Hopped Up

Way back in 1950, when television was really starting to take off, a need, quickly voracious, for content developed. With some foresight in this mad scramble, William Boyd, who had gained fame by portraying the good-guy cowboy Hopalong Cassidy in dozens of old "oaters" that were staples of Saturday movie matinees in the Thirties and Forties, acquired the rights to and packaged up a gaggle of his old movies and had them formatted for the boob tube.  If Hoppy wasn't the first kids fad fueled by Tee Vee it wasn't far behind.  It also set the stage (sorry), along with the Lone Ranger, for a phalanx of kiddie TV Westerns to follow.

Topps took advantage and made their first major foray into licensed character products with Hoppy.  A long series of cards were issued (stay tuned for a post on these), along with a virtually unknown saddle bag pack with candy inside.  I've posted, albeit briefly, about the saddle bag before, which is a thing of wonder:

For a product made of thin carboard, it's very well-designed.  Check out the back:

Given the ingredients, I suspect the candy was like Sugar Babies, or very similar. The one thing the packaging lacks, despite the ornateness, is color. Topps took care of that with a product called Hoppy's Wagon Wheel Pops. You got fifteen pops, in a box that had some other features beyond lolly-holstering:

Friend o'the Archive Dan Bretta, provided the above color image and most of the ones below.  Here's the all important indicia:

Topps made a go of selling candy for about eight years, including a run of Christmas-themed lollipops, but shut down their Candy Division in 1951. Thanks to Chris Benjamin's Sport Americana Guide to the Non-Sports Cards, we know what the lolly wrapper looked like:

There was a nice surprise inside the box as well:

As you can see, that is puzzle number two.  California Carlson was one of Hoppy's sidekicks and a kid could have a rootin' tootin' good time connecting the dots there to cipher what he was up to with that lasso. We'll get to a count momentarily but the big prize was the advertised picture of the star of the series on the box back. Mr. Bretta sent me images of two of these. I think I'll dub this one "Hoppy Gazing":

Here's Hoppy atop his horse, Topper:

You can see how the box lid fit over the box bottom, like old sets of record albums.  I have one of these myself, (a proof) and scans of two others:

It's muddy but that upside down wording states: "Please note: Every box of Hoppy Wagon Wheel Pops features one of six Hopalong Cassidy portraits and one of six Hoppy Pop Puzzles"

So good clues there, although I'm not sure why that statement isn't on all the other portraits I've seen so far except this one:

The pictures with the statement are all smaller and show a lot more white border than the ones without it and I wonder if Topps reissued Hoppy Pops again in 1951 before their license ran out. This one doesn't look cut down but check out Hoppy's gun-it looks hand drawn! There's a lot of added whites on the jacket and hat too, which is quite possibly the handiwork of Ben Solomon.

It's plausible they each come both ways but that needs to be verified somehow and these are now hard things to find.

Right now we have one Puzzle:

#2 California Lassoing

While 5/6ths of the portrait checklist is as follows:

• Hoppy Gazing
• Hoppy Atop Topper
• Hoppy Next to Topper With Gun (and Topper looks partially illustrated to me)
• Hoppy in Relaxed Pose
• Hoppy Pointing Gun In Front of Mountains

I'd love to get the portrait checklist finished off if anyone has the last subject handy but think finishing the puzzle checklist off could be "California Dreaming."

Contract High

I don't know if his estate is moving items after his death on June 18th of this year but I expect a bunch of Willie Mays' personal memorabilia to hit the market in the coming years.  One such item is already upon us, although it could have come from a different source-his 1954 contract with Topps, which popped up recently at Mile High Auctions:

Mays started out with Bowman in 1951, was with both them and Topps in '52, then Topps only in 1953 before appearing in both company's 1954 and 1955 sets. He was in the military for most of the 1952 season and all of 1953, so Bowman probably didn't have him locked up on auto-renew like Topps did.  Mays was also buddy-buddy with Sy Berger, and, I believe while unrelated to the events being described here, he holds the record for appearances in the most Topps sets (including inserts and supplemental issues) covering his playing days from 1951-73.

He's card no. 90 in 1954 and you can see he signed his contract on March 8th.  Topps did something weird with the distribution of the set after the first series, so it's not clear if he's a second, third, or fourth series card (or possibly fifth but I'm not positive it went that far in '54) but given how late the date is, he probably wasn't locked up until the third array of cards was being composed. As a reminder, his 1954 card is one of the best ever issued of him:

The back notes his time with Uncle Sam:

The contract itself has enormous historical value of course, but I like how simple the language was. That would change, as would the methods used by Topps to retain players over the years but the other thing I like about it is the signature of Turk Karam, who was employed by Topps as a talent scout and all-around "Sports Dept. guy" before they had an official Sports Dept. 

Mays would earn his only World Series ring with the Giants in 1954 and was the National League MVP to boot-Say hey!

Very Nice

All sorts of wondrous non-sports items have been popping up of late, including some really tough Topps test cards. Today's entry is Captain Nice, a failed 30-card test set from 1967 TV show that featured the exploits of a mild-mannered chemist named Carter Nash. Trying to exploit the camp-superhero craze that began with Batman, with a good helping of Marvel-esque angst, the show bombed, despite it being the product of Buck Henry's crazed mind; the success he had with Get Smart clearly could not carry this unfortunate turkey. Launched as a mid-season replacement show on NBC in January 1967, it lasted fifteen episodes and bit the dust by the end of August.

Given its lackluster network showing, Topps created a test set that was bound to fail. Despite the show being aired in color, the cards, which were rendered in black-and-white - albeit with a colorful cartoon on the back of each one - were kind of a letdown. It's a bit odd but Topps hadn't really yet got around to using full color for their TV show related tests in 1967, which I'm guessing was due to the higher costs for color printing. Anyhoo, a proof sheet that provides a look at all 30 cartoons recently had its debut on eBay; check it out:

 

I'll provide a closer look in a sec, but first check this out-the front only used two colors and this proof didn't use the photos, while the back was a full-on four-color test.  Doesn't this look odd?

Here's the card backs, in four groupings:

These are very reminiscent of the cartoon used on the backs of most Land of the Giants cards.

Super colorful, right?

Assuming the show had seen more success than it did, I wonder if the test would have done better featuring the cartoons on the fronts.

Topps repeated the top row of the sheet at the bottom, hence the count of 30 subjects vs an array of 33 cards. Kinda weird but not unheard of with licensed characters.  Here's the row-by-row breakdown:

1 2 3

29 19 14

10 26 10 (more on this shortly)

29 13 23

18 21 11

5 15 25 

12 20 7

22 9 24

4 17 27

8 6 30

1 2 3 (repeat of first row)

You will note there is no number 16 and thanks to the images over at Trading Card Database (click on over, it's a great site) we can see what the two number 10's look like (Topps must have glitched on the second digit):

Combo #1:

And combo B:

Yup, a real yukfest!

Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins sent over some wrapper scans that are also very interesting.  Note how the packs were sealed with the stickers that usually appeared only on the fronts of the packs; Topps used a small ingredients label with these (from a recent find) to seal the white test packs normally because of the bubble gum sold with the cards, so I wonder if this set even hit a retail test or if it got pulled just prior.

Wowsers!

Here's the intro to the show for those of you that are interested, it's pretty ghastly:

Winner's Circle

A long, long time ago, I took a look at the Milton Bradley Win-A-Card Game that focused on the cards included with this esoteric bit of Topps history. I won't rehash all of that here but to note the special sheet of 132 cards Topps printed up for the game have caused much confusion in the 55-plus years since it was available on store shelves.

Some better scans of the game board and box have since popped up and I figured they were worth sharing.  We've seen most of the game board before but this is a decidedly better look at it:

It's quite colorful and you can see the attraction of the concept to Milton Bradley, all they had to do was print up some cardboard and affix a plastic spinner then adding a gaggle of cards from Topps.  

What I didn't have available last time out was the inside of the box cover, which had the rules:

I'll embiggen each column and diagram for clarity:

Said Diagram #1 can be seen here:

If you're having a TL;DR moment right now, it's OK.  For the rest of you, let's soldier on:

And Diagram #2 for your viewing pleasure:

I'm getting to TL;DR-land myself-yikes!  Now for the concluding prose:

It's pretty obvious to me (and I'll bet to my readers too) why the game didn't take off-if you were a kid you would just get together with some friends and flip cards with out the rigmarole!

Might as well conclude with the indicia present at the end of the rules:

This product was all the result of a bit of overthinking by Topps and Milton Bradley I'd say, but they did leave behind a really cool collectible!

Nutty Goodness

As their stable of Mad Magazine associated artists grew during the Sixties, Topps became fond of using certain words - we would probably call them memes today - to describe their more smart-alecky products.  Stan Hart, who, among many other accomplishments in his long life, wrote for Mad for decades and was a Shorin family in-law, began working at Topps in the early Fifties and was  responsible for a lot of the "freshest" set descriptors to spring from the devious minds of their New Product Development Department. One theme/meme that saw favor in the mid-Sixties was "Nutty" and Topps issued three sets using that adjective: 1964's Nutty Awards, then two types of Nutty Tickets in 1967-68 and finished up with Nutty Initial Stickers in 1967 (and again in 1977). A fourth, called Nutty Ads may have been intended to precede them all, but one of the subjects was JFK and it's likely the set was halted before any kind of test was made after he was assassinated. So there's a lot of nuttiness to cover and today's quarry consists of the two Nutty Tickets releases. 

Nutty Tickets began life as a test set, and are exactly as described, offering "admission" to a series of snark-themed events.  These were issued as single tickets, measuring 1 5/8" x 5 3/16" likely two to a pack, and tested in 1967. The test does not seem to have gone well and they were tested once again in a two-ticket panelized format, where each individual ticket measures 1 1/4" x 4 11/16", if divided evenly by the perforation line that bisects them (don't hold your breath on that being laid down accurately). The panels were carried over and included as inserts that also served as stiffeners for the 32 Mini Stickers issue of 1968. The larger cards are, quite understandably, harder to find than the smaller ones by a pretty large margin. The smaller cards, also pretty tough in their own right, are usually found as singles but the panels are out there. 

Here's a size comparison of the two sizes of Nutty Tickets, note the smaller ones have far wider left and right side waste areas (sorry about the miscut large one, I'm lucky to even have it):

Nice job dragging the Mets and Senators!  The Mets were the butt of many similar jokes until they shocked the world in 1969 so it's not a real surprise to see the dis here. Not content with some light-hearted ribbing of two doormat baseball teams, Topps decided to trash Native Americans as well!

It would have been obvious that the fine print disclaimer found on a real ticket's reverse would not really fly here, so they went with some illustrations that drove home the theme of the "event" detailed on the front:

Those horizontal lines make for a muddy look and I'm not sure why it appealed to Topps. A number of original art pieces are known-check out this one of #17 that was sent to me by Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins. It really shows off just how nice these looked before Topps obfuscated things:

The Andy Yanchus collection recently offered by Bruneau & Co. had nice selection of the panels but no big boys. What it did have were test wrappers:

You have to assume that wrapper held the panels but that sticker was used for both sizes, which must have had different pack dimensions. There's been some photos seen of what I believe was intended to be the retail box and there is also a proof of it known:

The large cards are made up of 24 subjects as are the small, but the latter were issued in three counts over 36 panels encompassing 72 ducats, meaning each appeared thrice.  As mentioned above, the panelized Nutty Tickets were used to stiffen packs of 32 Mini Stickers in 1968.  That meant an elongated pack was required and non-sportwax.com has the goods:

Snark city, right? The back is kind of busy too:

"Horror Show" is peeking through but I'm not 100% sure of the subject above it, which could be "Brain Surgery" based upon the proof sheet I'll show below. That's a whole lotta Bazooka comics if you wanted that sweatshirt! There were sixteen little stickers arrayed on a larger, standard-sized sticker, so I'd imagine that's why the pack contents were spelled out in such detail.  

Here's the proof sheet with all 24 subjects showing and it has to be from the larger sized set as there's narrow white borders on the left and right edges. 

The Mini Stickers looked like this (with different geometric shapes used for effect):

Here's the back, for kicks:

A box flat is known:

There are also white-backed stickers from a reissue in 1977:

An insert card also came with them as the stiffener and thanks to Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins, we have a great image of it:

So if you do the math, it results in 44 distinct stickers with 16 subjects per sticker. Here's the test pack from that year:

The T-90-5a code intrigues me as it seems to indicate a "b'" pack should exist. Based upon the purple text on the reverse seal, I'd expect the "b" pack to have black text:

The 1968 version of 32 Mini Stickers seem harder to find than the two card panels of Nutty Tickets but easier than the larger ones. The 1977 white backs are very, very tough, as is often the case with the self-destructing test issues from Topps.

Goofing Off

More on the incredible Andy Yanchus collection today kids!

Goofy Goggles, a gumless novelty imported by Topps from Japan, remains one of their most elusive issues.  I have never seen an example of one in person and until this auction, had only seen the black-and-white image offered by Chris Benjamin in his Sport-Americana guides from three decades ago. Yanchus, who was obviously good at ferreting out these kind of things, had only two examples from the twelve subjects advertised by Topps.  So right now it's a universe of three images available!

The Yanchus items were sold indie their envelope-style packaging.  The envelopes proper have since been resold I believe, but the goggles may not have moved on from the winners of this lot over at Bruneau & Co.  Here's both goggles, in glorious color. Peek-a boo!

These were made of Styrofoam with an elastic band attached.  I am thinking that band is why these are so hard to track down as Topps may have feared a safety issue and pulled the test (if things even got that far.)  Too bad, they are really neat but it would explain the extreme scarcity of extant examples.  Here' an oblique look:

Nice and colorful! Here's the other one:

More fun with color-it's a nice look:

I guess there are three known wrapper scans as well, as Benjamin shows one.  Dig that smilin' sun:

Topps, thankfully, printed up a checklist on the back, so we can see what all twelve looked like:

Kiss Me is the black-and-white image I mentioned above.  Here's the full checklist:

• Come Fly With Me
• Get Lost
• Guess Who?
• Here's My Heart
• I'm Cool
• I've Got My Eyes On You
• Kiss Me
• Let's Have A Ball
• Please Ignore Me
• Stop Stop
• Stop Wasting My Time
• What's Cooking

Topps applied for the Goofy Goggles trademark on September, 7 1967 (which is the date most guides assign to these) and it was published for opposition on June 25, 1968. 

Goofy Goggles very much remind me of another elastic-band issue, 1968's Wise Ties, which may have suffered the same, safety-related fate, albeit after some brief time in the marketplace. I could  see a possible scenario where Wise Ties, which had its first use in commerce on September 4, 1968, was yanked over choking concerns and Goofy Goggles then got the kibosh before any real testing occurred. However, if that was the case, why wouldn't Topps just sell them without the elastic band?

I may have to do a post on all the classic Topps sets where all supposed examples have not yet been sighted in the wild, or via pictures and scans.