Peanuts To You -- And You And You And You And You And You

Many months ago, when this column was a mere wee stripling of a refuse-disposal site that only dreamed of become a sprawling, stinking landfill, I asked which trading-card license was more screwed up by its licensee: Looney Tunes or Disney.

I now realize the fallacy of that comparison, in that there were so many other licenses that were Dunkirk – and not merely Dunkirk, but Dunkirk at the Bay of Pigs – compared to those two.

There was Star Wars, reduced by Topps to the level of Shaun Cassidy and Welcome Back, Kotter. There were the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, jacked up to levels of chase and expense by Upper Deck so that the only people who could afford them were the Expense-Account Kids Of The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills. There was Marilyn Monroe, which was sold out to someone who knew how to make good-looking cards but whose idea of how to distribute them was – uh, can we get back to you on that? There were rock 'n' roll cards, which will be covered in more detail in a later column, but suffice it to say that at their core they make as much sense as a Stadium Club Anarchists set; Dr. Suess and The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes and Tom and Jerry, which were never made on any scale but should have been; and Dinotopia and Pagemaster and Campbell's Soup and Angel and Berestain Bears and stop me somebody, which never should have been made but were.

Honestly. Never a day went by at good ol' Professional Hobby Consultants when the phone didn't ring with some breathless printer on the other end over the moon at the news that they had just received a license to make UPS or Australian Box Lacrosse or Cop Rock cards and asking us what the hell they should do with it.

"Ask for your guarantee back," we would tell them, which is one of the reasons why I drive a 16-year-old Volvo.

And then we have Peanuts.

Making a good non-sports set is not like building a jet-powered skateboard with a bread knife and a block of wood. There's a formula that you follow, like making Rice Krispies treats, and if the ingredients are of sufficient quality you get a decent 150-card set out the other end. Kids like it, collectors like it, everyone makes a little ching, and you move on to Image vs. Valiant, where everything blows up like the ammo dump in The Fighting Seabees and you get to go back to printing the cute ducky-patterned tapes for Huggies.

The formula doesn't hold your feet to the fire too often, but one thing it absolutely insists on is that you never sell the cards as a complete set.

Think about it: If your whole business model is based on repeat purchases, why would you sell your entire product in one chunk – no matter what you charge for it? It would be like buying a Honda and getting not only this Honda but the next three, all for not much more than the price of one.

Hand-in-hand with that, like The Black-Eyed Peas and sampling software, is the Schwarzenegger-like recommendation that you put something in the product occasionally to keep people coming back to buy more. They're usually called "chase cards," though we used to call them "pretend-valuable cards."

If you don't sell your entire set in one chunk and your pretend-valuable cards are oooey enough, you might even be able to sell Image vs. Valiant. But don't bet the pressure-sensitive labeling machine on it.

Needless to say, the Peanuts set ignored both these venerable pearls of life-enhancing wisdom. And the product stunk.

It would have stunk more if someone had actually seen it. In terms of reaching an audience, the Peanuts set got out less than Howard Hughes in his Las Vegas years.

The 33-card Peanuts "Preview Collection" could have been assembled by anyone with a pair of scissors and a set of Crayolas. Consider the card selection: Picture of Charles Schulz, "first beagle on the moon" panel, Linus in the pumpkin patch, Boy Named Charlie Brown poster, scene from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, Snoopy on doghouse, Lucy holding football, Charlie Brown tied to tree by kite, Linus sucking thumb.

The entire set – it hurts too much to call it a set, so instead we'll just call it "the entire box of cards" – is like that. It's a Cliff's Notes version of a trading-card set shorn of continuity or meaning or any possible reason to buy the product.

You look at this set and wonder: This was Peanuts? This was the most popular and influential comic strip in history – bigger than Dick Tracy, Pogo, L'il Abner, and Little Orphan Annie combined? This sired the most-watched TV special in history, a No. 1 pop single, two balloons in the Macy's parade, a long-running Broadway musical, a dozen best-selling books, several movies, a blimp?

It's not possible. It has less oomph than The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

At this point, after viewing the laundry list of sins this product commits against trading-card orthodoxy, you ask, as any reasonable reader of a column titled "Handful O'Landfill" ought: Who is responsible for this mockery?

Uh, that would be Tuff Stuff Productions. The then-publishers of one of trading-card collecting's most popular periodicals. An organization founded and staffed by trading-card experts.

Let me say right here that I'm sure Tuff Stuff Productions did not think up the Peanuts Preview Collection itsownself. It undoubtedly had help from the Schulz estate and United Features Syndicate, the same sort of help Bugs Bunny provided Yosemite Sam when he was in a dark room full of dynamite and asked for a match. Licensors can be helpful like that.

But some of the blame also falls on the Stuffers for not walking away or at least threatening very strongly to walk away from a promising license when the desired end product is a box of cards.

Despite all of this -- and there is a whole lot of this to not spite, starting with its relentless trivialization of one of the most important culture-transforming phenomena ever crammed into four panels on the funny pages --  the Peanuts Preview Collection does not represent the ultimate manifestation of the screwed-up license. Not as long as Valiant Comics are in the world.

Rest easy, Snoopy. X-O Manowar is on the case.

Truly Comic

I am a sick chicken.

Not only do I engage in quasi-intellectual internal dialogues about trading cards, I engage in quasi-intellectual dialogues about trading cards with the people I hang around with, many of whom were in trading cards and are more desperate to forget than a lovesick legionnaire.

This is yet another reason why I have few friends.

I’m usually the one who kick-starts these conversations, my chums being rather hopeful that I keep my big yap shut, and so I started one the other day by asking, “Which property was more screwed up (and over) by trading cards: Disney or Looney Tunes?”

On the cusp of the ‘90s, as we watched trading cards spread from sports to non-sports like some sprawl of cardboard kudzu, we placed bets on which property would be the hottest next. Some bet on Marvel, some had Star Trek, but a surprising number had either Disney or Looney Tunes.

The reasons were obvious: both had compelling graphics – compelling graphics, hell; amazing art -- a huge fan base, and a sizable cadre of kid followers.

You would think that all Mr. Cardmaker would have to do was slap some of that pop-culture-classic art onto cardboard, tart it up with gold foil or serial numbers, create a high-end version for the adult fans, spray it out to mass retail, and then sit back and watch the cash roll in – right?

Right?

Let’s not answer that question; instead, let’s look at Looney Tunes.

Now, Warner in all its various incarnations hasn’t had a handle on Looney Tunes since Jack Warner died and Speedy Gonzalez got painted with the Lester Maddox brush. Warner wants Looney Tunes to be mainstream again, but doesn’t realize that what made them mainstream was their unwillingness to be mainstreamed. If the Dubya-Bush really wants Bugs Bunny to be relevant, it should paint him as he really is: as a better-drawn South Park character with a cleaner mouth, bigger ears, a better sense of comedic timing, and a playing field as big as your imagination.

Warner’s ongoing ineptitude was made more ironic by the fact that while WB was airbrushing the Looney Tunes characters into the cartoon equivalent of Cream of Wheat it gave Steven Spielberg the green light for Animaniacs, soon-to-be-classic cartoons that had all the rough-‘n’-rowdy characteristics of the very best Looney Tunes, save for a certain depth in backgrounds that’s gone forever. In the age of the Animaniacs, Looney Tunes characters were like comatose shells being lapped and slapped and given hot-foots by Yakko, Wakko, and Dot.

Still, in the late ‘80s Looney Tunes were the Michelle Pfeiffer of non-sports franchises, and everyone from Lime Rock to Collect-A-Card to Metallic Impressions to SkyBox to Topps wanted a date. After much deliberation, Time Warner gave its baby's hand to ... Upper Deck. The ax murderer.

It did make a limited amount of sense, if you were cashing the checks.

Upper Deck at the time was the world’s hottest sports-card company, bringing new technology to the collecting masses in the same way that Burger King brought the Whopper to the lost tribes of the Amazon. However, its non-sports-card experience was zero. Its skills as a cardmaker were flinging wads of money at large moving objects, manipulating press runs, threatening licensors with personal appearances by Reggie Jackson, and Photoshopping Mike Alstott until the orange of his uniform and the green of the grass were colors seen only in Kool-Aid.

No matter. Upper Deck’s Big Idea for Looney Tunes was to bring Bugs Bunny and the gang into Major League Baseball. In other words, Upper Deck would make baseball cards of cartoon characters.

It gets better. After flinging money at Warner for the rights to the characters, and more money at MLB to use team logos on non-sport cards, Upper Deck flung one more pot of money and landed Chuck Jones, the most famous of the Looney Tunes creators and illustrators.

So to recap, Upper Deck – the world’s hottest card company – had a project on the table which united the National Pastime, America’s favorite cartoon characters, and the planet’s most famous animator.

The mind boggles at the possibilities.

And Upper Deck botched the works.

It’s hard to tell exactly where things fell apart. Certainly the holograms didn’t help.

There was a certain point in the history of the card industry when cardmakers had a fascination with holograms that in the annals of demi-sport weirdness can only be matched by Madonna’s thing for Alex Rodriguez. That’s because these early holograms were simply pieces of shiny paper on which you were told an image of Wayne Gretzky or Ken Griffey Jr. or Bugs Bunny resided.

The images weren’t there, of course, but if you stared at the shiny paper long enough you could convince yourself they were there. It was the sports-collectibles equivalent of seeing the Virgin Mary in a screen door.

Upper Deck’s Looney Tunes line – dubbed “Comic Ball” – rolled out with holograms and a set of promotional cards that had a print run in the squillions. Packs of Upper Deck Comic Ball promo cards were sent home from the hospital with newborns, and dropped from planes to convince the Taliban to quit beating up the Russians.

The cards appeared to have been dashed off by Chuck Jones in between mustache waxes. They were a series of storyboards depicting a Bugs Bunny baseball cartoon that never happened, for a very good reason: It was abysmal. It did to Looney Tunes what Sly Stallone did to Judge Dredd.

There's a reason why there aren't any trading-card sets of storyboards outside of Comic Ball. Storyboards are naturally sketchy and by definition chopped up. They’re a cartoon in shorthand, and as such, represent one frame out of a thousand.

Putting storyboards on trading cards requires that they be chopped up further, then dropped into packs.

It’s to Upper Deck’s credit that it realized a random assortment of chopped-up storyboards dropped into a pack would be as logical as the lyrics in a Shonen Knife song. Upper Deck’s solution was to tell collectors which cards were in a pack. Pack No. 1 had cards one through 10, pack No. 2 had cards 11-20, and so forth.

That solves the problem, all right. It also totally scotches any possibility of selling more than nine packs to any single buyer – because once you have one of these sets, believe me, you don’t want another. And that caused a bit of an issue because Upper Deck back then didn't stop the presses until a million per ran off the line.

Okay, but does it work? Viewed in sequence in nine-pocket sheets, as it should be, the unicellular plot moves along logically. Bugs Bunny throws his eephus ball, Porky Pig does color, Yosemite Sam swings three times at one pitch, and you’re done.

And that's another fly in the holograms, because you truly are done. There's nowhere to go other than to chop up another cartoon, and another, and another, and if the cartoons aren't any good or don't make sense the set is lost.

A good trading card stands on its own merits, except when it shows Mickey Abarbanel. Someone can slip a trading card into a trick-or-treat bag and it can be savored in between bites of Lik-M-Aid. But a Comic Ball card needs other Comic Ball cards put in order to make sense.

That was just way too much to expect of collectors who were used to instant gratification card-by-card, weren't used to non-sport cards and weren't blown away by the production values of Comic Ball.

Undaunted and with bills to pay, Upper Deck soldiered on with Comic Ball. Its Other Big Idea was to intersperse athletes from the Upper Deck stable with Looney Tunes characters. This concept placed Ken Griffey Jr. and Wayne Gretzky in close proximity with Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, and if it in any way inspired Space Jam then it's really hateworthy.

One can only imagine the hilarity that ensued at the photo session when Kid Griff was told, "Okay, now you have to pretend you're playing catch with Bugs Bunny." And Junior sold it as well as MC Hammer sold Cash For Gold.

The fact that Upper Deck completely blew the pooch with Comic Ball was pointed up in 1995, when Topps did an Animaniacs set. Eight cards and a sticker in each pack, irreverent humor, good fun, less than a buck.

Upper Deck tried too hard with Comic Ball in the same way that BP tried too hard to get oil out of the Gulf of Mexico. You can't even give UD bonus points for trying, because what it was trying to do was idiocy. It reflected the arrogance of the era, and of a company that thought it could do no wrong.

It could, though. It could take the National Pastime, America’s favorite cartoon characters, and the planet’s most famous animator, and turn them into mush.

Not even the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator could have pulled that off.