Bored Game Theory

In the incomparable Preston Sturges screwball comedy The Palm Beach Story Claudette Colbert wants a divorce, so she hops in a cab and asks the cab driver where he’d get a divorce. (They don’t call ‘em “screwball comedies” for nothing.) The cabbie looks at her and says, “Well, most people go to Reno, Nevada, but for my money, it's Palm Beach. This time of the year you've got the track, you've got the ocean, you've got the palm trees. Three months. You leave from Penn Station.”

I was thinking of that this morning as I was framing the lede to this column. Most people who want to seriously lose their shirt go to Vegas, but for my money, you invent a game. You got copyright costs, printing costs, marketing costs, shady middlemen, the evil Wal-Mart megalith, Third World knocker-offers, Toy Fair booths, licensing fees, legal fees, sales tax, cease-and-desist orders, and in the end nobody buys games anymore anyway. Three months. You leave from Penn Station.

Throughout the Handful O’Landfill era I was connected in some way with the creation of half a dozen games, some better than others. The collectible card game I created in a morning in a construction office in San Clemente, Calif., was not so good. The APBA sports-simulation games, particularly an incredible hockey sim Baron Bedesky and I cranked out over two days in a Buffalo hotel room preparatory to eating fried-baloney sandwiches at a Bisons game, were much better. The APBA board games were okay, the game-like things we did for SkyBox and Pinnacle were game-like, and today’s subjects are right in there.

And this doesn’t even cover all the other games that made it onto the garbage truck without my help, including Marvel Overpower and DC Whatever, countless reboots of the Cadaco All-Star Baseball game, MLB playing cards, Donruss’ ill-fated Top of the Order game which wasn’t really ill-fated because it got what it deserved, and the Topps MLB collectible-figurine game that I still claim was the greatest waste of a can’t-miss license this side of Comic Ball.

The facts were that APBA and Strat-O-Matic players didn’t want the purity of their cards sullied by non-necessities like pictures, nothing was more fun than a 1968 Topps baseball card game, virtually all game play came down to rolling dice and/or walking a pawn around a board, and how can that compete with a virtually realified first-person-shooter game where you steal zombies’ cars and kill pirates with nuclear missiles you fire out of your ... uh, nostrils?

It is into that environment that we chuck today’s game contestants, Spellcast and the Jim Thome Baseball Game.

We got to know the creators of Spellcast at the New York International Toy Fair. We were booth neighbors, back in the part of the exhibit hall otherwise inhabited by goldbricking janitors, union stewards, intravenous drug users, and our client’s accountant, who liked to hit on women. The exhibitionists didn’t even go back there because, hey, they’re not doing this just for their own gratification, you know.

Two Manitoban sisters, Nicole Rondeau and Karen Laboissoie, created the game as an alternative to knitting curling stones. (The nights get long and boring in Winnipeg, and yarn is cheap.) Spellcast deals with magic and witches and spells, obviously, it’s ostensibly for girls without being hopelessly girly, it’s designed beautifully but totally unprofessionally, in a way that torches as much money as possible, and it plays in a delightfully roundabout way. It also includes stones, which makes it pretty much unusable for anyone under the age of four, and all boys.

Its few flaws aside – nothing that couldn’t have been corrected by a major manufacturer with a little want-to – Spellcast is a fine game totally deserving of a larger audience, yet the game’s chances of going big were about as great as the accountant’s chances of getting to first base with the sisters. Dice and stones and want-to can only take you so far.

It was quite a trip to New York for Karen and Nicole nonetheless. They came to the city with a gross of sellsheets and a handful of clips from the Winnipeg Free Press and the Vicki Gabareau Show. They came away with a gross of sellsheets minus 17, a couple of presumptive wholesalers who were extremely excited but obviously worthless, and the memories of a mugging at the World Trade Center. (Pre-9/11, obviously.) I tried to help on all fronts but there wasn’t much to be done.

I lost track of Nicole several years ago, and Karen long before that. The printers were not being kind to Nicole, the sisters had split, and she was trying to go it alone. She was slowly, reluctantly coming around to the realization that despite all her best efforts, it wasn’t going to happen.

The part of the business that sucks the most is when good people with big dreams get whacked. It happened to Nicole and Karen, and it also happened to the people behind the Jim Thome Baseball Game.

“Nice” doesn’t begin to describe the JTBG people. They’re the people who would stop their car on a screaming freeway to free a butterfly from their windshield wipers, and they wouldn’t care if it wasn’t a butterfly anymore but a collection of butterfly parts. If they were soup they’d be homemade chicken dumpling, if they were power tools they would be an electric chainsaw with no chain, and if they were a TV show they would be Teletubbies.

And Jim Thome! Name a nicer 600-home-run hitter not named Henry Aaron. Name a nicer nearly active 500-home-run hitter who doesn’t walk around with a chemical cloud over his head. Name a nicer 400-home-run hitter who actually hit 600 home runs.

Naturally the JTBG people were from Wisconsin, some quaintly named southern-Wisconsin hamlet like Roche-A-Cri or Montello. They were led by a retired businessman named Bob Montminy, who had assembled an army of local investors around a concept that was going to revolutionize tabletop baseball games. There are these dice, you see, and these pawns that you move around the board, and this part of the box stands up so it looks like a stadium wall, and when you roll snake eyes it’s actually a “big double,” and that means everyone on base scores, and –

Listen: I’m not trying to mock these guys because they’re so doggone nice, and I know Bob Montminy dumped all his financial and personal capital into the project, but the Jim Thome Baseball Game is just another baseball game, no more or less playable than a score of similar games.[1] It is, however, the best baseball-simulation game with the picture of a really nice 600-home-run hitter on its box.

Not content with one unnecessary cash outlay, the JTBG folks quickly reskinned the game as “Ebbets Field Baseball,” and switched the JTBG’s generic wall for the legendary ballpark’s legendary wall, with similar results. The resale shops and five-and-dimes of south-central Wisconsin teem with these games the way Buzzfeed teems with literary Pixy Stix. It’s not an accident.

I wish I could write about how games were the Yellow Brick Road for Karen and Nicole and Bob Montminy, how they were better than a Palm Beach divorce for a screwball heroine. They weren’t, and we’re all a little worse off for that.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to dry my tears and fire a few more rounds out of my … nostrils. I love the smell of cordite in the morning.

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[1] The rule of thumb with baseball board games is: The more realistic the game the more painful it is to play. The extreme example of this is Pursue the Pennant, which has been linked to more than 7,400 cases of OxyContin abuse.

POG Wonderful

I have only mentioned POGs in passing lo these many years. This is not an accident. I have a hard time deciding what to say about POGs.

POGs, in case you’ve forgotten (voluntarily or involuntarily) were milk-bottle caps. Actually, they weren’t really milk-bottle caps but instead the cardboard lids put on containers of passionfruit-orange-grapefruit juice in Hawaii (hence, the POG). Only the POGs that almost everyone knew had less contact with a passionfruit than I‘ve had with Jon-Erik Hexum.

In their original incarnation POGs were used to play a game. Your buddy stacked a bunch of his POGs face-up, and then you hit them with a “slammer” – either another POG or something heavier. You kept any POGs that landed face-up, and then you switched roles. 

As games go, it’s no rock-paper-scissors, but you could make 15 minutes seem like an hour playing it. The only problem? Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of POGs were actually used to play the POG game.

So to sum up, POGs were a milk-bottle cap that never capped a bottle of something that wasn’t milk used to play a game that nobody played, and it’s junk like that that makes it hard for me to say something coherent about POGs. The original collectible was so esoteric and so far removed from the final product that flooded the market in 1994-95 that POGs 2.0 literally had no reason for being other than to separate collectors from their money a dollar at a time.

Contrast that with baseball cards. The baseball cards of 1994-95 would have been instantly recognizable as baseball cards to the collectors of 1952. A modern POG would have been unrecognizable to a collector of vintage POGs – only there were no vintage-POG collectors. See? Junk like that.

I mention POGs today because of my continued perusal of The Brill Report, one of several faxed newsletters that attempted to chronicle changes in the fast-paced collectibles business in the pre-internet days. It seems like such a platypus of a publication now, like we couldn’t just read an email newsletter or check a news feed and get this stuff pronto, but we couldn’t. This was the news feed – and the fact that it was ad-free, minimally laid out and printed on someone else’s paper gave it a modicum of speed. You could have an event happen yesterday – early yesterday, but yesterday – and see news of it in The Brill Report the next day. Presuming Bob Brill was there. And decided to write about it. In time to meet his own self-imposed deadline.

(Actually, this particular edition of The Brill Report was called Brill-iant Ideas, a misnomer if ever was and one of those fillips of the business I’ve conveniently forgotten with the passage of time. It reminds me of the Wisconsin Dental Association’s newsletter that collects all the lighthearted aspects of Wisconsin dentistry, many of which involve breaking off an endodontic file deep in the roots of a back molar. It’s called Tongue ‘n’ Cheek, and yes, it makes Constant Reader fwow up.)

Anyway, the article that caught my eye was headlined “POGs Continue to Hop-Scotch [sic] the Nation.[1]” I wanted to read about POGs hopscotching the nation because the headline suggested there were POG-free areas around the country, and I wanted to know where they were. I know it wasn’t New London, Wis., because my Hawaiian partner, Darren Lee, was moving out Valiant Comics POGs[2] as fast as they came in. And I know it wasn’t San Clemente, Calif., because my buddy Mike Speakman had taken over an old racquetball court and filled it with POGs, and was literally shoveling out POGs with a grain scoop to meet orders. There were days, he told me, when the racquetball-court-cum-warehouse was full in the morning and empty at night, and in the course of emptying it out a million POGs had come and gone in 24 hours. 

Figure the POGs were coming in the door at a penny each and leaving at a nickel each. That’s a nifty return for spending a few hours in a racquetball court.

According to the story, POGs had slowed down in Dallas but had picked up in Houston.[3] However, a Dallas show had a POG tournament, presumably with actual participants slamming actual POGs.

POGs were up-and-down in the New York area, with some shops doing $400 a week and some shops doing bupkis. Even so, Brill said, “the history of the product is an indication the tri-state area is in for a good POG ride before the price falls.” And who doesn’t love a good POG ride, regardless of the price?

My favorite whistling-in-the-graveyard character in this saga is Jim Mitchell, owner of Safe-Co Plastics and manufacturer of mucho POGs. “I don’t believe [POGs] are a short-term thing,” he told Brill. “It’s the marbles of the ‘90s and we’re making quality collector caps.”

What Mr. Mitchell was suffering from, among other things, is a misunderstanding of marbles. No marble-maker ever made marbles looking over their shoulder, scanning the horizon for the end of their marble ride. Marble-makers made marbles secure on the knowledge that someone was going to buy their marbles.

The marbles of the ‘90s were marbles – and not by accident, since the marbles of the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s were marbles. See, the thing with marbles is you don’t have to play the game of marbles to have a hell of a lot of fun with marbles. Got an inclined plane or a mortal enemy? Swell! Then you’re fixed for fun stuff to do with marbles. Macaulay Culkin never used POGs as a boobytrap in Home Alone, nor could he. What was he going to do – fill a laundry chute with them? Launch them from improvised catapults? Have the dog eat them and throw up over the burglars? Give me a good boulder steelie anyday.

And along those lines, no self-respecting marble-maker ever said anything as ludicrous as, “We’re making quality collector marbles.” Heck, no: They’re making marbles. If people want to collect them, eat them on toast, spread them on stairs, drop them from a great height on the heads of squirrels, plant them in their garden and try to grow their own, it’s all fine – as long as they buy lots of marbles. The day a marble-maker started making collector marbles would be Day 1 of their demise.[4]
 
Brill concluded his piece with, “Many dealers thank their lucky stars, because in a slow period POGs kept many afloat.” Hey, dealers: That should have been a clue to your fate. When you start relying on non-milk non-bottle non-caps to feed your family, to keep the lights on and the wolf away, that’s a good time to find another line of work – unless you really want to wait for the Beanie Baby rip-offs with player names and numbers to drive that last nail in your coffin.

Good as that story was, it wasn’t Brill-iant Ideas’ only memory-jogging example of obsolete technology being employed in the collectibles arena to keep the larder full between POG runs. There was also a story on phone cards. 

I realize that phone cards still have limited uses in international commerce and communication, but in the mid-‘90s some marketers saw phone cards as … well, it’s hard to give you a modern comparison to the phone card as they conceived it. Imagine you needed to scan a special card every time you watched a movie via Netflix, and this card could only be used for Netflix movies. That’s not so far-fetched – right? Okay, now make it so that this Netflix card only got you about as far as the part where the indestructible dude throws Tony Stark through a skylight, and then you have to dig up another one of these cards to watch the rest of the movie, and hope it gets you through the part where Gwynneth Paltrow throws the self-destruct switch without having to produce a third card from down in the sofa. That was a phone card.

Phone cards initially had a nondescript image on the front – a globe, say – and a reasonable amount of long-distance talk time – somewhere between 100 and 1,000 minutes. As marketers realized that phone cards could be sold on their utility and retained for their collectibility the variety of front images increased and the amount of minutes on each card declined, so that by the end of the phone-card era it was like making a long-distance call from an old pay-phone booth, only instead of plugging dimes into a slot you were plugging phone-card numbers in response to prompts. The cards looked absolutely bitchin’, though.

Naturally Upper Deck was all over collectible phone cards. If it was semi-illegitimate and could hold a picture of Ken Griffey Jr., Upper Deck was on it. UD led in late ’94 with a Mickey Mantle phone card, then announced in January 1995 that it had inked a deal in conjunction with phone-time reseller GTS to produce a series of five phone cards featuring current major leaguers, with second and third five-card series in April and May.

The first five cards featured Griffey (natch), Frank Thomas, Cecil Fielder, Fred McGriff, and Tony Gwynn, with nary a Scott Klingenbeck to be found. 

The cards were not cheap -- $12 for 15 minutes – and they came out at a time when baseball was being threatened by a labor dispute, hence the plaintive (and only slightly out-of-whack) statement from GTS President Tom Silverstein: “We hope for the return of baseball in the spring and the excitement that the first MLB/MLBPA Player PhoneCards will generate among all fans.”

Uh, no. Didn’t work out that way. The previous year’s strike dragged into the season, teams played a truncated 144-game schedule, Dante Bichette led the NL in homers with 40[5], and MLB/MLBPA Player PhoneCards fell into the collectible sump, never to re-emerge, not even to make a phone call. 

Licensed phone cards were not the worst idea. They do combine utility with collectibility, and Silverstein was right to hope that they would generate excitement. But the funny thing about hope is that sometimes it gets crushed – especially when Upper Deck’s involved.

And here is the best part, the I-can’t-make-up-this-crap surprise ending that ties everything together. In the gutter of Brill-iant Ideas, just below the news that Hank Aaron, Jerry Rice, the Brady Bunch kids, and the four surviving cast members of Gilligan’s Island will be appearing at an Atlanta show, was the announcement that all subscribers will receive a “1^st Anniversary Brill Report Phone Card.” 

You know what this means: The phone-card aliens got to Bob Brill, the torch-bearer for poorly titled hobby journalism delivered via fax! Is no one safe?

Actually, we all are. Phone cards, POGs, The Brill Report, even Zubaz – they all passed from the scene. Now I see that Zubaz are coming back. Embrace them. Consider the alternative.

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[1] Interesting word, hopscotch. Beer and whiskey all wrapped up in a kids’ game. And they wonder how we got to be a nation of tumble-down drunks.

[2] At least, I think they were Valiant Comics POGs. Maybe they were Valiant Comics and POGs. Whatever they were, they needed to leave New London now.

[3] That’s Houston for you – a dollar short and a day late. Dallas got Dallas and J.R. Ewing; Houston got Matt Houston, with Lee Horsley in a Roman-helmet hairdo and a Dave Wannstedt mustache – and in California, of all places.
[4] Some did, and it was.
[5] Must be the PEDs and the altitude.

Who You Callin' A Harlo?

On my bike ride this noon I noticed one of those big plywood storks you can rent to announce the birth of a baby.[1] The plywood stork had clenched in its plywood beak a plywood balloon with the words “Welcome baby Harlo.”

I saw the name and was momentarily taken aback, because I didn’t see “Harlo”; I saw “Harlot.”

I’m special but I’m not that special, so I’m probably not the only person who will make the Harlo-Harlot connection and conclude that naming your child “Harlo” is pretty much like naming her “Rostitute.” 

This is one of those cases where it pays to be complete. You want to name your kid “Harlow”[2]? Add the bloody “W.”

Another area that would have benefited from completeness in communication (transition alert) was the Handful O’Landfill era. I was reminded of this when I found a near-complete run of Trade Fax while cleaning out a file cabinet.

Trade Fax was a weekly trade publication started by Krause Publications to satiate the hobby’s interest for breaking news (breaking in the sense of being less than 10 days old) and break the backs of a couple of competitors, The Brill Report and Beckett Insider. Today the idea of up-to-the-last-10-days news being delivered on paper the consistency of Warren Jabali’s drawers[3] is ludicrous, like putting potato chips in boxes.[4] Back then it was like Twitter on muscle relaxants.

I didn’t have to dive far into Trade Fax to get stopped by a random fact. In fact, I cliff-dived headlong into this one and was paralyzed from the waist down.

The fact was a quote from a SkyBox product manager named Ken Smith. Ken isn’t around anymore. He died way too young – a real shame, because he was a peach of a guy: smart, funny, polite in that delightful southern manner, self-effacing.

Ken understood what it took to move product, so it really wasn’t a surprise to see the breakout quote in Trade Fax that said, “While gimmicks do have limits, it’s important to keep putting new products on the market.”

While Ken is guilty of being just a little too aggressive in the candor department, the quote also suffers from a lack of completism. I don’t think Ken said, “While gimmicks do have limits, it’s important to keep putting new products on the market,” and just left it there; I think he said, “While gimmicks do have limits, it’s important to keep putting new products on the market,” and then added, “so our gimmicks can beat the snot out of their gimmicks.”

The other fascinating thing about this issue of Trade Fax was its lead story, a description of the legal fight between Classic and Upper Deck Authenticated over autographed memorabilia. Basically, UDA was doing what it did best – file legal action, this time against Classic parent the Score Board over its selling of autographed memorabilia featuring UDA-exclusive athletes Wayne Gretzky, Mickey Mantle, Joe Montana, and Reggie Jackson.

Hoo doggie. UDA and Classic duking it out over autographs. This is better than Scott Walker and Kim Kardashian mud-wrestling over the rights to The Lone Ranger 2, with Vladimir Putin (wearing Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl ring) as the mud.

The quotes are classic, especially from Ken Goldin, the shopping-channel pot that would not hesitate to call any kettle in the cupboard black as a Paula Deen nightmare (tha Timbaland remix).

After UDA’s Brian Burr led off by saying, “We will do whatever we can to clean up the sports-autograph business. The consumer must be protected from the illegal businesses that profit from sports fans’ lack of awareness,” Goldin countered with, “What the case claims and what their press release says are two different things. Score Board is not being sued due to sale of unauthorized memorabilia, but because we’re supposedly infringing on UDA’s exclusive contracts with four athletes[5] … It’s a bullying tactic.”

Ken From New Jersey then went in for the kill. First he said he resented being included in a suit with “three entities that we know nothing about” (though if he knew nothing about one of the entities, Shop At Home, I am all the characters in the movie Rango, including the thing that looks like a cross between a gila monster and a hiking boot). Then he added, “What they’re doing is pathetic. UDA is a company whose co-founder and half-owner [Bruce McNall] has been convicted of fraud. They fired their president and shut down their mail-order catalog and retail outlets. Their highest-paid athlete [Mickey Mantle] is suing them for breach of contract. It should be very easy for anyone to figure out the reasons for this suit.”

How do you like them apples, Upper Deck?

I don’t have a record of what happened after that. My guess is that the two entities came to a settlement wherein McNall and Richard McWilliam donated their supplies of snake oil to the National Strategic Reserve in exchange for Ken Goldin having sinus surgery. But this one Trade Fax – and I have hundreds of others – gives you some idea of how serious (or maybe seriocomic) the pictures-on-cardboard business was at the height of the Handful O’Landfill era.

In other words, this post suffers from a serious lack of completism. And since I don’t have the motivation to complete it, I think I’ll sign off.

Hope you enjoyed my post. Have a nice day.

Sincerely yours, Treetwalker

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[1] I wanted to say, “One of those big plywood storks you can rent from …,” and then fill in the blank, but then I realized I have no idea what sort of place rents big plywood storks. Stevens Point Stork Supply? Rent-A-Stork? The Stork Store? I think this will have to remain one of life’s great mysteries.

[2] Because it is a far, far better choice to name your innocent newborn after a self-destructing, substance-abusing, bed-hopping blonde actress, and spell her name properly. The name does sound kinda pretty, and there is the historical value. Besides, naming your child Marilyn Monroe Jones is such a cliché. Unless it’s a boy.

[3] Cf. Pluto, Terry, Loose Balls, p. 218. “Warren noticed that the kid was wearing cotton underwear. Jabali reached over and literally ripped the shorts right off the kid. Warren said, “Don’t you know that our ancestors had to pick this cotton? Get yourself some slick drawers.” Thanx and a hat tip to Jim and Sparky for that one.
[4] Of all the wayback-machine culture shocks my kids have been exposed to, this may have been the most shocking. For weeks afterwards they would break into bouts of head-shaking and mutter, “Potato chips in boxes?” It was a foodstuff and a container that simply did not go together, like chicken in a jar.
[5] Which would technically make the memorabilia unauthorized, but let’s not get wrapped up in the details here.

Shiny Spanky CCGs

There's a number of cut points in the Handful O'Landfill era, but few so pronounced as the one between the time when you could print the picture of anyone in an athletic uniform on a slab of cardboard and have it sell, and the time you could print a picture of any vaguely Japanese character on a piece of cardboard, be it sketchy and saucer-eyed and samuraied with acute angles for shoulders or round and pink and Jigglypuffy, connect it tenuously to a game of such labyrinthine complexity that not even the designers could play it properly, and sell it like it was the Apple iBacon. Those were the days when the CCG – collectible card game – was in full flower, driven like Vin Diesel with a Dwayne Johnson chaser by two fantastic properties: Magic: The Gathering for the so-called grownups and Pokémon for the presumed-to-be-kids.

Pokémon in particular had it nailed. It was a CCG based on a cartoon that was based on a CCG that was based on a cartoon that was based on a CCG that was based on a lengthy conversation with a 4-K class. It occupied the sweet spot equidistant from anime and the sword-and-sorcery line of Games for Dorks, it had a bottomless supply of characters that took their inspiration from the pop culture of three or four different cultures, and its creators obviously had access to pharmaceuticals so mind-blowing that you could give yourself a concussion just thinking about them. It was the coolest thing to come out of Japan since the Teisco May Queen.[1]

CCGs like Pokémon had some real advantages over sports cards, especially if you signed the checks that tied to an actual account. Best of all was that most CCGs were constructed from more-or-less intellectual property. You could spend moodles on a Marvel or DC or Tolkien license for your CCG, but why would you want to when you could hire an overactive imagination off the street and create your own saucer-eyed World of Weird?

This obviously did not stop people from spending moodles on Marvel, DC, and MLB CCG licenses, but that was just a manifestation of their unbounded belief in their own infallibility. Marvel Overpower in particular was the Facebook Phone of collectible card games.

However, let the record show that not every CCG built out of intellectual property was Pokémon or even Pokémon Lite, and not every spiky-haired anime hero was a pocket millionaire. For every Pokémon or even a modestly successful property like Yu-Gi-Oh there were scores of properties that were tried and found wanting.

Sailor Moon was a particular favorite. Now before all you animites start doing huffy breaths at me, let me say that I like Sailor Moon. I do not love Sailor Moon, because that would be borderline weird. I like Sailor Moon. I admire Sailor Moon. I edited a long, long story on Sailor Moon for the magazine PoJo’s Pokémon, and I found the story arc fascinating. Sort of like Galsworthy where everyone has a magical power like Shiny Spanky Uterus. [2]

About halfway between Yu-Gi-Oh and Sailor Moon was a property called Cardcaptors. Cardcaptors had all the pieces of a successful Japanese crossover hit: There were plenty of episodes of an animated series in the can, there was a trading-card series and a CCG – heck, the whole premise of the series was built around cards – there were plush toys and keychains and board games and a modest hillock of licensed properties, plus tie-ins with AOL and Kids' WB, and a website, and this cool rating chart that showed that Cardcaptors trailed only Pokémon (though by almost a two-to-one margin, admittedly) in the ratings of kids' anime series.[3]

Given all that, what could possibly go wrong?

Upper Deck got the card license, for one thing.

For all its success in sports cards Upper Deck had the Touch of Lead when it came to non-sport. Its modus operandi was to throw obscene amounts of money at properties just to keep someone else from getting them, sit with its head in its collective hands and wail, “What are we going to do with this?”, and then take the first harebrained idea that came along. It was like the writers’ room for Your Show of Shows, where Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, Mel Tolkin, and Carl Reiner fought for gags – only after hours, when all the writers were gone and just the janitors were left.

For instance, Upper Deck got the license for the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, then the top-rated TV show and dead-solid No. 1 licensed property for card-buying, weapon-toting, helmet-wearing pre-adolescent boys, and devised a super-high-end set that only the kids of Texas Rangers could afford – and we’re talking position players here. None of these situational lefties.

Upper Deck got the Looney Tunes license, hired Chuck Jones, merged it with Major League Baseball and the Upper Deck stable of superstar endorsers, and came up with a set of storyboards for grade-Q cartoons and a series of awkward situations involving Ken Griffey Jr. and a duck.

Upper Deck got the license for Valiant Comics, at that time the most collectible comics marque in the business, and produced a stinking dungheap. It definitely captured the Valiant oeuvre but didn’t sell a lick.

Upper Deck formed a non-sport division, called it Pyramid, and employed a director who – thanks to former Cards Illustrated editor Don Butler for the deathless image – kept his office door closed constantly for fear that someone might ask him to produce a card set.

So let’s review: Upper Deck, a successful sport-card company with the non-sport track record of Rich Kotite and a non-sport product manager whose best position was hiding under his desk, secured the license for a Japanese collectible card game that came with its own popular animated series, ready-made licensed products, and a storyline that involved collecting and playing with cards – trading cards. How could Upper Deck possibly screw up this one?

Here’s how: Cardcaptors involved epic battles just like Yu-Gi-Oh, with cards just like Yu-Gi-Oh, and a TV series just like Yu-Gi-Oh and licensed products just like Yu-Gi-Oh, but its lead character was a girl.

Oops! Just heard a pin drop.

The chief Cardcaptor was named Sakura, and she and her friend Li worked with Kero, keeper of the Clow Book[4], to defend the cards and … and something. Harness their magic, I guess. Most anime series involve someone trying to harness someone else’s magic. There must be an awful lot of magic running around Japan unharnessed, and that’s got to be a big problem in such a small country.

Anyway. The Cardcaptors material also mistakenly plays up the fashion angle. “Fashion-savvy Sakura sets the trends!” it proclaims, and adds, “With a different battle costume in every episode of Cardcaptors, Sakura’s sense of style is unmatched.” That was probably a mistake, seeing as the costumes look like something the Statue of Liberty would wear if she went to a lot of coming-out parties dressed as a fairy ballerina.

In Japan, poor cute little backwards podcar-driving Japan, the idea of women – girls – as action heroes is well-accepted. They aren’t sidekicks and don’t need sidekicks, save for the occasional magical cat. America, big burly manly truck-driving God Bless America, isn’t ready for girls starring as Ash Ketchum or Ben 10. That sends the wrong message – and besides, not every American girl under the age of 10 has a Barbie yet. Never mind that Cardcaptors as a story concept was more charming, more entertaining, more satisfying on almost every level save the decibel level than Yu-Gi-Oh. Never mind that Upper Deck could have tried something really radical and marketed a collectible card game to girls. Nope. Instead of pushing the envelope Upper Deck threw in the towel. Cardcaptors was done almost before it was born.

We love to talk about the magical times, the times the stars line up and produce something so much greater than the sum of its parts that we’re dumbstruck. The Wizard of Oz. The Great Gatsby (the book, thank you very much, Mr. Luhrmann). The eponymous Warren Zevon album. Key lime pie. But for each one of those there are scores of unruly stars, of seemingly random points of bright light that never quite managed to get things lined up. Cardcaptors is one of those. But you know, if they had gotten everything lined up I wouldn’t be talking about Cardcaptors today. You would.

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[1] Here. Or for Jim and Sparky and the rest of you automotive types, this.
[2] As God is my witness, that was the literal translation of one of the StarSailors’ powers. I thought it would get more logical as my wife got older but it didn’t.

[3] The ones it beat, in case you’re wondering: Dragonball Z, Digimon, Sailor Moon, and Gundam Wing. So not exactly the Miami Heat.

[4] The names didn’t help, certainly.

Have a Snot Sip, Rex Menu, Or Stoney's End

It was either write about these cards I found inside my desk or place my head on the aforementioned desk and nap.[1] You decide which was a better use of my time.

The technology is staggering (by 1990s trading-card standards) behind this SkyBox eX card, the more highly evolved version of the E-Motion card we pilloried months ago. The front is a mirror image of the back, yet nothing is reversed. Grant Hill’s jersey reads “PISTONS”  front and back, not “PISTONS” and “SNOTSIP.”[2] Even the writing on the basketball reads appropriately front and back. Near as I can figure, a graphic artist worked hours on each card un-backwardsing everything that went backwards when the image was flipped. It’s like building the Great Pyramid of Cheops with Macs.

It’s a gobsmacking little trick, but so what? Trading cards were the collectible equivalent of the Princess phone when this card came out, and this particular card wasn’t going to halt the slide to the abyss.

In that respect it’s a lot like a car ad. There’s a class of car ads that consists of footage of vehicles navigating ever more absurd settings – up the sides of walls, careening through pinball machines, whipping down the intestinal tract, dodging chunks of City Hall in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, plowing merrily through in the bowels of hell, outacting Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible movies, crossing the Atlantic, appearing suddenly in the middle of the battle of Yorktown – but in the end it’s just a car driving. You could have saved yourself $5 million, given the nice CGI man a day off, filmed a Chevy Malibu cruising down Grand Avenue, and sold just as many cars. Same here. You could have just put a nice Grant Hill picture on a nice piece of cardboard and sold as many Grant Hill cards as this double-positive piece of legerdemain.[3]

 

Note that I chose not to remove the protective film. That’s because I know what’s underneath.

One of my sons’ elementary-school classmates was named Jamyz, which always struck me as a particularly cruel hip-hop joke. For the record, I feel the same way about Mozaics.

 

 

The best way to describe Stoney Case is that he’s Tim Tebow without the athleticism, which begs the question: What was Signature Rookies trying to accomplish by making a trading card of him, paying money to have him sign it, and then attempting to market it as a collectible? There was no market for autographed Stoney Case cards, no pent-up demand for Stoney Case cards that built all through college and was only waiting for his matriculation(ish) from New Mexico to burst to the surface, and furthermore there was no path in professional ball that could have elevated him from emergency-starter status or make him anything other than the kind of quarterback that you tell, “Just hand off the damn ball."[4] The CFL didn’t want him, for Pete’s sake, and in the absence of the Lingerie Football League the only way things could play out was for Case to hold clipboards for four years, get thrown into the breach and found wanting (four TDs and 15 interceptions in 20 games, six starts), take a tour of several training camps and tryouts, and then pick up his career as a high-school football coach or insurance agent. He came and went, and like a Looney Tunes witch leaving bobby pins in her wake, he left behind this autographed card for us to remember him by.

I think I’m going to throw it away now.

Long before Jeremy Lin and Yao Ming there was the Upper Deck Chinese Basketball Alliance set. Call it prescience; I call it throwing crap on the wall to see what sticks.[5]

Unlike previous attempts to foist an outmoded technology on the lucrative Asian sports-collectibles market, the Upper Deck CBA set made no nods or winks to western markets. Well, other than the usual Upper Deck stuff, of course. In Taiwan, your chances of buying this set were slightly less than getting a good plate of pompano en papillote, while your chances of finding these cards at any church-basement show from Perth Amboy to Petaluma were greater than the odds of finding at least one attendee who thought “Old Spice” referred to nutmeg.

Given that, this set’s raison d’être grows fainter with each passing day. Because there is not a shred of English on these cards and no one in my pod reads Mandarin, I have no idea who these players are and what their relative goodness level is, other than to assume if the best you can do as a professional athlete is land on a team with the first name of “Luckipar,” you are probably not a professional athlete that needs to be immortalized on hundreds of thousands of cardboard rectangles. A simple line in a program will suffice, thank you.

That begs another question: Why is this person smiling? He is living in a foreign culture, eating dogs and eyeballs (and sometimes even dog’s eyeballs), he doesn’t understand the language – he can’t even tell you what it says on his shirt, for crying out loud – the beer tastes like soybeans, and he’s about 5,000 miles away from even the absolute worst franchise in the NBA, playing for a team so bad that not even Dexter Cambridge wants to play for them. I’ve got an idea: maybe it’s rictus. 

What’s better than a picture of a smiling basketball player in a jersey he can’t even read? A team-logo card of a team no one’s heard of, written in a language no one can speak, describing the glorious history of a franchise that can’t be very glorious, seeing as it only was in existence from 1993 to 2000, max.[6]

Turns out the team name was wrong on both counts. It wasn’t that lucky and it was way below par.

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[1] An activity that requires a mouthguard, apparently. For those of you who don’t know, I work at a dental-insurance company, and because of my position I receive oral-health tips periodically. Today’s tip included a list of sports for which a mouthguard is suggested. The actual list included discus-throwing and skiing; the list we came up with added bocce, synchronized swimming, and falling asleep at your desk. So I should be wearing a mouthguard while typing this, just to be on the safe side.

[2] There’s a thought, huh, McLauchlin and Seals?

[3] Though speaking of post-apocalyptic stuff, isn’t it amazing that Grant Hill is still at it, creating separation from defenders and burying the fallaway 15-footer? He’s hit the same shot on Steph Curry and his dad. I swear, he’s the NBA’s very own post-atomic cockroach.

[4] So naturally he started games for Detroit and Arizona.

[5] Or, alternately, I call it someone at Upper Deck saying, “we should do a CBA set,” and forgetting that there was a Continental Basketball Association already alive and well (or at least, as alive and well as anything with Isaiah Thomas running it can be) in the United States.

[6] The league history (at http://www.taiwanhoops.com/2001/01/chinese-basketball-alliance-brief.html) is semi-fascinating, though. The first player to score a point in CBA history was named “Rex Menu,” which leads one to believe that Marvin Barnes chose his new alias at Denny’s.