Funny Stuff

An early Topps issue that is a bit unknown to many collectors, Funny Foldees were originally issued in 1949 and then reissued in 1955 (or thereabouts). In between there were a number of design changes made to this metamorphic set of 66 cards.

As you can see, nine different pictures were possible (Oh, if only there was a bear instead of a woman....) but the real trick these days is finding examples that have not been folded. And is it cheating if three of the pictures are unaltered?

Funny Foldees were printed in color groups, as follows:

1-11: Yellow, 12-22: Blue, 23-33: Red, 34-44 and 55: Orange, 45-54 Green, 56-66 Yellow. Why #55 is out of sequence is  real head scratcher.  There were a number of subjects that ended up redrawn, one of them actually was redrawn twice.  I hate to be a tease but until I have scans of the ones that were changed I am not going to post the differences! I will tell you though that the numbers involved were: 9, 13,14,19, 26, 29, 39, 48 & 51.

A box showed up on eBay recently, purportedly from 1949:

  


















Boxes, packs and wrappers are rare so it's hard to tell if it is a '49.  The 1955 reissue date may have been surmised from the Hocus Focus reissues the same year but I am not sure what it's based upon.   The wrapper was unknown in the hobby until about 15-30 years ago: