Some trifectas were made just so perfectly conceived that you’d swear heaven was triangular. The Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont. Chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Magic, Kareem, and Worthy. Tinker to Evers to Chance. Dodge vs. Chevy vs. Ford. Chico, Harpo, and Groucho. Moe, Larry, and Curly. The French Connection line. The three Godfather movies. Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Bacon, lettuce, and tomato.
And then there are accumulations of three that make you wonder whether the prophets at Schoolhouse Rock had it all wrong, and three is indeed not a magic number. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. The three Porky’s movies. Wade and Bosh and LeBron. The K cars. That three-wheeled Chernobyl made by the Company Formerly Known As Ski-Doo. Pat Listach to Scott Fletcher to Franklin Stubbs. Moe, Larry, and Joe Besser. Bacos, lettuce, and tomato. And last but not least, Australia, James Donaldson, and baseball.
And yet these things happen and continue to happen. The Brewers persist in trotting out a DP combo of Yuniesky Betancourt to Rickie Weeks to Cecil Fielder, an assemblage that is to slick fielding what Michelle Bachmann is to reasoned political thought. National Treasure 3 is in production. Alabama is back together. And not too long ago, Donaldson promoted Australian baseball through the mercifully short-lived Australian Baseball League set.
Once you break through the realization that this is one ménage a trois that’s really a ménage, it’s fairly easy to draw lines between any two of the three. Australia and baseball is logical enough. Baseball is sort of equidistant between cricket and Australian Rules Football, that aboriginal aberration played by sides of 18 that find Brian Urlacher too much of a sissy-boy for their tastes.
Australia and James Donaldson is doable. The former Washington State big played there after a 10-year NBA career where he moved more glacially than a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s. Baseball and Donaldson is a bit of a stretch until you realize they’re both mortally slow sports. It’s connecting all three that’s the reach. Yet there they all are in the Australian Baseball League set, linking arms and singing “The Kookaburra Song” while the dingoes howl in the distance.
Triangular logic notwithstanding, it’s hard to fathom how a continent whose No. 1 contribution to the National Pastime was David Nilsson, a catcher who couldn’t catch and couldn’t stay healthy enough to hit, merits a set of cards for its incestuous minor league, a sort of multicity crumb tray for all ANZAC players worse than Trent Oeltjen.
On the other hand, in the Handful O’Landfill Era every league that didn’t have the name of a towing service plastered across the fronts of its uniforms was prime territory for a card set. It just so happens that this league was about 50,000 miles away from its target market, with no network broadcast contract and no way of engaging its potential audience other than a set of baseball cards whose most recognizable name got beat out of a starting job by Mark Eaton.
With that said, the ABL cards are a pretty patch in a semipro sort of way. Fronts are clean, photography is right-side up, and backs are no worse than Sally League quality if a little too influenced by the Star Company for their own good.
The real question now, looking back at this set through the crystal-clear lens of retrospection, is what the plan was, how this set was going to do anything for anyone. The logistics – the big leagues are way over here, and the ABL is way over there – were just too heavily stacked against the ABL. The league was positioned as a low-level winter league, the winter equivalent of an upper-echelon independent like the American Association. While it was certainly possible that someone would take a path to stardom that ran through the ABL, the odds were against it. It was much more likely that someone would bounce from the Cape Cod League to the Northern League to the low minors to the upper minors to the bigs, with stops at Maracaibo and UPS and 50 games off for what they swear was an over-the-counter allergy medicine.
It was asking far too much of ABL cards to elevate such a turkey, and the cards' murky distribution – no one in my vast network of gainfully employed former card geeks can remember seeing these cards anywhere except in my file cabinet – ensured that no one would make money on the deal and the printer would be running hard after someone, holding aloft a sheaf of official-looking papers and reeking of acetone.
Ah, but the ABL had a secret weapon: James Donaldson. He shows up in the set, certainly not as a player or manager and not really as a general manager or owner. Seeing as the Donaldson card shows the big man bereft of any mascot clothing, he apparently was just lending moral support to the operation, which needed all the help it could get.
Here's how bad off the ABL was: When it finally gave up the ghost (and the Paramatta Patriots) in 1999, Dave Nilsson bought the entire league, lock, stock, and James Donaldson, for $5 million. MLB now owns 75 percent of the operation and runs it as a trading-card-free, fundamental-stressing South Asia developmental league, which is what it should have been all along.
The Australian Baseball League may not have merited cards, but it got 'em. But so did Dinotopia and Campbell's soup. At a time and place where they were still called baseball cards, it probably deserved them.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Rocky Mountain Why?
I changed jobs at the height of the Handful O’Landfill era. I moved out of journalism into something more lucrative.
I know, I know. “What could be more lucrative than journalism?” you beller. Well, the fact is, children and future J-school students, there are professions more lucrative than journalism, though I admit that once I get past “washroom attendant at Barstow Kum ‘n’ Go” my eyes glaze over and I lose count of just how many there are.
Anyway, just as the trading-card bubble was beginning to resemble Howie Mandel’s head I got married and joined a firm that consulted for trading-card manufacturers, miscellaneous licensors (which is how I came to have carnal knowledge of the Jim Thome Baseball Game) and licensees like the National Basketball Association.
Essentially, I went from being threatened with lawsuits by trading-card manufacturers for telling them what I thought of their products to being paid reasonable sums of money by trading-card manufacturers for telling them what I thought of their products.
America. What a country.
I have said this before, but at the height of the craziness we had scores of prospective Campfire Girl card manufacturers and History of Plumbing card manufacturers and Famous Dentists card manufacturers banging on our doors daily and bombarding us with offers to make hundreds (on the back end, usually) by helping them make millions.
Most we turned away with a smile and a friendly waffle sole in the tucchus. Coors we did not.
I don’t remember how we got associated with Coors. I’m guessing it was through the guy who put the lifesize cardboard cutouts of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (“Got my steaks. Got my ribs”) into liquor stores. (We didn’t know everybody in those days; just a representative cross-section.)
Somehow someone at Coors thought the company should capitalize on the trading-card boom, and someone who worked with Coors said, “You oughta get ahold of these guys in Wisconsin,” and before you knew it, Coors Cards were leaping a-glimmering out of the Golden Gang’s corporate womb.
These were not shabby cards by any measure. No, siree. The card art came out of Coors’ vast Archives Bunker. (With Coors, everything was in a bunker.) The Coors Design Bunker chipped in the design. Backs were written to the highest standards by a team of Professional Hobby Consultants writers – not me, thankfully – and writers from the Coors Creative Bunker. The chase program was solid. Pete Coors himself even signed a few, from the security of the Pete Coors Bunker. And the gold foil flowed like Rocky Mountain Kool-Aid.
Distribution was a cinch. After all, there are two types of companies whose survival depends on getting their product everywhere: breweries and tobacco companies. The wages of sin is death, but the marketing plan of sin is universal distribution.
There was only one thing Coors and us and everyone else involved with the project overlooked: Cards are for kids. Beer, even Coors, is not.
Coors Cards were barely into their first month of marketing when a righteous mom happened upon the cards at a Smokey Mountain Market or similar establishment and blew The Whistle Heard One-Third Of The Way ‘Round The World.
Now, Coors may have borrowed a page from the Christopher Buckley Thank You For Smoking School of Marketing and played along with Coors Cards as a subtle way of marketing its beer-flavored Rocky Mountain spring water to teens and tweens and pre-tweens. If that was Coors’ plan, its people hid it well. The genuine-seeming surprise leading to outrage leading to cessation of payment when the whistle blew was more than ample proof of that.
Beyond that, these were not kiddie cards. They had pictures of mountain streams, stainless-steel kettles, hop fields, bearded guys, and water towers. Yeah, there were a couple of cards of tank trucks, but no self-respecting kid was going to buy Coors Cards over Pacific Flash Cards on that basis. (Insert raised eyebrow here.)
All good intentions aside, the upshot was that Coors, upstanding bourgeois running dog that it was, acceded to the pressure and pulled the cards from shelves. It distributed a few sets internally, and sold cards in its gift shop, but the idea of mass-marketing Coors Cards went the way of prohibition.
But the funny thing was, Coors was less than a year away from not having to pull the product at all. Playboy cards came along later that year, mimicked Coors Cards' distribution, and created a brief bubble in the adult-card market large enough to cover Sally Rand's ... uh, apostrophe. But the calls for their removal from shelves, if they came at all, went unheeded, and Playboy cards lasted several series before being carried shoulder-high down the road to the landfill all card-runners come.
Many of the cards featured in "Handful O'Landfill" are like cars that rolled off the assembly line missing a part or two, like an engine, that most people would consider pretty vital to a car being a car and doing car stuff. Coors Cards had all the parts in the right place. Who'da figured that they'd hang a left out of the car lot and get broadsided?
I know, I know. “What could be more lucrative than journalism?” you beller. Well, the fact is, children and future J-school students, there are professions more lucrative than journalism, though I admit that once I get past “washroom attendant at Barstow Kum ‘n’ Go” my eyes glaze over and I lose count of just how many there are.
Anyway, just as the trading-card bubble was beginning to resemble Howie Mandel’s head I got married and joined a firm that consulted for trading-card manufacturers, miscellaneous licensors (which is how I came to have carnal knowledge of the Jim Thome Baseball Game) and licensees like the National Basketball Association.
Essentially, I went from being threatened with lawsuits by trading-card manufacturers for telling them what I thought of their products to being paid reasonable sums of money by trading-card manufacturers for telling them what I thought of their products.
America. What a country.
I have said this before, but at the height of the craziness we had scores of prospective Campfire Girl card manufacturers and History of Plumbing card manufacturers and Famous Dentists card manufacturers banging on our doors daily and bombarding us with offers to make hundreds (on the back end, usually) by helping them make millions.
Most we turned away with a smile and a friendly waffle sole in the tucchus. Coors we did not.
I don’t remember how we got associated with Coors. I’m guessing it was through the guy who put the lifesize cardboard cutouts of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (“Got my steaks. Got my ribs”) into liquor stores. (We didn’t know everybody in those days; just a representative cross-section.)
Somehow someone at Coors thought the company should capitalize on the trading-card boom, and someone who worked with Coors said, “You oughta get ahold of these guys in Wisconsin,” and before you knew it, Coors Cards were leaping a-glimmering out of the Golden Gang’s corporate womb.
These were not shabby cards by any measure. No, siree. The card art came out of Coors’ vast Archives Bunker. (With Coors, everything was in a bunker.) The Coors Design Bunker chipped in the design. Backs were written to the highest standards by a team of Professional Hobby Consultants writers – not me, thankfully – and writers from the Coors Creative Bunker. The chase program was solid. Pete Coors himself even signed a few, from the security of the Pete Coors Bunker. And the gold foil flowed like Rocky Mountain Kool-Aid.
Distribution was a cinch. After all, there are two types of companies whose survival depends on getting their product everywhere: breweries and tobacco companies. The wages of sin is death, but the marketing plan of sin is universal distribution.
There was only one thing Coors and us and everyone else involved with the project overlooked: Cards are for kids. Beer, even Coors, is not.
Coors Cards were barely into their first month of marketing when a righteous mom happened upon the cards at a Smokey Mountain Market or similar establishment and blew The Whistle Heard One-Third Of The Way ‘Round The World.
Now, Coors may have borrowed a page from the Christopher Buckley Thank You For Smoking School of Marketing and played along with Coors Cards as a subtle way of marketing its beer-flavored Rocky Mountain spring water to teens and tweens and pre-tweens. If that was Coors’ plan, its people hid it well. The genuine-seeming surprise leading to outrage leading to cessation of payment when the whistle blew was more than ample proof of that.
Beyond that, these were not kiddie cards. They had pictures of mountain streams, stainless-steel kettles, hop fields, bearded guys, and water towers. Yeah, there were a couple of cards of tank trucks, but no self-respecting kid was going to buy Coors Cards over Pacific Flash Cards on that basis. (Insert raised eyebrow here.)
All good intentions aside, the upshot was that Coors, upstanding bourgeois running dog that it was, acceded to the pressure and pulled the cards from shelves. It distributed a few sets internally, and sold cards in its gift shop, but the idea of mass-marketing Coors Cards went the way of prohibition.
But the funny thing was, Coors was less than a year away from not having to pull the product at all. Playboy cards came along later that year, mimicked Coors Cards' distribution, and created a brief bubble in the adult-card market large enough to cover Sally Rand's ... uh, apostrophe. But the calls for their removal from shelves, if they came at all, went unheeded, and Playboy cards lasted several series before being carried shoulder-high down the road to the landfill all card-runners come.
Many of the cards featured in "Handful O'Landfill" are like cars that rolled off the assembly line missing a part or two, like an engine, that most people would consider pretty vital to a car being a car and doing car stuff. Coors Cards had all the parts in the right place. Who'da figured that they'd hang a left out of the car lot and get broadsided?
Friday, April 22, 2011
Stak-A-Pack
While the actual Handful O’Landfill era was as ridiculous in its time-capsule way as a royal-wedding nail job or Cyndi Lauper, the post-Landfill era was a hoot and a half itsownself.
The Landfill-era hilarity ensued because in those days you could literally put macaroni and cheese on a trading card and it would sell. The post-Landfill hilarity was equal parts ignorance and desperation.
Did these people not see that Dinotopia cards died in one-one-millionth of the time it took to kill off the actual dinosaurs, or that the market for the Jim Thome Baseball Game extended from its epicenter in Cleveland at least as far as Euclid, or that Pagemaster movie cards were the worst marketing idea since they took the alcohol out of Geritol? And even if they did not see, could they not have used their own intuition to figure out that if a comic book sells at a rate of null, a set of trading cards based on the comic book will sell at a rate of null minus seven?
But the people who persisted in making trading cards in ignorance of this specific gravity really needed trading cards to work.
Well, of course they did. But eight-year-old boys around the world weren’t going to do a 180 with their purchasing habits just because the CEO of PeopleCards (an amazing product concept – think Facebook on cardboard) had based his plans for global domination around a phenomenon which hadn’t occurred in more than a decade.
It was fascinating to walk the aisles of Toy Fair in those transitional days and see who was relying on an archaic adult-to-child communication medium pushed through an outdated distribution model as their golden ticket to the big gated community on the hill.
Some of these products have been covered before, most notably America’s Most Wanted cards, which nobody wanted. PeopleCards we'll cover later. And then there were Stak-Its, which were one of the more fascinating efforts, especially if you happen to be a quadrilateral.
Stak-Its took one of the nice things about trading cards and attempted to build an entire product around that one characteristic. It was like reducing an AC/DC album to the lyrics, recited by James Earl Jones. Talk about your highways to hell.
Stak-Its did not take the best attribute of trading cards, which could arguably be the pictures on the front, the words on the back, the cartoons, the graphics, the gold foil, or the chase cards. Nope. Stak-Its focused on the fact that trading cards are great for building card forts.
It is true that trading cards make awesome forts. Among its many other charms, a 1965 Topps AFL Jim Perkins provides the foundation for the Buckingham Palace of card forts. I have a picture taken when I was quite wee and living in Alaska showing a massive fort comprised of 1966 Topps baseball cards. A whole lotta Hank Bauers went into that, let me tell you, and the only thing that brought it down was the existence of dust bunnies the size of wolverines inside its walls.
However, it needs to be pointed out that trading cards are not alone in possessing this attribute. Playing cards make great forts, and they go for less than a buck for 52. Index cards make great forts, and they’re even cheaper. Cut-up cereal boxes do the job for free. And undoubtedly there’s a free iPod app that lets you build virtual card houses without the muss, the fuss, the false starts, or the dust bunnies. (However, all your Hank Bauers get cheaper in the process.)
Still, none of these alternatives have what Stak-Its have, namely: plastic.
Card-house-building capability was not the prime focus of the brilliant card engineers at Topps, but Stak-Its employed a veritable Manhattan Project of card brains to create the most house-building-friendly cards possible without resorting to making them out of OSB and Tyvek. Where traditional cards were essentially two-dimensional, Stak-Its added a row of pegs along card edges. Where traditional cards were comprised out of a relatively primitive material – cardboard – Stak-Its were made out of space-age plastic.
The difference is staggering. Stak-Its make a fort that may not be as immovable as the pyramids but will give any Oklahoma double-wide a run for its money on the stability front.
The problem is that at three to the pack, it takes an awful lot of Stak-Its packs to make anything more assuming than a honeymoon A-frame for a couple of Polly Pockets.
Then there’s what actually is shown on the cards – not pictured on the cards but gouged into the plastic with a dull nail file -- which appears to be the result of Jim Davis being asked to draw “Garfield” with his feet.
The end result is collectible, I suppose, if you equate “collectible” with “scarce” and “scarce” with “nobody bought them in the first place because they’re so bloody daft.”
We will give Stak-Its credit for realizing that man does not live by pegged plastic trading cards alone. Packs contain stickers reproducing the card artwork – enabling us to see that Jim Davis drew these pictures with his left foot – as well as internet activities (don’t bother) and rules for games you can play with Stak-Its.
Here’s a for-instance: Throw Stak-Its towards a wall and try to get your Stak-It closest to the wall without it actually leaning against the wall. And remember, kids, “do not throw cards at or towards any otherperson.” Especially these cards. You actually can put an eye out with Stak-Its – which, considering the way they look, is not the worst outcome. In fact, Stak-Its may make you may want to double-up on the eye-out thing.
Stak-Its are not the worst trading-card idea ever. In Topps’ capable hands they could have been … mediocre, but only because making card forts out of trading cards is a grassroots, organic thing. You can’t market it into existence; the best you can do is throw a product out there with uses A, B, and C, and be ready to take advantage if someone discovers you can also do D with it.
That was Stak-Its’ fatal flaw. They skipped A, B, and C and went directly to D. And as every member of the target audience can tell you, D is for dog.
The Landfill-era hilarity ensued because in those days you could literally put macaroni and cheese on a trading card and it would sell. The post-Landfill hilarity was equal parts ignorance and desperation.
Did these people not see that Dinotopia cards died in one-one-millionth of the time it took to kill off the actual dinosaurs, or that the market for the Jim Thome Baseball Game extended from its epicenter in Cleveland at least as far as Euclid, or that Pagemaster movie cards were the worst marketing idea since they took the alcohol out of Geritol? And even if they did not see, could they not have used their own intuition to figure out that if a comic book sells at a rate of null, a set of trading cards based on the comic book will sell at a rate of null minus seven?
But the people who persisted in making trading cards in ignorance of this specific gravity really needed trading cards to work.
Well, of course they did. But eight-year-old boys around the world weren’t going to do a 180 with their purchasing habits just because the CEO of PeopleCards (an amazing product concept – think Facebook on cardboard) had based his plans for global domination around a phenomenon which hadn’t occurred in more than a decade.
It was fascinating to walk the aisles of Toy Fair in those transitional days and see who was relying on an archaic adult-to-child communication medium pushed through an outdated distribution model as their golden ticket to the big gated community on the hill.
Some of these products have been covered before, most notably America’s Most Wanted cards, which nobody wanted. PeopleCards we'll cover later. And then there were Stak-Its, which were one of the more fascinating efforts, especially if you happen to be a quadrilateral.
Stak-Its did not take the best attribute of trading cards, which could arguably be the pictures on the front, the words on the back, the cartoons, the graphics, the gold foil, or the chase cards. Nope. Stak-Its focused on the fact that trading cards are great for building card forts.
It is true that trading cards make awesome forts. Among its many other charms, a 1965 Topps AFL Jim Perkins provides the foundation for the Buckingham Palace of card forts. I have a picture taken when I was quite wee and living in Alaska showing a massive fort comprised of 1966 Topps baseball cards. A whole lotta Hank Bauers went into that, let me tell you, and the only thing that brought it down was the existence of dust bunnies the size of wolverines inside its walls.
However, it needs to be pointed out that trading cards are not alone in possessing this attribute. Playing cards make great forts, and they go for less than a buck for 52. Index cards make great forts, and they’re even cheaper. Cut-up cereal boxes do the job for free. And undoubtedly there’s a free iPod app that lets you build virtual card houses without the muss, the fuss, the false starts, or the dust bunnies. (However, all your Hank Bauers get cheaper in the process.)
Still, none of these alternatives have what Stak-Its have, namely: plastic.
The difference is staggering. Stak-Its make a fort that may not be as immovable as the pyramids but will give any Oklahoma double-wide a run for its money on the stability front.
The problem is that at three to the pack, it takes an awful lot of Stak-Its packs to make anything more assuming than a honeymoon A-frame for a couple of Polly Pockets.
Then there’s what actually is shown on the cards – not pictured on the cards but gouged into the plastic with a dull nail file -- which appears to be the result of Jim Davis being asked to draw “Garfield” with his feet.
The end result is collectible, I suppose, if you equate “collectible” with “scarce” and “scarce” with “nobody bought them in the first place because they’re so bloody daft.”
We will give Stak-Its credit for realizing that man does not live by pegged plastic trading cards alone. Packs contain stickers reproducing the card artwork – enabling us to see that Jim Davis drew these pictures with his left foot – as well as internet activities (don’t bother) and rules for games you can play with Stak-Its.Stak-Its are not the worst trading-card idea ever. In Topps’ capable hands they could have been … mediocre, but only because making card forts out of trading cards is a grassroots, organic thing. You can’t market it into existence; the best you can do is throw a product out there with uses A, B, and C, and be ready to take advantage if someone discovers you can also do D with it.
That was Stak-Its’ fatal flaw. They skipped A, B, and C and went directly to D. And as every member of the target audience can tell you, D is for dog.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Kayo'ed Again
What if they started a league and nobody came?
In the halcyon days of Handful O'Landfill, the answer was easy: You named an official card licensee and put out a press release. And if that didn't put you on the map, then you folded.
That's how it worked for the Professional Spring Football League.
Don't remember the PSFL? Neither do I. All I have to remember it by is this press release. But it's in Wikipedia, so it did exist, at least in the metaphysical sense. People were convinced of its eventual existence, which is almost as good as existing, especially in North Dakota. Its near-existence is reinforced by a website called "Remember the PSFL," from which the following history was derived:
The PSFL was born on Nov. 1, 1992, at a New York City news conference – ironically held in the same room where the previous furtive attempt at a spring football league, the United States Football League, was introduced.
The league was founded by computer salesman Vincent Sette, who served as its first and only president. The league’s commissioner was Rex Lardner, and Judge Peter Spivak and Walt Michaels were named chairman of the board and director of football operations, respectively.
The league owned the franchises (franchise fee: $250,000) and assigned players based on college attended and regional appeal. Nine teams were announced at the press conference -- Albuquerque, Boston, Columbia, Las Vegas, Little Rock, Miami, Portland, Tampa Bay, and Salt Lake City. Washington was later added as the 10th and final team.
Teams had a 43-man roster with a seven-man developmental squad, and were to play a 16-game schedule. Players would receive a maximum of $40,000 a season, with a $2 million player salary cap. A $1 million cap was put in place for non-player expenses.
The league was to commence operation Feb. 29, 1992, with a game between Utah and Tampa Bay in Tampa Bay. The league’s championship game was to be known as the "Red, White, and Blue Bowl," and was scheduled to be held Sunday, January 5, 1992, at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C.
The PSFL had no media coverage, television deals, or radio deals, so it came as no surprise when the league ran out of money 10 days before the season opener and quietly folded.
Now, this account has some issues, not the least of which being that if it’s to be trusted, the league folded 10 months prior to being announced, and more than a month after its version of the Super Bowl.
On the other hand, for a league whose Super Bowl is named after my old Uncle Lloyd’s Cheap Drunk of Choice, the timeline in the account sorta makes sense.
Outside of a few marginally recognizable names (Tony Rice, Major Harris) having been assigned to team rosters, there was nothing about the PSFL that made you think this was as bona fide a sports league as, say, the Bangladeshi Box Lacrosse Alliance. It certainly lacked the essential vittles of a sports league – having actual players in actual uniforms playing games, having those games broadcast, having Kevin Harlan beller out misinformation about your team in a moosetorian voice, and, sadly, having your team's best players captured for posterity on trading cards.
No trading cards? But didn't I just say the PSFL had an official card licensee?
They did. And that's where the trouble starts.
The official card licensee was not Pro Set, which approached card licenses with the same jeweler's eye used by Lawrence Taylor in evaluating female companions. It was not Upper Deck, whose treated leagues and licensors much the same way the aforementioned female companions treated the aforementioned Mr. Taylor. It was not Pacific, which, to Mr. Taylor’s approval, would have made PSFL flash cards, or SkyBox, which would have done right by the league and paid it, or Star Pics, which would have done right by the league and skipped town without paying. It was not Star Company or Pinnacle or Panini or Playoff or Donruss or Fleer or Topps or even tiny Lime Rock.
Nope. It was Kayo.
The last time we saw Kayo it was dumping millions down that deviated-septum-shaped drain known as boxing cards. Somehow it became convinced that having a semi-dominant position in boxing cards was not the stuff world dominance was made of; however, spring professional football was.
So in a press release dated Oct. 7, 1991 – more than a month before the league was even announced to the world, if accounts can be believed (and based on what we’ve seen … meh), Kayo was named the Official Trading Card of the PSFL.
As part of the deal – talk about a package deal! – Kayo won the right to “sponsor the three combines utilized to test and grade prospective PSFL players, the first of which is scheduled for October 19 and 20 in Atlanta, Ga.”
(Yep – combines scheduled before league announced. Shrewd. Shrewd, I tell ya.)
“We welcome the opportunity to get involved in the PSFL on the ground floor,” Kayo’s Eric Gitter said in his best press-release-speak. “The PSFL fills a void, and we at Kayo are confident the league will be met with instant popularity.”
Okay, so he was slightly wrong. The PSFL was a void, and it was met with instant antipathy. But Kayo was no stranger to antipathy, and seeing as it was named the PSFL’s official card before the PSFL officially existed, it definitely was in on the ground floor.
Too bad it only went down from there.
In the halcyon days of Handful O'Landfill, the answer was easy: You named an official card licensee and put out a press release. And if that didn't put you on the map, then you folded.
That's how it worked for the Professional Spring Football League.
Don't remember the PSFL? Neither do I. All I have to remember it by is this press release. But it's in Wikipedia, so it did exist, at least in the metaphysical sense. People were convinced of its eventual existence, which is almost as good as existing, especially in North Dakota. Its near-existence is reinforced by a website called "Remember the PSFL," from which the following history was derived:
The PSFL was born on Nov. 1, 1992, at a New York City news conference – ironically held in the same room where the previous furtive attempt at a spring football league, the United States Football League, was introduced.
The league was founded by computer salesman Vincent Sette, who served as its first and only president. The league’s commissioner was Rex Lardner, and Judge Peter Spivak and Walt Michaels were named chairman of the board and director of football operations, respectively.
The league owned the franchises (franchise fee: $250,000) and assigned players based on college attended and regional appeal. Nine teams were announced at the press conference -- Albuquerque, Boston, Columbia, Las Vegas, Little Rock, Miami, Portland, Tampa Bay, and Salt Lake City. Washington was later added as the 10th and final team.
Teams had a 43-man roster with a seven-man developmental squad, and were to play a 16-game schedule. Players would receive a maximum of $40,000 a season, with a $2 million player salary cap. A $1 million cap was put in place for non-player expenses.
The league was to commence operation Feb. 29, 1992, with a game between Utah and Tampa Bay in Tampa Bay. The league’s championship game was to be known as the "Red, White, and Blue Bowl," and was scheduled to be held Sunday, January 5, 1992, at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C.
The PSFL had no media coverage, television deals, or radio deals, so it came as no surprise when the league ran out of money 10 days before the season opener and quietly folded.
Now, this account has some issues, not the least of which being that if it’s to be trusted, the league folded 10 months prior to being announced, and more than a month after its version of the Super Bowl.
On the other hand, for a league whose Super Bowl is named after my old Uncle Lloyd’s Cheap Drunk of Choice, the timeline in the account sorta makes sense.
Outside of a few marginally recognizable names (Tony Rice, Major Harris) having been assigned to team rosters, there was nothing about the PSFL that made you think this was as bona fide a sports league as, say, the Bangladeshi Box Lacrosse Alliance. It certainly lacked the essential vittles of a sports league – having actual players in actual uniforms playing games, having those games broadcast, having Kevin Harlan beller out misinformation about your team in a moosetorian voice, and, sadly, having your team's best players captured for posterity on trading cards.
No trading cards? But didn't I just say the PSFL had an official card licensee?
They did. And that's where the trouble starts.
The official card licensee was not Pro Set, which approached card licenses with the same jeweler's eye used by Lawrence Taylor in evaluating female companions. It was not Upper Deck, whose treated leagues and licensors much the same way the aforementioned female companions treated the aforementioned Mr. Taylor. It was not Pacific, which, to Mr. Taylor’s approval, would have made PSFL flash cards, or SkyBox, which would have done right by the league and paid it, or Star Pics, which would have done right by the league and skipped town without paying. It was not Star Company or Pinnacle or Panini or Playoff or Donruss or Fleer or Topps or even tiny Lime Rock.
Nope. It was Kayo.
The last time we saw Kayo it was dumping millions down that deviated-septum-shaped drain known as boxing cards. Somehow it became convinced that having a semi-dominant position in boxing cards was not the stuff world dominance was made of; however, spring professional football was.
So in a press release dated Oct. 7, 1991 – more than a month before the league was even announced to the world, if accounts can be believed (and based on what we’ve seen … meh), Kayo was named the Official Trading Card of the PSFL.
As part of the deal – talk about a package deal! – Kayo won the right to “sponsor the three combines utilized to test and grade prospective PSFL players, the first of which is scheduled for October 19 and 20 in Atlanta, Ga.”
(Yep – combines scheduled before league announced. Shrewd. Shrewd, I tell ya.)
“We welcome the opportunity to get involved in the PSFL on the ground floor,” Kayo’s Eric Gitter said in his best press-release-speak. “The PSFL fills a void, and we at Kayo are confident the league will be met with instant popularity.”
Okay, so he was slightly wrong. The PSFL was a void, and it was met with instant antipathy. But Kayo was no stranger to antipathy, and seeing as it was named the PSFL’s official card before the PSFL officially existed, it definitely was in on the ground floor.
Too bad it only went down from there.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Yo! MTV Saps!
There are far fewer parallels between sports and popular music than people, particularly athletes, would have you believe.
Let’s start with the obvious. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever screamed, “Sex and drugs and harness racing!” No rock ‘n’ roller has ever been traded to another band for a bag of drumsticks, or Joe Foy. (Though the way I heard the lyrics to Mott the Hoople’s “All the Way From Memphis” for many years, I thought Mott’s guitar was griping because he had been traded to REO Speedwagon – a far better story than the actual lyrics, which are a bit of a muddle.) Stevie Ray Vaughan was no one’s first-round draft choice, Echo and the Bunnymen do not play in the English Premier League, and there are few rockers beyond Jason Becker who’ve suffered a career-ending injury not known as death. Hell, the drummer for Def Leppard lost an arm and kept playing. Let’s see Chase Utley try that.
The parallels tend to be superficial. Athletes and rockers have entourages, indulge in excesses, enjoy strip clubs, and don’t know when to quit. Memory loss also figures in there, but I’ve forgotten exactly where.
The major difference between professional sports and rock ‘n’ roll is attitude. Rockers by definition are anti-establishment while athletes are non-establishment. Rockers attack the bourgeoisie running dogs; athletes run like dogs, and like it. Rockers flip off their fans as a sign of endearment; athletes can’t even thumb their nose at a heckler who suggests that the athlete’s wife is sleeping with a rock star. The most beloved athlete hit home runs for orphans; the most beloved rock star had fathers worldwide locking up their daughters. There’s an edge, a threat, an unsettling element to rock ‘n’ roll that sports has never had. It’s pegged pants, torn T-shirts, biker boots, afros, piercings, and tattoos. The best sports can offer in response is Brandy Chastain stripping down to a sports bra after winning a world championship for her country. Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl? Pure rock ‘n’ roll. Which is why rock and sports cannot and should not coexist.
This message has a particular amount of wham right now because the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductions were last week. Alice Cooper, Neil Diamond, and Tom Waits were inducted – three of my favorite rock ‘n’ roll creeps enshrined in one fell swoop. The only way the night could have been better would have been if Screamin’ Jay Hawkins had risen from his now-real coffin and sung “I Put A Spell On You” to the tuxedoed multitude.
I am no fan of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. I find it as ludicrous as Jane Eyre in 3-D. (Not yet, but soon.) It began as a big-moneyed institutionalization of anarchy and has rapidly reached the point where it is scraping the underside of the barrel for inductees – hence the enshrinement of the creative force behind “Longfellow Serenade.”
Put in perspective, the baseball equivalent to this year’s rock hall-of-famers would be a Cooperstown class consisting of Ralph Garr (multiple lightweight No.1s), Frenchy Bordagaray (short weird guy), and George Brunet (pet snakes).
All of which is a roundabout introduction to one of the worst ideas ever to skulk into the trading-card business: rock-‘n’-roll trading cards.
Let’s be clear on the definitions. By rock-‘n’-roll cards I do not mean the Fleer Beatles sets of the early ‘60s. Those cards were celebrating a cultural phenomenon and indulging in the other National Pastime: separating 10-year-old girls from their money.
The rock-‘n’- roll cards I’m talking about were the Handful O’Landfill-era attempts to treat rock like sports and musicians like athletes, right down to rookie cards, stats, foil, and chase.
There were three major attempts to make rock-‘n’-roll the new hockey. Two, in what should come as a shock to absolutely no one, emanated from Pro Set, the Chinese Democracy of trading-card makers. The third was from a company called Brockum, which was far more sincere but no less misguided.
Brockum's RockCards are the better jumping-off point because they are as bone-simple and straightforward – and derivative – as a CCR riff. They're 4/4 time for sure. None of this Led Zappa stuff.
There's a refreshing naiveté to RockCards, from the five-minute front design to the Uncle-Harry-up-against-the-wall photos to the backs, which read the way '52 Topps cards would have read if they were written by Nikki Sixx.
"Jerry Dixon admits that he loves every aspect of his life on the road with Warrant," reads the back of the aforementioned Mr. Dixon's card – "the women, the free booze backstage, the women, the bus trips and the women. But the talented bass beater has other loves too – including his tattoo collection which he'll gladly show to anyone who asks."
As you may have inferred, RockCards walk with pointy-toed boots on the metal side of the road. Bon Jovi is as soft as these cards get. There are individual cards of people like Brad Whitford, who is known to guitar geeks and unconcussed headbangers as a major contributor to the Aerosmith sound, but is just another over-age, Aqua-Netted reprobate to the rest of the world. Brockum included a few foil cards and autographs for the occasional collector who happened by, but they did it with the same sort of enthusiasm displayed by Peter Frampton in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
RockCards, then, were a hardcore trading card for hardcore hard-rock fans, which was as misguided a notion as giving Steve Jobs an IBM Selectric for his birthday. Their demise was as swift as it was expected.
Pro Set took a different tack for its 1991 run at music-card global domination – but this was SOP for the Lud Denny Band, whose path to the market often ran through Kyrgyzstan.
Its massive (350-plus-card) Super Star MusicCards set included hard rockers (Zakk Wylde), one-hit wonders (Alannah Myles), no-hit blunders (The Party), classics (The Doors, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix) and legit legends (Madonna, Janet Jackson) – their promo photos, anyway – wedged between fuchsia trapezoids and backed with the usual blather, all laid out on a leopard-skin background.
Paula Abdul and fuchsia trapezoids and leopard-skin card backs? Rrrrrowwwwrrrrrr.
For extra texture each pack included a scratch-and-win card (top prize: a trip to swingin’ London) and a handful of Pro Set Points, which could be collected and collected and collected to no apparent effect. You couldn’t even get a Puck bar in the deal.
Unbowed by the lukewarm reception to MusicCards, Pro Set attacked the market the next year with a smaller (150-card) set of Yo! MTV Raps cards.
As part of Pro Set’s attempt to make MusicCards the Standard Rock-‘n’-Roll Trading Card of the World (in the same way that its Flopps cards were the Standard Witless Baseball Parody Trading Card of the World), Yo! MTV Raps are a chip off the Super Stars block o’ rock. The design’s practically the same – maybe a little more gigantic-clock-around-the-neck, but hardly enough to notice – and the backs display the same attention to the press kit … I mean, the same attention to detail. Muckraking, they’re not.
Call me an old softie, but I’m not as repulsed by Yo! MTV Raps cards because they actually document a fascinating period in music history – and by that, I’m not referring to the period when people thought Vanilla Ice had talent. I’m talking about the time when rap went mainstream, powered by Mr. Ice and Mr. Hammer, and the genre was also at a creative peak, thanks to less acclaimed groups like Bell Biv Devoe and the Digital Underground in addition to the critical powerhouses Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys.
Are trading cards the ultimate means of documenting this period? I prefer It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back myself. But at the going rate for Yo! MTV Raps cards (approximately a nickel a gross) it’s tough to say no to the cardboard.
Teenybopper-pop-hero cards will always have a place in the lexicon. Drop by Target and check out the Panini Justin Bieber set for proof. But please, Mr. Panini: Leave rock ‘n’ roll to the sweaty bars and soundstages. You’ll both be better for it.
Let’s start with the obvious. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever screamed, “Sex and drugs and harness racing!” No rock ‘n’ roller has ever been traded to another band for a bag of drumsticks, or Joe Foy. (Though the way I heard the lyrics to Mott the Hoople’s “All the Way From Memphis” for many years, I thought Mott’s guitar was griping because he had been traded to REO Speedwagon – a far better story than the actual lyrics, which are a bit of a muddle.) Stevie Ray Vaughan was no one’s first-round draft choice, Echo and the Bunnymen do not play in the English Premier League, and there are few rockers beyond Jason Becker who’ve suffered a career-ending injury not known as death. Hell, the drummer for Def Leppard lost an arm and kept playing. Let’s see Chase Utley try that.
The parallels tend to be superficial. Athletes and rockers have entourages, indulge in excesses, enjoy strip clubs, and don’t know when to quit. Memory loss also figures in there, but I’ve forgotten exactly where.
The major difference between professional sports and rock ‘n’ roll is attitude. Rockers by definition are anti-establishment while athletes are non-establishment. Rockers attack the bourgeoisie running dogs; athletes run like dogs, and like it. Rockers flip off their fans as a sign of endearment; athletes can’t even thumb their nose at a heckler who suggests that the athlete’s wife is sleeping with a rock star. The most beloved athlete hit home runs for orphans; the most beloved rock star had fathers worldwide locking up their daughters. There’s an edge, a threat, an unsettling element to rock ‘n’ roll that sports has never had. It’s pegged pants, torn T-shirts, biker boots, afros, piercings, and tattoos. The best sports can offer in response is Brandy Chastain stripping down to a sports bra after winning a world championship for her country. Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl? Pure rock ‘n’ roll. Which is why rock and sports cannot and should not coexist.
This message has a particular amount of wham right now because the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductions were last week. Alice Cooper, Neil Diamond, and Tom Waits were inducted – three of my favorite rock ‘n’ roll creeps enshrined in one fell swoop. The only way the night could have been better would have been if Screamin’ Jay Hawkins had risen from his now-real coffin and sung “I Put A Spell On You” to the tuxedoed multitude.
I am no fan of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. I find it as ludicrous as Jane Eyre in 3-D. (Not yet, but soon.) It began as a big-moneyed institutionalization of anarchy and has rapidly reached the point where it is scraping the underside of the barrel for inductees – hence the enshrinement of the creative force behind “Longfellow Serenade.”
Put in perspective, the baseball equivalent to this year’s rock hall-of-famers would be a Cooperstown class consisting of Ralph Garr (multiple lightweight No.1s), Frenchy Bordagaray (short weird guy), and George Brunet (pet snakes).
All of which is a roundabout introduction to one of the worst ideas ever to skulk into the trading-card business: rock-‘n’-roll trading cards.
The rock-‘n’- roll cards I’m talking about were the Handful O’Landfill-era attempts to treat rock like sports and musicians like athletes, right down to rookie cards, stats, foil, and chase.
There were three major attempts to make rock-‘n’-roll the new hockey. Two, in what should come as a shock to absolutely no one, emanated from Pro Set, the Chinese Democracy of trading-card makers. The third was from a company called Brockum, which was far more sincere but no less misguided.
Brockum's RockCards are the better jumping-off point because they are as bone-simple and straightforward – and derivative – as a CCR riff. They're 4/4 time for sure. None of this Led Zappa stuff.
There's a refreshing naiveté to RockCards, from the five-minute front design to the Uncle-Harry-up-against-the-wall photos to the backs, which read the way '52 Topps cards would have read if they were written by Nikki Sixx.
As you may have inferred, RockCards walk with pointy-toed boots on the metal side of the road. Bon Jovi is as soft as these cards get. There are individual cards of people like Brad Whitford, who is known to guitar geeks and unconcussed headbangers as a major contributor to the Aerosmith sound, but is just another over-age, Aqua-Netted reprobate to the rest of the world. Brockum included a few foil cards and autographs for the occasional collector who happened by, but they did it with the same sort of enthusiasm displayed by Peter Frampton in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
RockCards, then, were a hardcore trading card for hardcore hard-rock fans, which was as misguided a notion as giving Steve Jobs an IBM Selectric for his birthday. Their demise was as swift as it was expected.
Pro Set took a different tack for its 1991 run at music-card global domination – but this was SOP for the Lud Denny Band, whose path to the market often ran through Kyrgyzstan.
Its massive (350-plus-card) Super Star MusicCards set included hard rockers (Zakk Wylde), one-hit wonders (Alannah Myles), no-hit blunders (The Party), classics (The Doors, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix) and legit legends (Madonna, Janet Jackson) – their promo photos, anyway – wedged between fuchsia trapezoids and backed with the usual blather, all laid out on a leopard-skin background.
Paula Abdul and fuchsia trapezoids and leopard-skin card backs? Rrrrrowwwwrrrrrr.
For extra texture each pack included a scratch-and-win card (top prize: a trip to swingin’ London) and a handful of Pro Set Points, which could be collected and collected and collected to no apparent effect. You couldn’t even get a Puck bar in the deal.
Unbowed by the lukewarm reception to MusicCards, Pro Set attacked the market the next year with a smaller (150-card) set of Yo! MTV Raps cards.
Call me an old softie, but I’m not as repulsed by Yo! MTV Raps cards because they actually document a fascinating period in music history – and by that, I’m not referring to the period when people thought Vanilla Ice had talent. I’m talking about the time when rap went mainstream, powered by Mr. Ice and Mr. Hammer, and the genre was also at a creative peak, thanks to less acclaimed groups like Bell Biv Devoe and the Digital Underground in addition to the critical powerhouses Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys.
Are trading cards the ultimate means of documenting this period? I prefer It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back myself. But at the going rate for Yo! MTV Raps cards (approximately a nickel a gross) it’s tough to say no to the cardboard.
Teenybopper-pop-hero cards will always have a place in the lexicon. Drop by Target and check out the Panini Justin Bieber set for proof. But please, Mr. Panini: Leave rock ‘n’ roll to the sweaty bars and soundstages. You’ll both be better for it.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Peanuts To You -- And You And You And You And You And You
Many months ago, when this column was a mere wee stripling of a refuse-disposal site that only dreamed of become a sprawling, stinking landfill, I asked which trading-card license was more screwed up by its licensee: Looney Tunes or Disney.
I now realize the fallacy of that comparison, in that there were so many other licenses that were Dunkirk – and not merely Dunkirk, but Dunkirk at the Bay of Pigs – compared to those two.
There was Star Wars, reduced by Topps to the level of Shaun Cassidy and Welcome Back, Kotter. There were the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, jacked up to levels of chase and expense by Upper Deck so that the only people who could afford them were the Expense-Account Kids Of The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills. There was Marilyn Monroe, which was sold out to someone who knew how to make good-looking cards but whose idea of how to distribute them was – uh, can we get back to you on that? There were rock 'n' roll cards, which will be covered in more detail in a later column, but suffice it to say that at their core they make as much sense as a Stadium Club Anarchists set; Dr. Suess and The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes and Tom and Jerry, which were never made on any scale but should have been; and Dinotopia and Pagemaster and Campbell's Soup and Angel and Berestain Bears and stop me somebody, which never should have been made but were.
Honestly. Never a day went by at good ol' Professional Hobby Consultants when the phone didn't ring with some breathless printer on the other end over the moon at the news that they had just received a license to make UPS or Australian Box Lacrosse or Cop Rock cards and asking us what the hell they should do with it.
"Ask for your guarantee back," we would tell them, which is one of the reasons why I drive a 16-year-old Volvo.
And then we have Peanuts.
Making a good non-sports set is not like building a jet-powered skateboard with a bread knife and a block of wood. There's a formula that you follow, like making Rice Krispies treats, and if the ingredients are of sufficient quality you get a decent 150-card set out the other end. Kids like it, collectors like it, everyone makes a little ching, and you move on to Image vs. Valiant, where everything blows up like the ammo dump in The Fighting Seabees and you get to go back to printing the cute ducky-patterned tapes for Huggies.
The formula doesn't hold your feet to the fire too often, but one thing it absolutely insists on is that you never sell the cards as a complete set.
Think about it: If your whole business model is based on repeat purchases, why would you sell your entire product in one chunk – no matter what you charge for it? It would be like buying a Honda and getting not only this Honda but the next three, all for not much more than the price of one.
Hand-in-hand with that, like The Black-Eyed Peas and sampling software, is the Schwarzenegger-like recommendation that you put something in the product occasionally to keep people coming back to buy more. They're usually called "chase cards," though we used to call them "pretend-valuable cards."
If you don't sell your entire set in one chunk and your pretend-valuable cards are oooey enough, you might even be able to sell Image vs. Valiant. But don't bet the pressure-sensitive labeling machine on it.
Needless to say, the Peanuts set ignored both these venerable pearls of life-enhancing wisdom. And the product stunk.
It would have stunk more if someone had actually seen it. In terms of reaching an audience, the Peanuts set got out less than Howard Hughes in his Las Vegas years.
The 33-card Peanuts "Preview Collection" could have been assembled by anyone with a pair of scissors and a set of Crayolas. Consider the card selection: Picture of Charles Schulz, "first beagle on the moon" panel, Linus in the pumpkin patch, Boy Named Charlie Brown poster, scene from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, Snoopy on doghouse, Lucy holding football, Charlie Brown tied to tree by kite, Linus sucking thumb.
The entire set – it hurts too much to call it a set, so instead we'll just call it "the entire box of cards" – is like that. It's a Cliff's Notes version of a trading-card set shorn of continuity or meaning or any possible reason to buy the product.
You look at this set and wonder: This was Peanuts? This was the most popular and influential comic strip in history – bigger than Dick Tracy, Pogo, L'il Abner, and Little Orphan Annie combined? This sired the most-watched TV special in history, a No. 1 pop single, two balloons in the Macy's parade, a long-running Broadway musical, a dozen best-selling books, several movies, a blimp?
It's not possible. It has less oomph than The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
At this point, after viewing the laundry list of sins this product commits against trading-card orthodoxy, you ask, as any reasonable reader of a column titled "Handful O'Landfill" ought: Who is responsible for this mockery?
Uh, that would be Tuff Stuff Productions. The then-publishers of one of trading-card collecting's most popular periodicals. An organization founded and staffed by trading-card experts.
Let me say right here that I'm sure Tuff Stuff Productions did not think up the Peanuts Preview Collection itsownself. It undoubtedly had help from the Schulz estate and United Features Syndicate, the same sort of help Bugs Bunny provided Yosemite Sam when he was in a dark room full of dynamite and asked for a match. Licensors can be helpful like that.
But some of the blame also falls on the Stuffers for not walking away or at least threatening very strongly to walk away from a promising license when the desired end product is a box of cards.
Despite all of this -- and there is a whole lot of this to not spite, starting with its relentless trivialization of one of the most important culture-transforming phenomena ever crammed into four panels on the funny pages -- the Peanuts Preview Collection does not represent the ultimate manifestation of the screwed-up license. Not as long as Valiant Comics are in the world.
Rest easy, Snoopy. X-O Manowar is on the case.
I now realize the fallacy of that comparison, in that there were so many other licenses that were Dunkirk – and not merely Dunkirk, but Dunkirk at the Bay of Pigs – compared to those two.
There was Star Wars, reduced by Topps to the level of Shaun Cassidy and Welcome Back, Kotter. There were the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, jacked up to levels of chase and expense by Upper Deck so that the only people who could afford them were the Expense-Account Kids Of The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills. There was Marilyn Monroe, which was sold out to someone who knew how to make good-looking cards but whose idea of how to distribute them was – uh, can we get back to you on that? There were rock 'n' roll cards, which will be covered in more detail in a later column, but suffice it to say that at their core they make as much sense as a Stadium Club Anarchists set; Dr. Suess and The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes and Tom and Jerry, which were never made on any scale but should have been; and Dinotopia and Pagemaster and Campbell's Soup and Angel and Berestain Bears and stop me somebody, which never should have been made but were.
Honestly. Never a day went by at good ol' Professional Hobby Consultants when the phone didn't ring with some breathless printer on the other end over the moon at the news that they had just received a license to make UPS or Australian Box Lacrosse or Cop Rock cards and asking us what the hell they should do with it.
"Ask for your guarantee back," we would tell them, which is one of the reasons why I drive a 16-year-old Volvo.
And then we have Peanuts.
The formula doesn't hold your feet to the fire too often, but one thing it absolutely insists on is that you never sell the cards as a complete set.
Think about it: If your whole business model is based on repeat purchases, why would you sell your entire product in one chunk – no matter what you charge for it? It would be like buying a Honda and getting not only this Honda but the next three, all for not much more than the price of one.
Hand-in-hand with that, like The Black-Eyed Peas and sampling software, is the Schwarzenegger-like recommendation that you put something in the product occasionally to keep people coming back to buy more. They're usually called "chase cards," though we used to call them "pretend-valuable cards."
If you don't sell your entire set in one chunk and your pretend-valuable cards are oooey enough, you might even be able to sell Image vs. Valiant. But don't bet the pressure-sensitive labeling machine on it.
Needless to say, the Peanuts set ignored both these venerable pearls of life-enhancing wisdom. And the product stunk.
The 33-card Peanuts "Preview Collection" could have been assembled by anyone with a pair of scissors and a set of Crayolas. Consider the card selection: Picture of Charles Schulz, "first beagle on the moon" panel, Linus in the pumpkin patch, Boy Named Charlie Brown poster, scene from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, Snoopy on doghouse, Lucy holding football, Charlie Brown tied to tree by kite, Linus sucking thumb.
The entire set – it hurts too much to call it a set, so instead we'll just call it "the entire box of cards" – is like that. It's a Cliff's Notes version of a trading-card set shorn of continuity or meaning or any possible reason to buy the product.
You look at this set and wonder: This was Peanuts? This was the most popular and influential comic strip in history – bigger than Dick Tracy, Pogo, L'il Abner, and Little Orphan Annie combined? This sired the most-watched TV special in history, a No. 1 pop single, two balloons in the Macy's parade, a long-running Broadway musical, a dozen best-selling books, several movies, a blimp?
It's not possible. It has less oomph than The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
At this point, after viewing the laundry list of sins this product commits against trading-card orthodoxy, you ask, as any reasonable reader of a column titled "Handful O'Landfill" ought: Who is responsible for this mockery?
Uh, that would be Tuff Stuff Productions. The then-publishers of one of trading-card collecting's most popular periodicals. An organization founded and staffed by trading-card experts.
Let me say right here that I'm sure Tuff Stuff Productions did not think up the Peanuts Preview Collection itsownself. It undoubtedly had help from the Schulz estate and United Features Syndicate, the same sort of help Bugs Bunny provided Yosemite Sam when he was in a dark room full of dynamite and asked for a match. Licensors can be helpful like that.
But some of the blame also falls on the Stuffers for not walking away or at least threatening very strongly to walk away from a promising license when the desired end product is a box of cards.
Despite all of this -- and there is a whole lot of this to not spite, starting with its relentless trivialization of one of the most important culture-transforming phenomena ever crammed into four panels on the funny pages -- the Peanuts Preview Collection does not represent the ultimate manifestation of the screwed-up license. Not as long as Valiant Comics are in the world.
Rest easy, Snoopy. X-O Manowar is on the case.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
You're In America. Speak Japanese.
Trading cards are unlike most other collectibles in that part of the enjoyment of having them comes in reading them.
Guitars are not like that, unless you’re into the number 10. Neither are most records, especially the ones with poetry, though I make exceptions for the ones with liner notes by Leonard Feather, Robert Simon, Rich Kienzle, or Cub Koda.
End tables, sewing machines, vases, Currier & Ives prints, cigars, wine, and Nudie suits are likewise light on the metonymies and compound modifiers.
Comic books are the No. 1 exception except when they’re slabbed and the only way you can read them is by cracking the slab and destroying their collectibility for all time, or at least until you fork over another hundred to have them regraded.
Seriously. That’s like buying Frosted Spooners and not eating them because you don’t want to mess with the big, bold “Malt-O-Meal” splashed across the front.
Baseball cards are closer to comic books than anything previously mentioned, and they have the added advantage of being one page front and back, meaning their deathless prose can be savored and their card-head preserved even in tamper-resistant Lexan.
After all, where would the Sam Bowens ’64 Topps card be without the immortal words, “Sam hit .324 for Bluefield of the Appalachian League in 1960,” splashed across the back?
Though “the older the better” is an adage that normally applies to baseball cards, it doesn’t always apply to the writing on baseball cards. Even as cardmakers tossed back a few on the party bus to Chapter 7 they continued to fling a few sous in the direction of quality writing on card backs. From NFL Books’ contributions to Pro Set to Keith Olbermann’s work on the “En Fuego” chase set to the anonymous souls (who can remain anonymous no longer: they included myself and Jim McLauchlin) who delivered the vintage goods on Fleer’s Goudey remakes, top-notch writing was one of the hallmarks of sports cards from the early edge of the Handful O’Landfill era, before it was all about the foil.
There are four main requirements for good writing on card backs: Eschew surplusage, avoid clichés, accentuate the positive, and work in at least one pertinent fact per back. So while “Opposing hitters teed off on Alfredo’s 70-mph fastball, helping account for last season’s 3-17 mark” would not be good card-back writing, “Alfredo is counting on an improved changeup to help him build on last year’s three-win total” would be good card-back writing.
Oh, and one more requirement: Backs should be in English, please.
Let’s be clear about this. Nobody’s getting all bumper-stickery here. This is not about what is or is not the official language of the United States. This is about what needs to be written on baseball-card backs so people can read them.
Canadian hockey cards get a pass because they’re Canadian, they’re bilingual by law, and because “la rousse est la taille d'une rondelle qualifiée de gestionnaire” (“the big redhead is a skilled puck-handler”) lets you make neat herking noises in your throat.
Donruss and Fleer baseball sets from the early ‘80s do not get a pass, because while they clearly utilize English words, they use them in a random fashion, much like Sarah Palin.
Also not getting a pass is the Baseball Magazine set from 1991, because it’s in Japanese. I mean, all in Japanese, except for the player name, team, position, and the words “Baseball Magazine.”
This gives Baseball Magazine a license to ill, because while it’s quite clear that Mickey Abarbanel’s raison d’être for being in a baseball-card set is that he went 13-4 with Fox Cities of the Midwest League in 1966 (“Mickey a 13-4 avec les villes Fox de la Ligue du Midwest en 1966”) there is nothing similar for Kozo Shohda other than “Baseball Magazine” – unless you read Japanese.
Even then it’s not a sure thing. Who knows what’s an appropriate reason for being for a Nippon Ham Fighter? Kozo “I Shohda been a contender” could be in the set because his hands look like turtle doves when they are holding a bat (“宮城の手がバットを持って鳩亀のように見える”).
Oh, the cards have one more phrase in English: A box filled with Japanese characters is headlined with the words “Did you know?” Actually, I did not know that 浩三は、芸者ので、
Here, I think, is where the importers of the Baseball Magazine set (which may have been Upper Deck, though memory escapes me) made a misstep. Instead of seeing that 99.63 percent of the American card-buying public does not read Japanese, they saw it as 99.63 percent of the American card-buying public does not not read Japanese, and they forged ahead.
The notion that American collectors might want Japanese baseball cards rose with Hideo Nomo and fell before Ichiro Suzuki hit these shores. It’s a shame. We might want to know that 服がなければイチローは、東京と大阪を結ぶ新幹線に似ている (“Without clothes Ichiro resembles the bullet train linking Tokyo and Osaka”).
On second thought, they probably said the same thing about Mickey Abarbanel.
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