I hate when I’m reminded of things I’d forgotten about the
Handful O’Landfill era, because then I’m reminded of things I’d forgotten about
the Handful O’Landfill era.
Some people join the French Foreign Legion to forget. Me, I
went into dental insurance. But only because the 401(k) was better.
The story behind this case of institutional remembering is
that my lovely wife needed file folders, so I emptied out some of my voluminous
chronicles of the Decline and Fall of the Trading-Card Business, mostly the
stuff dealing with Collect-A-Card and its various products.
Collect-A-Card is interesting. It may not get its own
chapter in the Decline and Fall etc., but it certainly merits several healthy
paragraphs.
The short history of Collect-A-Card is this: It had one huge
hit with Coca-Cola cards, came close with a couple other properties and bombed
with the rest, and the bosses got out while the getting was good.
Put another way, if Collect-A-Card was a Cy Young Award
winner it would have been Doug Drabek.
Collect-A-Card was out of Greenville, S.C., and had a whole
mess of sly-foxy good-ol’-boyness about it, most of it emanating from the
company’s president, Neil Connor. Neil had a swell gold pinky ring, a Sam Snead
golf swing, a gold chain around his neck he got from doubling down on
par-threes, and a taste for sippin’ liquor.
It was fun to watch dealers and distributors, guys who
thought they knew their way around a sheepskin deal (read: fleece), think they
had had really put one over on the Collect-A-Card boys, only to come away with
40 cases of Dinotopia, 10 cases of Campbell’s Soup, five cases of Coca-Cola
Polar Bears, a couple of cases of metal cards, 500,000 assorted POGs, and only
one case of the Coke cards they’d come for.
Connor’s right-hand man, Nelson Wheeler, was particularly
sharp. He had a voice that sounded like a blue-tick hound gargling with Red Man
chewing tobacco and spitting Southern Comfort, but he was nobody’s fool. He
wasn’t even nobody’s court-appointed legal counsel. He could go into a knife
fight with a vegetable peeler and come away with an order for a dozen more
knives. The reason Collect-A-Card was able to turn one so-so property (as
cardable licenses go, Coca-Cola was no Looney Tunes or Disney) into a decade of
prosperity was because Neil and Nelson did a mess of deals sweeter than South
Carolina iced tea.
Collect-A-Card had the original Power Rangers license
(Connor still swears he did a better job with the property than Upper Deck, and
that statement gets truer as the years go by), and made Corvette sets, about a
dozen different varieties of Coke sets (base, POGs, premium, superpremium,
superultrapremium, metal, Polar Bears, and business class), and a set of
Olympic logos in addition to the aforementioned Dinotopia and Campbell’s Soup
set.
And then, in a moment of weakness, Collect-A-Card did the
McDonaldland 500 set.
I had remembered just about everything about Collect-A-Card
except the McDonaldland 500. CAC called these “fantasy cards,” which is about
right, since calling them collector cards was absolutely a flight of fancy.
Recalling now the circumstances around their creation,
Connor wanted to do for McDonald’s what he had done for Coke – create a set
showing old ads and memorabilia, maybe do some burger-shaped POGs, follow it up
with some metal cards, and include a Fisher-Price Hamburglar in every pack.
McDonald’s either wasn’t buying the whole nostalgia trip or
wanted Collect-A-Card to show its good faith, so it said, “Do a McDonaldland
500 set.”
At this point, anyone with lesser confidence in their
ability to sell Bears jerseys to Packer fans would have bailed – but not Neil
Connor. And this was one case where the good ol’ boy got his, because the
McDonaldland 500 was a dogburger.
I’ll quote from the product description in all its
grammatically incorrect glory and let you make your own conclusions: “Join the
fun in this premier collection of ‘The Adventures of Ronald McDonald®’
characters in the most exciting stock car race of the year … ‘The McDonaldland®
500’!!! Hamburglar will be using every trick in the book to capture the
beautiful winner’s trophy which is filled with the one thing he simply can’t
resist … hamburgers! Ronald McDonald will be driving the ‘Ronald Rocket’ and
pulling out the stops in an effort to overcome Hamburglars mischievous plans.
Will Ronald be able to stop him? Grab a few packs and follow this exciting
action adventure!”
I’m pretty sure I didn’t write that. I would have put four
exclamation points after “McDonaldland® 500.”
Breaking it down as a marketer would (and I do that on
occasion), the McDonaldland 500 set offered the Ronald McDonald characters[1],
which taken as a group had less marketing oomph than the cast of Moesha, in a
racing story – all you genuine stories out there, please don’t take it
personally – unsupported by any other medium, with only the most tenuous
connection to a Tier-1.5 NASCAR driver (Bill Elliott). Yeah, the packs were
only 79 cents and included seven cards and a sticker, but seven cards of what
and a sticker of what? Seven cards of five characters, with a sticker showing
one of the selfsame five characters and maybe a car, all rendered with the same
precision of line exhibited by Peter Max in kindergarten. They couldn’t even
have Birdie autographed cards because she’s a bird. She can’t hold a pen. She
doesn’t have fingers.
There were also reports of “three special insert cards
featuring the real ‘McDonald’s® Racing team driver, Bill Elliott™’ plus other
fun items,” but I never stuck around to learn what the fun items were, or why
“Bill Elliott” is a trademarked phrase [2],
or what the quotation marks meant.
Here’s a contemporary analogy. The McDonaldland 500 set is
like redoing Criminal Minds with the cows
from the Chick-Fil-A ads, and making a trading-card set of that.
(You listening, Upper Deck?)
Contractual Obligation Set that it clearly seemed to be, the
McDonaldland 500 set made a quick lap around the track and was gone. On one
hand, that’s a blessing. The product died before parents could get up in arms
over a set of trading cards that uses cartoon characters to sell fat- and
sugar-laden fast food to kids. (After seeing what public opinion did to Coors
Cards, never underestimate the American public’s ability to whack down any
trading-card set with a loose association to life’s milder vices. Never mind
the multitudinous sports cards of tokers, dopers, intravenous drug users,
aggravated assaulters, and miscellaneous misogynists.)
On the other hand, Collect-A-Card never was able to make a
regular McDonald’s set, more’s the pity. Ol’ Neil and Nelson might have done
something with that.
[1] Ronald, Grimace, Hamburglar, Birdie the Early
Bird, and the Fry Kids, in case you’ve forgotten.
[2] Because
if I’m trademarking the name of a Tier-1.5 NASCAR driver, I’m going Coo Coo
Marlin all the way.
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