Are You Ready For Your Mystery Date?

Today let's take a look at another entry in a long line of Topps penny pack vegetable-dye based issues, the 1960 (or '61) Magic Tatoo set. These spit 'n' slap sets were literally based upon the ur-Topps novelty set, 1948's Tatoo. In this case a special concealing layer revealed the answer to a brief riddle-like feature, often, and oddly, in in the form of a declaration that sat atop each subject, like so:

At a guess, there's a horse or a beat up fedora under that layer of wavy lines but I have not been able to decipher it for real.  The outer wrapper was nautically-themed, no surprise give the three-set run of Popeye tattoos Topps was just finishing off:

Popeye's third issue from Topps also featured a mystery component that was more opaque:

The year of issue for Magic Tatoo (and the Popeye tattoo sets) is a bit malleable as they all seem to have had a roughly 18-24 month sales cycle.

The real question is how many different subjects came in the Magic Tatoo set?  About 60+ subjects are known and as Topps usually printed tatoos of the era in iterations of 16, then 72 or 96 subjects seems like a possibility.  We do know 120 packs came in the retail box:

I would not be surprised, given the images on sailor boy's torso, if most of the images were recycled from their earlier tatoo sets.  There is also the mystery of the retail box's outer sleeve, which really just repeats things; maybe there was an offer on the bottom or it served to stave off moisture?

Answers are not easy to come by with these and they remain, after the nigh-impossible 1955 Davy Crockett Tatoo issue, the hardest of the one cent Topps tatoos to track down.