Alive in '55

Last month's post about possible dating anomalies concerning the Topps Robin Hood set caught the attention of Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins, who pointed out a couple of things of import on that front. First and foremost, I either need screens with better resolution or a new prescription for my glasses. Lonnie then pointed out the copyright on the one and five cent wrappers was a unique one for Topps, especially the penny version.

Here is the one cent wrapper, in case you forgot how it looked:

Double the indicia, double the fun:

I spent some time casting about for the meaning of "OFF F" but it turns out the five cent wrapper had it spelled out all along, which I couldn't quite resolve on the pack example shown last month.  Lonnie kindly sent along a wrapper image with more clarity:

Just below the five cent circle, you can see that it says "OFFICIAL FILMS":

Lonnie also passed along a five cent retail box scan, which was Canadian in origin (you can easily tell by the "36 Count" stamp).  The packs would have held four and not five cards like in the US and you can see the Official Films name at bottom right of the top flap:

Nice box!

As it turns out, Official Films were the syndicator for The Adventures of Robin Hood in the US (and possibly Canada).

There's still  dating and attribution anomalies as the October 1955 copyright for the set being at odds with the 1960 American Card Catalog entry:

All of this leads me to think the Topps Robin Hood debuted in 1955 and then, well, I dunno.  Did it sell so fantastically it lasted until 1957?  Was it reissued? But if so, where are all the one and five cent wrappers? What of the Lucky Penny insert then, eh? And why, if Woody Gelman was one of the ACC editors, is the date for a Topps set wrong?!  Was it just a typo? Then there is the notion it was based upon some undefined movie. 

I've identified six possible silver screen candidates, all of which were released after the classic 1938 Errol Flynn version, with the actor playing Robin in parentheses:

• The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (Cornel Wilde)
• The Prince of Thieves (Jon Hall)
• Rogues of Sherwood Forest (John Derek)
• Tales of Robin Hood (Robert Clarke)
• The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men (Richard Todd)
• The Men of Sherwood Forest (Dan Taylor)

The Richard Todd vehicle was a 1952 live action Disney feature, and the The Men of Sherwood Forest was a Hammer Films production released first in the UK (seemingly in 1954) which then, maybe (hard to tell) debuted two years later in the US, so perhaps it was just a brain cramp somewhere coming up with it as the source ,but none of these flicks starred Richard Greene, so it's an obvious error.

Questions, questions...but I am now considering this is a 1955 set, with confusion still about the dating in the ACC; your mileage may vary. That would make it the first standard sized set from Topps then, and not Elvis Presley more than a year later, quite surprising but the boys from Brooklyn were experimenting with various dimensions for most of their first card-issuing decade. I suspect it was conceived as a Giant Size set, hence the divisible-by-ten set count, then a decision was made to reduce the size of the cards to 2.5 x 3.5 inches for release.

The Straight Dopey

I was looking through my 1970 Funny Doors set the other day when I noticed something well, funny.  Card number 20, "Dopey Book Shop" is festooned with eight book titles, which are being looked over by a puzzled consumer. I realized these titles sounded familiar and sure enough, Topps did something meta here, as almost all are taken from the 1967 release of Dopey Books!

Here's the door in question:

Now my set of Funny Doors is unburst so I didn't want to open the flaps up to see each gag's payoff but I do have an image of an original bit o'artwork (with partial overlay) that shows the reveals for some of them:

I showed that specific piece of artwork when I posted about the set not too long ago but it's come in handy again, so please forgive the repeat look.  As you can see, five of the gags are revealed.  Let's take a look, shall we?  From left-to-right, then top-to-bottom and using the Dopey Book numbering, we also have five that correspond to its gags:

31. What Every Girl Should Know (A Rich Bachelor!)

10. How To Take Care Of Your Teeth (Put 'Em In A Glass)

7. I Lived With Wild Beasts (My Family)

27. How To Put A Lasting Finish On Your Car (Try To Beat A Train To The Crossing)

36. I Hunted For Buffalo (But I Got Lost And Wound Up In Albany)

Another is very close:

32. Your Career In The Movies aka Dopey Books "You Can Have A Job In Movies" (As An Usher)  

Two don't match up:

See Europe On $5.00 A Day - I assume this is some kind of French Foreign Legion joke based upon the reveal behind the door.

Hypnotism - Not sure of this payoff based upon the illustration shown above.

Text has been replaced, of course, by an image for each payoff and the artwork is not the same at all given the size restrictions, but the point is made. It was pretty cool of Topps to do something like this.

Chips Off The Ol' Blockheads or, Here Be Monsters

Hey gang, today we take a look at the very oddball Blockheads issue that makes last week's subject, Wise Ties - a product Topps appears to have pulled or curtailed due to a perceived choking hazard - look like a national safety award winner. I've taken only the briefest of glances here at the set, which is also related to 3D Monster Posters, and therein hangs a tale (of terror).

As with the Wise Ties, Blockheads is thought to have been quicky withdrawn from the marketplace as they were intended to be opened up and used as Hallowe'en masks, like so:

While undeniably cool, you can plainly see that a safety hazard was presented by Blockheads miniscule eye slits. But here's the thing, thanks to some serious detective work by Fiend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins, it very much seems like 3D Monster Posters, long thought to have been a reissued or reconfigured re-release of Blockheads, came first in a test format, then was changed over to a mask.

I get the distinct feeling that any safety concerns were back-burnered at Topps in favor of a set's "cool factor," which to my mind could have been somewhat related to the way they lab tested things with kids.  It's not hard to envision some young tyke holding the original test issue poster to his face and saying how neat it would be if instead it was a mask. 

Lonnie's theory is based upon disappeared or changed indicia from 3-D Monster Posters compared to Blockheads, and while I love showing that stuff, I'm limited due to some low-res images but it sure seems like a solid hypothesis. Poster first, the mask:

 

You can see how the left side of the white box is blank on the mask example, as two lines of information were apparently excised from the poster, as seen at left.  Lonnie has also found some subjects where there is just a blank area on certain Blockheads that matches were indicia would or should have been. And that fuzzy word next to the "12 " on the poster example sure looks long enough to say "poster." All of this points to 3D Monster Posters being the first issue, closely followed by Blockheads.

Here now, the boxes:

3D plus three uses suggested, nice reinforcement!  The redesign added five cents to the price and added some wonderfully gruesome artwork.  What's abundantly clear is that Topps explicitly gave instructions right on the retail box for wearing the Blockheads:

This means they changed the product from being somewhat hazardous to fully hazardous ON PURPOSE! 

That top box was courtesy of Lonnie by the way, the bottom two from another Fiend o'the Archive, Terry Gomes. The box front displayed a helpful visual checklist of all twelve subjects (more on that in a sec) while the bottom indicia rocked a 1967 commodity code.

I do not have a 3D Monster Posters box bottom to show unfortunately. On a related note, longtime Topps consultant Mark Newgarden recalls finding these at what turned out to this Brooklyn test store:

He found them well after 1967, so they languished a bit until he came along.  Now, did Mark find a Blockhead or a 3D Monster Poster?  I'm guessing both were possible (Update:5/9/25: It was masks only. Full poster indicia has yet to be sighted based upon messages I've received since this was posted). He advised there were no wrappers either, they were just loose in the box.

I originally intended for this to just be a visual checklist covering both sets (the artwork itself was never altered) but realizing I had never really addressed either in full, things kind of ballooned on me.  Yet another Friend o'the Archive, Jeff Pace, sent along this shot of all twelve images.  It's got some glare, so let's regroup below:

OK, so the artwork is all stunning, and that's even before you relaize these were designed to sell for a kid's pocket change! This was where Topps was at the time though, as they knocked out one large format set after another, particularly in the 1967-69 timeframe, all of which featured amazing illustration work.

The checklist is as follows, going left-to-right, then top-to bottom:

The Hippie

The Ape

The Giant Fly

The Pirate

The Mad Scientist

The Witch Doctor

The Martian

The Three Eyed Monster

The Bleech

The Skull

The Moon Creature

The Green Monster

Some of those names may be from old checklists and might contain too many "the's"; these are tough finds and I do not have any scans of the subject names beyond The Bleech to go with indicia-wise. Here's non-glare views of  The Mad Scientist, The Three Eyed Monster, The Bleech and The Green Monster:

He seems to be the toughest one to find, at least from what I have been able to determine but it's all relative given the scarcity of these suckers.

Topps seemed to love three-eyed monsters as several have appeared in sets over the years. Pee Wee's Playhouse had an example, two in fact, twenty-two years later:

Yecch...the Bleech!

Sorry (not sorry).  Here's the real Green Monster:

I'll conclude with something I've shown before, namely the full artwork for The Witch Doctor.  It might be the best single example of artwork I've ever seen from Topps, quite close if it isn't, as it's hard to rank the really, really top ones:

These were all created for kids to essentially destroy then toss.  How monstrously crazy!

Choke Artist

Here's a new look at an old set, 1968's Wise Ties, which I've covered in a small way previously (click on over to the labels to see). Topps was experiencing a peak right around '68 in their max experimental period that ran from roughly 1966 to 1971, with releases often fueled by ideas from the underground artists Topps was using for a lot of their new product development under Woody Gelman. These projects, informed in many cases by Pop-Art, were then illustrated for release by really talented artists like Wally Wood (one of our illustrators here) and Jack Davis. 

A number of supremely surreal sets reared their pointy little heads during this time and there aren't many more "out-there" issues than Wise Ties. Despite at least one semi-find over the years, the ties are not seen all that often, as the story is Topps pulled them from the market due to concerns that the elastic band used to secure them around the neck could be a choking hazard. Even today, given their odd dimensions and just plain weirdness, they don't get a lot of love in terms of articles or reference guide action. So I thought a visual checklist of the set would be kinda groovy, with scans provided by Friend o'the Archive Jeff Pace. And without further ado:

         

A word to the wise....these are really cool!

Super Seventies Sales Sensations

A trio of Seventies Topps sell sheets today kids, as I'm feeling a little nostalgic for what I consider to be a decade very much unlike any other.  The last good time, in many (but not all) ways!

Anyhoo, we've seen Topps "package" promotions before but I've only covered those involving card and sticker issues.  Those were used to burn off products that weren't 't selling well or where Topps overestimated demand for ones that were. Here, given that Ring Pops and Big Mouth, both top sellers,  are in the deal, it looks like Topps was trying to piggyback Smooth 'N' Juicy, which was their tepid answer to Bubble Yum's unrelenting assault, and Sugar Free Bazooka, which was not exactly a carbon copy of the original, plus some candy items.

Much cooler all around was this as for Cherry and Grape Bazooka, which were both tasty treats I enjoyed at the time, especially the latter...

...but what caught my eye was not the dual flavor box but rather the canister in the lower right corner.  As you can see it clearly states Flavor Mates.  Well, the last time we saw examples from that brand they were a sugarless bubble gum, so did Topps just have extra canisters displays lying around because nobody liked the gum?

And speaking of things nobody liked, it's Bubble Fudge!

Let's conclude with something a little more novel, sent along some time ago by Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins:

The commodity code on this pins it to 1970 and the only reason it would have the code is so Topps could track income and expenses on an aggregate basis.  The idea persisted for at least another year and then may have been curtailed as Topps reined in costs as they prepared for their March 1972 IPO. By the time they issued the Countermates (I never know if that should be one word or two, nor did Topps!) sell sheet that we kicked things off with today, I guess they started tracking things in a different way.

Hoodwinked?

I've briefly touched upon the 1957 Topps Robin Hood set before and today I want to take a more detailed and nuanced look at it. It's a bit of an oddity at 60 cards given it was printed in standard size (2.5 x 3.5 inches), seemingly coming on the heels of the first 66 card Topps set (1956's Elvis Presley) and the implementation of the 11 cards-per-row/12 cards-per-column print arrays used with standard sizing. The set count, being divisible by ten, very well might have been planned at the tail end of the Giant Size era, with its corresponding 10 card rows. However, I've found a major anomaly as Topps filed for the Robin Hood trademark on October 28, 1955 and indicated in their filing that what appears to be the card set was being sold as of October 4th that year:

If that's true (and why wouldn't it be) then something is off. This is a real puzzler and could possibly make Robin Hood the first standard sized Topps issue, arriving over a year ahead of Elvis. I really don't know what to make of this, although two potential options come to mind:

1) A failed test set to coincide with the US premiere of the program in Fall of 1955, but I've never seen anything anywhere to inform that possibility. 

2) It does seem possible a gum-only release or a tattoo issue, possibly generic like the 1955 Davy Crockett tats, was first contemplated, tested and then rejected, with the trademarked bubble gum brand reused when the cards were finally issued in 1957. Again, I can find no evidence to confirm or rebut.

The show, set in the Twelfth Century's densely wooded Sherwood Forest (which as we all know was ensconced in Nottinghamshire, England) was officially called The Adventures of Robin Hood, and was the first of several Lew Grade ITC productions that would find their way in syndication to lucrative U.S. shores. As noted, it aired from Fall 1955 until the Fall of 1958, always on Mondays at 7:30 and carried by CBS, with each episode running for a half an hour. After the third season it was switched over to Saturday Mornings, which then melded in season four, which was the final one produced.  I caught an episode by chance not too long ago and the forest scenes, filmed in 35 MM, were pretty great, as were the various sword fights.

The set used colorized back-and-white images from the TV show, which have that sickening, muted color used in several late Fifties Topps releases:

The reverse, despite the fairly accurate illustration of series star Richard Greene, is kind of hideous too:

It is not hard to find these cards today as they were massively overproduced.  What is hard though, is finding examples that look OK, as print defects are legion.

The packaging was far nicer than the product it contained.  Here's a flattened box straight from the Topps file room:

It was sold in all possible retail configurations: penny and nickel packs, cello and vending. I suspect cello ruled the day as the wax wrappers are hard to find:

For once, the repeater looks nicer than the five cent version, at least to my eyes:

(Courtesy Chuck Mann)

So the whole thing's a bit of a mess!  The set is also known for its inclusion of the Lucky Penny insert card:

The more I type, the more I wonder about all of this.  Thoughts, dear readers?