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.

---

[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.

The Other Other Hot Hot Cards

You'd think I'd be about done with handfuls from the landfill that is a box of '80s and '90s cards that spilled on the floor of my storage room. You would be wrong. We're just getting started.

The back of A.G. Dillard's Traks Racing card reads as follows:
183 A.G. Dillard
Owner
Gwaltney Big 8 Hot Dogs[1]
Dillard Motorsports Buick

1987 Began Busch Grand National, helped son-in-law Rick Mast win first two (Dover, Martinsville)

1988-89 4 more wins, 26 top-10s, 2 poles, $243,585; finished 8th, 7th in Busch Grand National points

1990 Mast to Winston Cup. Elton Sawyer driver. 31 races, 10 top-10. Sawyer married driver Patty Moise following season; will become the first couple to compete against each other in a major series in 1991.

Outside of the high-level items like the Winston Cup, Busch Grand National, Dover, Martinsville, and Buick, there is nothing on this car that I recall or even believe. Gwaltney Big 8 Hot Dogs? Dillard Motorsports? Married NASCAR drivers racing against each other? Patty Moise?

This card is the most tangible proof I've found of the existence of an alternate reality[2].

Barry Colla was a portrait photographer of baseball players who did some trading-card shooting, a little magazine work, and sold some 8x10s to be autographed, and as the Handful O'Landfill era progressed grew increasingly frustrated with the fact that most of the money that was flying around baseball in those days was not flying his way. Being an industrious self-starter, like a lot of the photographers I met in those days, he dropped the big change on an MLB license, which lifted him out of Broder territory and let him sell cards anywhere he wanted.

Actually, it was anywhere they wanted, and they turned out not to want. Colla had the license and the skills and a player (Ken Griffey Jr., who probably doubled his salary on individual trading-card deals), but didn't have design, motivation or distribution. Mostly distribution for a small single-player set.

The result was like running the Gwaltney Big 8 Hot Dogs Buick against the Millers and U.S. Armys of the sponsored-ride world. Colla turned some 8x10s of Ken Griffey Jr. into cards, and figured that would be enough. It wasn't. Not even close.

I'm going to try to describe the origin of chase sets, but it's probably not going to make much sense. It's like trying to explain how disco logically evolved from Creedence Clearwater Revival without getting into polyester, granny glasses, bowl haircuts, or the switchover from heroin to cocaine.

Postwar baseball cards were originally issued in series, which was an incredibly sensible way to market the product. Fresh product (including fresh-ish bubble gum) could be kept on shelves throughout the summer. Kids would buy early series until 80 percent of the packs contained 99 percent doubles and shove the extras in their bicycle spokes or flip them or just rubber-band them and toss them in the attic for their mother to throw out in another dozen years[3], and even though sales of subsequent series dwindled through the summer, that eventually drove collectiblity. I realize Topps probably lost its shirt on fifth-series 1952 Baseball, but the American collectibles economy is forever in its debt.[4]

The other thing Topps did in those days was print cards in different quantities. Cards were printed on sheets of 100; trading-card series weren’t always created in the same multiples. Sixty was a good number for a later series in an early Topps set, allowing for three and three-quarters cards per team – a utility infielder, a backup catcher, and a pitcher recently optioned to Keokuk of the Three-I League. That unbalanced dynamic resulted in 40 double-printed cards and 20 single-prints. Single-prints were twice as hard to get as double-prints, creating a series of scarce cards within series that were increasingly less desired as the summer wore on.

(This wasn’t new. A lot of prewar cardmakers promised kids a new baseball glove or a similar object of desire if they assembled a complete set and sent it to the manufacturer. To limit the damage, the cardmakers would drastically short-print one or two cards in the set, leaving thousands of gloveless American kids tantalizingly close to their dream, but destined never to get there. And then when World War II came, Goudey and U.S. Caramel blamed it on the Japs. No wonder American kids fought like devil dogs.)

As time went on, short-prints became less frequent and the allure of having Bird Belters available for a limited four-week engagement was not enough by itself to sell baseball cards. In response, Topps began including a bonus card in every pack – a scratch-off or a poster or a coin or a gold-foil card. These added indescribable luster to a series whose only other highlight was a Boyhood Photos of the Stars Wilbur Wood card.

Modern chase cards combined elements of the one-per-pack inserts with the scarcity factor of short-prints and began appearing in 1985 – in football cards first, strangely enough. However, in their first incarnation they were like The Operation from the old Monty Python sketch, where the notorious Piranha Brothers would select a victim and then threaten to beat him up if he paid the so-called protection money. In this case, Topps made the chase cards (named “The Star Set” without a smidgen of irony) easier to get than the set’s regular cards, effectively devaluing Ronnie Lott, Eric Dickerson et al. and making every pack less valuable than if it had just contained the usual assortment of Hoby Brenner and Uwe von Schamann cards.

In a couple of years, and with some help from Fleer Basketball, cardmakers progressed to the Other Other Operation and got the whole chase-cards thing straightened out – and by “straightened out,” I mean straightened out the way George W. Bush straightened out the tax code. They started making chase cards harder to get to drive sales, and then added a layer of chase above the chase cards that were harder to get to drive sales, and then another layer above that, and then another, until the base set was a conveyance valued less highly than a Geo Metro.

All of which is a long way around to the point that calling a chase set “Hot Cards” is a lot like naming your baby “Human” and then having it grow up to be a dog – or Christian Okoye, in this case.

I’m done now.

I’ve been scouring pro-football-reference.com trying to figure out what made Lorenzo White and Ken Tippins such bitter arch-rivals that they merited their own (poorly designed) card from the 1991 Upper Deck Football set. Were they a couple of brush-cut junkyard dogs, like Dick Butkus and Jim Taylor? Was there a debilitating injury, like Jack Tatum and Darryl Stingley? Were there bounties involved, like Jonathan Vilma and Brett Favre?

I dunno. I’m guessing the split occurred because White liked milk on his strawberry shortcake and Tippins preferred Cool Whip.

Tippins was a fulltime starter for one year in his seven-year career, White a fulltime starter a sconch more, meaning that Upper Deck expended a card on a couple of part-timers banging ineffectually at each other with less violence and rancor than is seen on a Catholic-high-school kickoff return.

It's possible I'm missing the point with this Arch Rivals card. Tippins might be representing corbel arches and White pointed arches, and this card might be a subtle treatise on the underlying tension between the gothic and Romanesque schools of architecture, especially during the expansive and emotionally charged architectural environment of post-Civil War America.

If that's the case, Upper Deck is more erudite than I'd imagined, and it's still a major waste of cardboard.

Okay, now that you won it, what are you going to do with it?

The futility of hockey draft-pick cards has been mentioned before, and somewhere I have the Ultimate hockey-players-in-tuxedos set that merits its own column, but suffice it to say the only thing that beats hockey draft-pick cards as a waste of cardboard are Roundy’s scratch-and-win game tickets.[5]

Being a No. 1 overall draft pick is usually a path to a modest level of stardom, unless you were chosen by Al Davis or are fond of recreational drugs of abuse. But too often hockey teams dip into the vast pool of international talent and select with the first pick in the NHL Draft … Alexandre Daigle. Bryan Berard. Rick DiPietro.

Part of the problem is hockey’s unique player-promotion system, relying as it does on multiple spins through myriad junior and minor leagues. So it should come as a shock to no one that Alex Stojanov’s NHL career is a big ol’ goose egg – especially when you read the back of his card and see that his heroes are Cam Neely and Bob Probert and his scouting report reads, “Not a naturally skilled offensive player” – not the best attribute for a winger.

I have a new favorite Mark Twain quote that goes, “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” I can think of a couple of places that could have stood a dose of lightning back in 1991.

I was going to give The Vette Set the title of "Card Set With The Smallest Potential Audience," but I look at Star Pics hockey draft picks and am tempted to reconsider. The Vette Set does slice the market thin enough to read a newspaper through. It’s not just a set of car cards, which have a limited track record of success (Odd Rods excepted), or a set devoted to a marque, which have no record of success, but a set devoted to a specific model of a car carrying a marque made by a manufacturer of many marques and cars.[6] It would be like devoting an entire set of cards to Sam Horn. Oh, wait …

[1] What people with their black belts in Lean Six Sigma are absolutely not allowed to eat.
[2] But not a bad alternate reality. It has hot dogs.

[3] So how come I never hear of the cleaning frenzies of the mid-‘60s -- and how come baseball cards are the only thing I ever hear of being thrown out? I haven't even heard of a Wagner card being accidentally decoupaged.
[4] If Topps had issued its 1950s cards in one series and Gibson made all its 1959 Les Pauls with plain tops, thousands more American dentists would be driving around in McLarens and Maseratis. The guitar dealer's windfall is the luxo-auto dealer's downfall.
[5] Where the odds of winning anything were like one-in-40, and the prize won by 95 percent of prize-winners was more game tickets.
[6] Though as such it has more curb appeal than The Plymouth Volarè Set.

Happy Baseball Freaking Birthday

So I reached into one of the file boxes holding the entire history of the Handful O’Landfill era in press releases and sell sheets and pulled out a folder with a Sharpie scrawl that read “Misc. Non-Card Baseball.”

O frabjous day calloo callay. It couldn’t have been better if I had answered the doorbell and found Tim Tebow on my stoop, in the arms of Lindsey Vonn. And Newt Gingrich.

The folder was surprisingly thin. It did contain a press release from demi-legendary semi-legit cardmaker Little Sun touting its first set of high-school all-stars, the set that put Little Sun on the map, albeit somewhere in southwestern Oklahoma. This was the first card that showed Manny before Manny was Manny being Manny, even though technically Manny couldn’t be anything besides Manny being Manny without running afoul of immigration or the Social Security Administration or amazon.com or something.

That’s a topic for a different column, Manny and Little Sun and the first card of big-league malcontent Tyler Houston, sporting a sneer that put to shame even the twisted lips of James Thurber’s great dysfunctional national hero, Pal Smurch. This column is about some of the other stuff in the folder.

In addition to an embarrassingly self-congratulatory press release from the U.S. Playing Card Company, makers of a set of big-leaguer playing cards I was all prepared to like in a future column (how’s this for self-congratulatory: “Sales for the first edition were extraordinary. Over 600 customers eager to receive the new deck called during the first week of the 1990 All-Star playing card release in April.” Six hundred customers? In a week? A hundred customers a day, in a business where press runs of under a million were considered scarce, and collectors rang the phones like Quasimodo on speed? Oh, mur-der), there was this press release, from the legitimately high-falutin’ firm of Silverman, Warren/Kremer (their punctuation, not mine) in New York:

Many Top Baseball Stars To Be Featured In Unique Gift Idea;

‘A Happy Baseball Birthday’ To Reach Retailers In April

A Happy Baseball Birthday. And what goes into a Happy Baseball Birthday, you may well ask?

How about: a cassette tape. Hoo doggie.

Lest we forget, there was a time when a cassette was on top of the high-tech ziggurat, when the idea that you could record a whopping 45 minutes of music on a piece of iron-oxide-coated plastic only slightly more expansive than the hook to a Black-Eyed Peas song (but much deeper) had the stupendous import of a French nail treatment done in iPads.

We were discussing this the other day in the context of car CD changers. Cars these days have six-disc changers the way they have engines, but when in-car CD changers came out it was like the day they quit putting whalebone in corsets. You mean I can put six CDs in my car? At once? And I can listen to music five hours straight and not have to do anything else? And at this point most people fainted dead away and had to wait until their cars smashed head-on into telephone poles to be revived. Or not.

Of all the defunct audio technologies I've tried to explain to my kids, they get cassettes least. Phonograph albums they get, in a prop-driven sort of way. Eight-tracks even make more sense to them, probably because they've never heard an eight-track. But they have the idea that the cassette tape and cassette-tape players, especially portable ones like the Walkman, were invented by Playskool and sold to three-year-olds whose parents couldn't afford iPods.

Anyhow, enough about the technology. Think of the execution. The Happy Baseball Birthday card carried an MSRP of $7.99. Now, imagine you're a seven-year-old in 1991 and you're having a birthday party. Your mom has told all the invited guests not to spend more than $10 on you – a reasonable amount in those days. (Heck, a reasonable amount in these days.)

So it comes time for gift opening, and you get the usual hodgepodge: Some G.I. Joe figurines, a couple of LEGO sets, a Furby ("From Tyler" – figures; I never liked the little dweeb anyway) and then a thin package with a couple of lumps and bumps.

"Oh, boy – Sega Game Gear," you think. Just what you'd wanted, forever and ever and EVER! So you tear open the package with trembling fingers and discover (switching back to Silverman, Warren/Kremer mode here), "a high-quality audio cassette with a two-minute birthday greeting from a Major League Baseball star [Kevin Maas, in this case], as well as a special photograph collectible card with the player's autograph printed on the back." And three packs of strawberry Bubble Yum.

You seek out the offender and find him buck-toothed and smiling in the corner, smeared with Rocky Road from ear to ear.

"Get out of my party!" you scream at him, pounding him with tiny fists of rage and shattering his genuine gold-plated-plastic Screaming Siren Sound Effect, imported from China at $15 the gross. "I never want to see you again! You're not my friend any more EVER!" And so on.

Don't be thinking it was just the fact that little C.J. chose as his gift a card of an ineffectual though good-looking slugger with more holes in his swing than in an average Dancing With The Stars costume. The Happy Baseball Birthday thing came in many other flavors, including Tony Gwynn, Dennis Eckersley, John Smoltz, Mark Grace, the Ken Griffeys, Kevin McReynolds, John Franco, Kevin Mitchell, and – look, chicos! – Ruben Sierra, reading his special birthday greeting in Spanish (because if he read it in English you'd think the wow and flutter was all out of whack again). It's just that on the bang-for-the-buck scale it's no Kim Kardashian, if you catch my drift.

It should be obvious from the fact that no one has wished their buddy a Happy Baseball Birthday for a good 20 years that this particular attempt to scoop a ladle off of the gravy train went a-glimmering, and it's probably for the best. Think of what the 2011 model of a Happy Baseball Birthday would look like:

It's Wyoming's seventh birthday and all his friends are there: Cheyenne, Cody, Sheridan, Casper, Douglas, Laramie, Powell, Rock Springs, and Utah, the little neighbor boy.  His mom has told all the invited guests not to spend more than $15 on Wyoming – a more-than-reasonable amount these days.

So it comes time for gift opening, and Wyoming gets the usual hodgepodge: a couple of Bakugans, two LEGO sets, a Wimpy Kid book, a Webkinz ("From Lander," the little dweeb) and then a thin package with a couple of lumps and bumps.

"Oh, boy – Pokemon," you think. Just what you'd wanted, forever and ever and EVER! So you tear open the package with trembling fingers and discover ... nothing.

"It's actually a high-quality mp3 with a two-minute birthday greeting from a Major League Baseball star [Brennan Boesch, in this case]," little Torrington in the corner pipes up, his face smeared with dirt-and-worm cup, "and a special virtual collectible card with the player's autograph printed on the back. Oh, but it's all in the cloud."

Wyoming's little lower lip starts to tremble. "So you got me ... nothing?" he says, as visions of a full-scale evacuation dance through his mother's head.

Well, I also got you this," Torrington says, and reaches into his pocket and produces three packs of strawberry Bubble Yum.

You can take it from here.

Floppsy, Toppsy, And A Rotten Tale

I feel like Steve Goodman being taken to the woodshed by David Allan Coe. I did not write the perfect country-and-western song because I didn't say anything at all about mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk. And what's worse, I wrote about the so-called funny baseball cards of the Handful O'Landfill era and didn't say anything about Flopps.

Flopps were a product of Pro Set circa 1992, when the company was well on its way to world domination through pictures on cardboard. It already had the official cards of the National Football League and the National Hockey League, it had the NBA dead in its sights, it had sold hockey cards with a Canadian Nut Goodie so it could sell practically anything, it had an opulent corporate headquarters that seemed to be made entirely of light beams and Walter Payton statues, and it had a corpulent CEO guaranteed to make a thousand Marie Claire editors go “ick!” The only thing it was missing: a baseball license.

In those days the real money in the card biz was still in baseball, because the NFL and its players’ association (the whole “official card of the NFL” thing notwithstanding) gave away licenses to anyone willing to make a seven-figure donation to their respective labor-unrest war chests, and hockey and basketball were still hockey and basketball, no matter what Michael Jordan said.

Major League Baseball had kept a pretty tight lid on things, meaning it had only five licensees making six products each. This was before baseball cards in cans, so almost all those sets made money. And Pro Set wanted a piece. Very badly.

That was one aspect to Pro Set – “good” Pro Set, if you will. Then there was the Sarah Palin operation, Pro Set gone rogue, mainly under the leadership of trading-card deep-thinker Victor Shaffer. The Pro Set skunkworks made Desert Storm cards and Young Indiana Jones cards and Little Mermaids cards and Dinosaurs cards and racing cards and other non-mainstream sets, and badly wanted to get into the comic end of the non-sport biz.

(There was another level to Pro Set, the money-skimming “evil” Pro Set, but that’s a topic – and a federal investigation -- for another day.)

Somehow the skunkworks got tangled up with the desire for a baseball license and determined the way to get into comic cards and get a baseball license was to use a comic set to slam Topps and many of the superstar baseball players it depicted. The result was Flopps.

Flopps was not Pro Set's finest hour. It was not even its finest couple of seconds. There was nothing about Flopps that was not done elsewhere – and not simply "done better elsewhere," because ha-ha-told-you-so satiric baseball-card sets have never been done well by anyone.

Here are the contents of the promo packs distributed to the media and dealers: Wade Bugs of the Boston Sweat Socks; Stickey Henderson of the Oakland Ughs!; Ken Groovy, Jr., of the Seattle Mindwarps; Barry Bones of the Pusburgh Packrats; and Lance Perishable of the California Airheads.

Laughing yet? If you're not now you never will be, because that's all there is.

The Calvin Coolidge-like lack of humor of the promo cards aside – and remember, promo cards are supposedly the best of the best – the aforementioned Flopps cards point up a bigger problem: sustaining the humor over the course of a set. The promo cards have players hailing from Boston, Oakland, Seattle, California, and Pusbergh. That would be like creating a Garbage Pail Kids set consisting of Adam Bomb, Busted Bertha, Smelly Kelly, Bea Sting, and Glenn Beck. (Yeah, I don't have a problem with it, either.)

And then how big a set do you want? Keeping the knee-slapping mirth going over a handful of superstar cards is one thing; when you get down to cards 466 and 467, Bean Figueroa and Bill Grisly, who's still paying attention? And what, oh what, do you do with Archi Cianfrocco?

The bottom of the theoretical Flopps barrel is the stuff EC Comics were made of: Paul Faires as Paul Fairies. Juan Agosto as Juan Disgusto. Kevin Appier as Kevin Disappear. It would take James Thurber, Dave Barry, and Mark Twain alternating sentences on the back, and Gary Larson and Bill Watterston doing the art, and it still wouldn't come off half as good as a run-of-the-mill Odd Rod.

And that didn't happen. The art has a day-glo sketchiness that makes a Wacky Package look like a DaVinci, and the writing on the back rarely rises above streetwalker level.

"Lance is not a good long-term investment for any team," reads the back of the Lance Perishable card. "Although he's got it together by the early season, by mid-summer he just falls to pieces. Most agree that Lance stinks because he's just plain rottin.'"

There's a perverse, oh-my-God-she's-wearing-that? fascination to Flopps cards. It's like watching your buddy from accounting trying to do karaoke to "Vision of Love" after going four rounds with chocotinis. But that doesn't mean it's something you want to return to time and again.

Rarely has a set been as broken in so many ways as Flopps, so it's probably a good thing it never made it past the promo stage. Why it didn't is a matter of conjecture.

“What we believe happened is that Topps got wind of it and complained to MLB," a former Pro Set staffer says. "The MLB told Pro Set: If you produce Flopps, you will never get a baseball license. Pro Set had every right to produce Flopps; they just realized that it was not worth it to ruin any chance of ever getting a baseball license."

“I remember a giant yawn from the non-sport community when dealers were artificially rigging promo card prices on these weak cards," contends Don Butler, Pro Set expert and former non-sport-card-magazine editor. "I think we received a cello pack -- Wade Buggs was the top card --with an announcement of the set, then it was abandoned either from the threat of a lawsuit or – what I think – the worse threat of no sales."

Whatever did or didn't happen with Flopps, it points up the eternal lesson: Make lemonade when life gives you lemons, but if insist on making your own lemons, don't expect it to taste like Minute Maid.

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.