines that appear smackdab in the middle of the sheet, top and bottom:

On the back, we get two complete puzzle images of the Big Dipper himself, Wilt Chamberlain:

It too has centering lines:

The set has been covered here before, including an in-depth look at dating by guest blogger Keith Olbermann that pins the set as a 1967-68 release. Click here for all the deets.

The 44 card array is intriguing but certainly within the "11 X arrays Topps used at the time for their standard sized sets. I'm trying to match with some other B&W sets of the era to see if it may have been printed along with another test but I don't think that was the case as nothing else really matches up. I think then this is just how Topps printed them up for the test.

This is a really great piece of Topps history and while it's partially wrecked, I'm hoping the winner doesn't decide to chop it up but it certainly could happen.

Go West, Young-ish Man

One of the more enduring bits of hobby lore concerns the rarity of the 1949 Bowman Pacific Coast League set, whose 36 subjects have bedeviled collectors for decades. The PCL was nearing the cusp of "open" classification from Organized Baseball at the time, which was eventually granted to see if it could become a viable third major league. That ascension from AAA to Open happened in 1952 and the level of talent often was better than the minor league designation implied. The weather was fine for the most part (some seasons ran to over 200 games) and a lot of major leaguers on the way down from the Show ended up playing there along with dozens of major league prospects headed in the opposite direction. There were also players in the league who were career minor leaguers by choice as the circuit offered relatively good pay and extensively recruited west of the Rockies at a time where it still wasn't all that common to casually travel across the Continental Divide.

There's a rich history of PCL sets that stretch back to the T-card era and by 1949 most were either team-issued or sponsored by businesses that primarily operated in the same geographic area as the league.  That particular season, which ran to 187 games, the league boasted franchises in Oakland, San Diego, Hollywood, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland. For reasons unknown, Bowman elected to issue a separate set of PCL players in addition to their major league specific 240 subjects. 

Reports vary but the cards seem to have been sold in Philadelphia (home of Bowman), Seattle and Portland, possibly co-mingled with the MLB cards, although Mark Macrae, as reliable a source as there is for all things PCL, relays they were known to have sold separately, at least in Seattle.  A number of surviving examples are hand cut and some sources indicate they could be found in sheet form as well. All-in-all, it's remarkably murky distribution-wise, especially for a Bowman product.

They look just like the regular-issue 49 Bowman's:

Rucker was a typical PCL player of the day- a veteran who had played in the National League for a half-dozen years in the Forties (all with the Giants) and then concluded his career out west, in this case ending in 1950. A short blurb in the December 1951 Card Collectors Bulletin gives us what is likely the first or second mention of the set (it reads like it had been identified in an earlier issue that year):

Still not very well known by the end of the decade, the fourth issue of Woody Gelman's Card Collector newsletter, dated September 1959, had a short piece on them. This was quite possibly the first time many collectors had even seen an image of one:

Gelman, or his ghost writer, mentions most of the cards were destroyed, which I'd say is possible but not definite. In fact, if they were actually disposed of, they were likely sold by the pound to Philadelphia "junk" stores specializing in paper and not just discarded.  No matter, they are difficult; PSA presently has 605 examples in their database, or just under an average of 17 per subject. Specific populations range from a low of thirteen to a high of twenty-two, which is essentially random as there are no star players involved. As above, some fairly well-known names were included though.

The cards are not impossible but do get pricey even as demand for them has waned a bit over the years. They are neat little items and their infamy has kept them in the minds of hobbyists for over seventy-five years now.