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.

Gotta Trash 'Em All

I’m not quite sure where trading-card manufacturers got their sense of humor from. Kim Jong Il, maybe.

With the exception of Topps, which had pop-culture coolness hard-wired into its chicle-powered consciousness, card companies’ attempts at humor have gone over as well as Jackie Mason at the Umm Al-Quwain Dairy Bar.

I know why, and I’ve known ever since I first met the guys behind Fleer. In those days Fleer was run by a bunch of characters straight out of Dickens – I mean, straight out of Dickens, right down to the quill pens and knee breeches -- and they were trying to keep up with Wacky Packages. And with what? The hopelessly hopeless Baseball Weird-Ohs. CB Convoy Code. Jet Set Stickers.

Fleer showed same sort of creative comic thinking behind the German killer joke in the classic Monty Python sketch -- which is about what you’d expect from a bunch of Bartleby-the-scrivener types from the land of the scrapple and the cheesesteak.

If Fleer had done this in Veterans Stadium instead an nondescript industrial pile they would have been booed.

The problem with funny trading cards is the problem with Fleer trying to be Topps: ancient gummakers have no idea what’s funny to kids. It’s completely beyond them. It’s like handing an iPhone to Benjamin Franklin and telling him to call his girlfriend in Paris.

And this doesn’t simply apply to gummakers; makers of trading cards from the Handful O’Landfill Era were equally clueless.

Lime Rock’s Mad magazine set, for instance, took the most relentlessly hysterical magazine in history and reduced it to a hopeless mélange of cover art and teensy-weensy Spy Vs. Spy comics. It was like Reader’s Digest condensing The Great Gatsby by cutting three pages out of every four, and printing the remainder in single-spaced four-point type.

And then there was Pokémon. I have great admiration for the makers of Pokémon cards, because they’ve been able to convince kids to collect cards of half-baked pieces of neo-Shinto environmental bric-a-brac (a rock? A lily-of-the-valley? A sparrow?) with powers that rank just above exhaling on the Ability-O-Meter.

In any other milieu these characters would be as collectible as janitors – and yet Pokémon has kept it going for 15 years! Topps can’t get anyone to buy a LeBron James card more than once every couple of years, and Pokémon has kids lining up for yet another Shellder.

Naturally that sort of success raised the cackles (thanks, Duke) of the cardmakers who paid millions of dollars for the right to make Roland Melanson cards only to find that no one wants a Roland Melanson card, not even Rollie the Goalie.

Chief among the raised-cackle crowd was Pacific Trading Cards, whose president, Mike Cramer, by-God vowed to do something about it. And the name of this pre-emptive nuclear strike? Pukey-mon.

There may be a non-sport parody set more mean-spirited, more clumsily executed, more ugly on so many levels than Pukey-mon, but I haven’t seen it. If you took the most evil political attack ad imaginable – “Russ Feingold wants to send American jobs overseas so he can elect Iranian terrorists to the Supreme Court,” along those lines – and had its creators make a Pokémon parody set, it would still lack the putrid tang of Pukey-mon.

Consider this set’s construction: one-toilet, two-toilet, and three-toilet chase levels. Names like Blewchow, Yuhorrid, Upchuckmander, Starpee, Hitmongroin, Crampy, Gastricate, and of course, Yuk. The deathless slogan, “Time to flush ‘em all.” The value statement, "A new low in trading cards." The disclaimer, “These cards are a parody and are not authorized or licensed by the makers of Pokémon. In fact, Pokémon makes us puke.” And, finally, the irresistible sales pitch, “Pukey-mon cards have no purpose, value, or reason to exist; therefore, everyone will want to collect them.”

Talk about biting off the hand that feeds you. At the shoulder.

Regardless of your station or how much skin you have in its game, you have to give Pokémon props. When the rest of the collectible card world was falling apart like a ’99 Hyundai, Pokémon kept interest, kept collectability, and kept making money, and did so largely by selling pictures on cardboard to kids.

Pukey-mon is a cardboard hissy-fit thrown by a cardmaker spurned, seething with jealousy at the thought  of some stupid monster game stealing away his kids from his crown-shaped, die-cut Shyrone Stith pictures.

Eric Clapton got jealous of George Harrison and produced “Layla.” The Beach Boys got jealous of Sgt. Pepper and made Pet Sounds. Beyond that, there aren’t many instances of raging jealousy producing great art – especially when the jealousee is something of a hack to start with. You don’t have to look any further for proof than Pukey-mon.

I’ll be back next time with more examples of not-quite-comic cards extricated from the landfill. And in the meantime, here’s a memo to Mike Cramer: If you’re going to make stuff for kids that they really want, grow up a little yourownself.