It's Wild! It's A Card!

Nothing like a sheriff’s sale to jog the old memory.

Reading the back (way back) issues of The Brill Report has brought on the flashbacks big-time. Many of the bit players whose names (and cards) had escaped me over the last 20 years have come charging back like William Perry astride a donkey.

There’s the Ted Williams Card Company, a high-concept piece of sports-marketing detritus that was a better idea than the Sandy Consegura Card Company, but only marginally. (We shall write about the TWCC at greater length when we clean out the vacuum-cleaner bag.)

There are the Assets phone cards from Classic and Kayo’s America’s Cup set, part of Kayo’s grand scheme to corner the market on crappy licenses for quasi-sports. After all, nothing says “misguided” like a 24-karat-gold card of Dennis Conner.

And then there’s Wild Card. I had forgotten about Wild Card for several reasons, but mainly because its product was so godawful in concept and execution.

Okay, so the very basic, basic concept behind Wild Card wasn’t godawful. It was even a wee bit inspired, in a self-referential sort of way.

Start with the name: Wild Card. Roughly defined, a wild card is something of value – interest, at least – that appears on an unexpected basis. How much of the Handful O’Landfill era was built around that conceit? The more you buy, the higher up the theoretical ladder you can climb. Buy enough – and we mean enough enough – and you can get a genuine authentic jersey-fragment card of Browning Nagle.[1]

With Wild Card, that conceit even extended into the base set. Each Wild Card card (is that right?) had a point value printed on the front. Most were one-point cards[2]. There were proportionally fewer five-, 10-, 25-, 50-, and 100-point cards, and far fewer 1,000-point cards. You could, if you had a masochistic streak as wide as the Monongahela, collect 100 one-point cards of Amp Lee or some other schlubby NFL draft pick and trade them for a 100-point card. Collect enough point cards of a given player and you could trade them in for an autograph or something similar, though not anything useful, like a washer-dryer. It was like Let’s Make A Deal with the base set as the zonks.

Again, Wild Card, not a terrible idea for a card set. Certainly worse ideas have been allowed onto the market. (We’re talking to you, Pinnacle Inside.) The problem with Wild Card was that the execution was exactly that. Wild Card took this idea out back, blindfolded it, offered it a cigarette, and blasted it to smithereens with some antediluvian fowling piece lifted off of Sons of Guns: Winnemucca.

The logo was ripped – flames, ragged edge, and all – out of a third-grader’s social-studies notebook. The pictures were taken at night with a cell phone, a feat made only slightly less remarkable by the fact that the cell-phone camera hadn’t been invented yet. The backs were written in Twitter on a Magnadoodle by Johnny Manziel. The remaining graphics were designed, if you want to call it that, by people who view a glittery puffy sticker of a goldfish as the pinnacle of modern art.

In a trading-card world full of Star Pics cards of Really Obscure Draft Picks Taken From a Long, Long Ways Away and Traks racing cards of tire-changers reading newspapers, this was the nadir. If you took the world’s worst tattoo artist, gave them a Barbie Fabulous Fuzzy Digital Camera and a nail, and told them to create a card set, they would have come up with something better than Wild Card.

Here’s another reason I had forgotten Wild Card: Wild Card’s card-producing lifespan ran from mid-1991 to late 1992, with a quick breather in mid-1992. I got engaged in 1991 and married in '92, and why would I want to sully two otherwise perfectly wonderful years with memories of some perfectly awful trading-card sets?

Speaking of awful, Wild Card’s coup was landing the license for the World League of American Football, the League Subsequently (And Oh-So-Misleadingly) Known As NFL Europe, the league with the most spot-on acronym in pro sports (WLAF, with the accent on the “laf”), the league that bedecked the fabled capitals of western civilization with teams full of CFL rejects named Amir Rasul, Mike Prugle, Ron Sancho, Cornell Burbage, and Joe Howard-Johnson, the league that out of nearly a decade of grinding effort and vein-popping concentration gave the NFL … Stan Gelbaugh.

It’s a reasonable match. If you want it bad enough you can have a Wild Card WLAF card of Falanda Newton. But I don’t know anyone who wants that bad enough.

About that sheriff’s sale: In late 1994, and without explanation for how Wild Card spent 1993 and most of ’94[3], a sheriff’s sale was held in Cincinnati to dispose of Wild Card’s assets. I can’t imagine what was in the sale – I’m guessing thousands of cards of Will Furrer, Tommy Maddox, Siran Stacy, Darryl Williams, Tommy Vardell, Quentin Coryatt, Ty Detmer, and David Klingler, with a couple of Babe Laufenberg autos as lagniappe – and how anyone could call them “assets” with a straight face, but Bob Brill pulled it off. At least, there weren’t phlegm stains on my Brill Report from Bob coughing up a lung in laughter.

It’s a very real possibility that they held the sheriff’s sale and no one came, meaning that if you ever get arrested in the Cincinnati area, while they’re slapping the cuffs on you and the officer reaches into his pocket and pulls out a card, instead of, “You have the right to remain silent,” you may hear, “Former Packers signal-caller Anthony Dilweg is hoping for big things at the helm of the Montreal Machine.”

At that point you may just want to plead guilty and be done with it.

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[1] Or this year’s Browning Nagle, Geno Smith.
[2] I’m doing this from memory, so I may mess up some of the details. But take my word for it: It really doesn’t matter.
[3] Beating the bushes for the next WLAF is a possibility.

POG Wonderful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who You Callin' A Harlo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you like them apples, Upper Deck?

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

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

Hope you enjoyed my post. Have a nice day.

Sincerely yours, Treetwalker

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

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

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

The Art of the Sheet

Advertising is becoming more vulgar, in case you hadn't noticed. K mart wasn't even attracting spiders to its stores until it rolled out a video called "Ship My Pants"; now I have it on good authority that spiders flock to K marts, and occasionally even bring their own fly guys. K mart followed up this Citizen Kane of quasi-vulgar, semi-viral disgusting-discount-store videos with another called "Big Gas Savings." So if K mart were writing this blog, the title of this post would just be the tip of the mushy brown iceberg. But since K mart has absolutely nothing to do with this blog aside from providing 85.2 million Topps Collectors' Edition boxed sets as lovely parting gifts, we return you to our regularly scheduled post.


I was checking out a rival blog at the behest of my buddy Sparky. I don’t do this often; I believe it’s a big ocean with more than enough complete ignorance of our existence to go around, and I won’t pick on yours if you won’t pick on mine. Besides, I gave up reading for Lent.

Anyway, this person’s blog basically ridicules the poses and designs found on individual cards. It’s a lot of fun and really well done and good for them, but I occasionally (okay, make that rarely) aspire to more.  I could spend the rest of my natural days, plus a few of the unnatural ones, shooting the fish in the bottom of that barrel. To me the aggregate is much more interesting. Any cardmaker is going to goober out a stool sample when faced with an 4-A shortstop who just was traded from the Astros to the Expos for Don Bosch and a player to be named later, or a product manager whose sister-in-law does this groovy painting thing where she imagines steroid-fueled sluggers as Shetland horses (“My Little Phony,” she calls it). It’s when an entire set or series of sets is redolent of the cattle barn at the Trempealeau County Fair that you have to question the motivation of the … uh, cow-makers.

Speaking of cows and their byproducts, leave us examine the promotional sheet issued by Fleer in 1993 to promote its football set. If you were around the business at all during the Handful O’Landfill era you remember these sheets and scores of others just like them. They were the main way cardmakers built demand for upcoming products. The idea was that the promo sheet would get out in quantities limited enough so that demand built for the promo sheet and its subsequent card set without the sheet being flat-out unobtainable. This was a tightrope much skinnier than the hawser Nik Wallenda strung across the Grand Canyon, and in the end most of the cardmakers wound up plunging into the abyss, with nothing to break their fall.[1]

In 1993 Fleer made two different football products – Ultra and this. In case you couldn’t tell, this was the base product. And while a lot of lips in those days were swearing that the base-level products got as much attention as the high-zoot stuff, a lot of hands were being held behind backs with fingers crossed.

There’s really nothing bad about these cards per se. In 1993, this passed for a pretty nice base set. Back then we were screaming for action shots – shots of football players playing football – that were in focus, and with the most prominent player in the photo being the player featured on the card.[2] We wanted full-color backs with something of interest on the flip side, stats that meant something and copy that wasn’t just conspicuous consumption of black ink. We also were minimalists when it came to graphics but we weren’t fanatics about it, though we were whole-namers and not fans of the last-name-only movement.

(Incidentally, this sheet is a perfect example of why we are not last-name-onlyites. The names of the players on this sheet are Young, Walker, Lohmiller, Greene, Heyward, Jones, Smith, and Byars. Two are Hall of Famers and instantly recognizable – Emmitt Smith and Steve Young. Three are recognizable if you were following football in 1993: Craig “Ironhead” Heyward, Kevin Greene, and Keith Byars. But Jones and Walker? Is that Adam Jones and Antoine Walker? Kenny Jones and Kenny “Sky” Walker? Homer Jones and Herschel Walker? Steve Jones and Scott Walker? Well, no; it’s Ernie Jones and Kenny “Ground” Walker, neither of whom spring immediately to mind when considering the NFL landscape of the early ‘90s. In fact, they are so unresponsive in the springing-immediately-to-mind department that I had to check their pulses, and then see who the heck they were. Ernie Jones caught 38 balls for four TDs in 1992, a performance that put him only 70 short of Sterling Sharpe for the league lead. Kenny “Non-Sky” Walker had 1.5 sacks in 1992, his last season in the league -- though, as his card back takes pains to remind us, he was the second deaf person to play in the NFL.)

So let’s recap the players that Fleer used to build a tidal wave of undeniable, irresistible demand for its namesake product among collectors:

·         Arguably the greatest running back of all time;

·         Arguably the greatest quarterback of all time;

·         A borderline Hall of Fame pass-rushing linebacker/defensive end;

·         A durable journeyman running back;

·         A pass-catching third-down specialist;

·         The fourth-best receiver on a 4-10 team;

·         A kicker; and

·         A defensive end who was pitched as the NFL’s wholly inadequate answer to Jim Abbott but was out of football after two years, 16 starts, and 4.5 sacks.

Well, there was also the centerpiece card reading “Fleer ’93 Football – A Game In Every Pack,” a semi-truthful statement when you consider that almost every NFL game has a couple of superstars, some decent players, some marginal guys, kickers, and someone who will be out of the league shortly.

The promo-card business is a crapshoot, as proven by the previously ridiculed cards of Scott Chiamparino and Kevin Morton. The whole enterprise looks even sillier through a 20-year lens. But even given all that, I would choose the ’93 Fleer football promo sheet over the Fleer Ultra X-Men promo sheet that came out a year later.
 

Don’t get me wrong: I like comics. I like comic art. I like comic art on trading cards. I like Marvel comics. I like the X-Men. I like comic art of the X-Men on trading cards. I like comic art of the X-Men on trading cards with a side of fries to go with that shake. But I do not like this promo sheet, Sam I Am.

Here’s why: Look at this sheet. Where do your eyes go? If your eyes are like mine, they go into the back of your head and stay there until it’s safe for them to come out again. There’s so much to look at that you don’t look at anything, and everything is a different color. Beast’s blue is different from Angel’s blue which is different from Iceman’s blue which is different from the blue in the center of the card that serves as a background for the product logo in – you guessed it – a different shade of blue. Hulk Green is different from the ectoplasmic green that serves as the background for the X-Men Gold Team cards, which are, yes, green. There’s Magneto red and Bishop red and Archangel purple and Jean Grey pink (which really, really ought to be a contradiction) and two Storms that don’t really look much like one another, since one looks like a possessed Lady Gaga in a silver bodysuit and the other looks like a possessed Beyonce in a silver bodysuit.[3]

I could have cut this sheet into nine pieces and ridiculed each one separately, but had I done that there would have been nothing to ridicule. This box of Cracker Jack would have contained eight nice-looking comic art cards and a prize.

Sometimes we get so engrossed in the search for stupidity that we overlook the excellence. Sometimes the stupidity is in the presentation. And given that I’ve just spent 1,200 words talking about Fleer promo sheets, sometimes the fricking stupidity is right here.

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[1] More or less. As my son observed while we watched Wallenda battle the winds and praise the Lord, “He’s got something to break his fall. Rocks.”
[2] Seems obvious I know, but even Jim and Sparky would be amazed at how many times this didn’t happen.

[3] Neither being a stretch, sartorially or cerebrally.

The So-Called Collectible of My So-Called Life

In the late 1800s, when horsecars were giving way to streetcars and horses were yielding to horseless carriages, New York City took to putting horses’ heads on trolleys in an attempt to dupe the horses into thinking these new contraptions were actually horse-related and not the robotic vacuums of another day.

 

The horses would have none of it, and good for the horses. But it wasn’t exactly unraveling the genome for a horse to determine that a 16-wheeled, wooden-bodied, anticlimbered thing with windows, seats, a uniformed attendant, and a big, clangy bell was not a fellow traveler.

 

The point for this column is that new technology doth make fools of us all, and because none of us are able to fully discern the extent to which a new technology might break us out of our habit box, we clothe the new stuff in the old stuff to make it less threatening at the same time we dress up the old stuff to make it look more like new technology despite its absence of, you know, new technology.

 

I had this conversation today with the head of marketing for a small quasi-tech company that plays in the same space as Apple, Microsoft, Verizon, and other howitzers, only with people instead of microchips and algorithms. “We’re doing the same thing that the phone company did 30 years ago,” he said, “and we’re trying to pass it off as groundbreaking.”

 

It is in that spirit of half-truthiness that we present the 1995 Super Slam this is my life™ series.

 

 

The coming of computers and the rise of the internet prompted all sorts of horse-on-the-streetcar moments in the Handful O’Landfill omniverse. Upper Deck and Topps experimented with “virtual cards” that included perhaps a scrap of video and some pseudo-collectibility. Topps created a “stock exchange” for its eTopps cards, and if you find it ludicrous that people would pay real money for a computer image of a nonexistent card that could in theory be sold in its nonexistent computer-image form to someone else at a real-money profit to you, you’re among friends.

 

The interesting thing about these virtual cards of Midre Cummings was that for the most part they were designed to do exactly what a real card of Midre Cummings would do, which is lay there inert. If you interacted with paper cards by reading their stats, putting them in alphabetical order by team, and checking them off the checklist, you had far more up-close-and-personal contact with them than you could possibly have with one of the online models.[1]

 

Online cards have largely passed from the firmament, leaving behind only slivers of RAM, but other cards from the low-tech-dressed-up-as-high-tech side of the street were not so lucky. We’ve touched on some of these cards and their pathetic attempts to show demi-realistic action or create the impression of perspective or depth. Sportflics, Upper Deck holograms, Donruss Die-Cuts, SkyBox E-Motion, and the Pro Set Young Indiana Jones 3-D cards all failed to one degree or another. To the extent that any of these products are collectible, it’s not because they created the sensation of reality or movement out of pictures on cardboard; it’s because they were so poorly received in the marketplace that they’re nearly (but not nearly enough) nonexistent.

 

In that hierarchy, the Super Slam this is my life™ series might be the nearly nonexistentest of the bunch. I have not seen any of these outside of the samples you see here, not that I go looking for them. As the quite late Steve Goodman astutely observed, “Don’t go lookin’ for trouble/Trouble will find you.” And in my world, trouble takes the shape of a die-cut Jack McDowell set on top of a picture of Jack McDowell.

 

Members of our department had to assemble custom boxes the other day for a promotional mailing, and I was amazed at the ingenuity in design that can turn a flat piece of cardboard into a tight, solid box with a parcel shelf, a goodie well, and a cutout for a USB drive. I do not have the same sort of admiration for the Super Slam this is my life™ series.

 

I suppose my feeling has to do with the relentless low-tech approach followed in creating these. As mentioned before, the Super Slam this is my life™ series overlays a player photo with the same photo only die-cut, and then encases the Piazza sandwich in a heavy silver checkerboard border. The McDowell "variant" (if you can call it that, since it has just as much claim to being the original deal as the Piazza card) features two heavy black borders surrounding a heavier silver checkerboard border. Regardless of your choice of variant (and as far as variants go, I prefer Hasil Adkins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nz9jR_AuLM), these are what Action Packed cards would have looked like if they had been designed by A-Ha and not some grumpy dude from Chicago.

 

The card back is scarcely larger than a normal card, but is packed to the gunwales with unreadable answers to unreal semi-questions, including “Earned Money As a Kid.” In Piazza’s case, he earned money as a kid driving truck, which if it wasn’t one of those battery-powered John Deere kiddie trucks is plumb full of interesting legal implications.

 

Is there more? Of course there is. Once you whip out the 10x loupe you learn that among Jack McDowell’s notable ancestors is Eddie Keane, a one-armed minor-league second baseman, and that his favorite song is his own composition called “Reinvent.”[2]

 

Obviously the Super Slam this is my life™ series did nothing to stop the computer/internet/eBay onslaught. In that regard, it wasn’t someone holding a flower standing in front of a tank in Tienamen Square. It was an ant clutching a grain of pollen perched on a flower held by someone standing in front of a tank in Tienamen Square. It got squished beyond recognition, but the tank? The tank rolled on.

 

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[1] This relationship between hard and vapor copy is virtually identical to most print magazines and their on-pad counterparts. While the on-pad magazine offers the most potential for interaction, most actual interaction takes place between the reader of a print magazine and the printed piece itself. And call me a fuddy-duddy, but I have yet to see the virtual magazine that can be rolled up and used in a pinch to cudgel a trespassing wasp.

[2] This revelation, along with the facts that McDowell’s favorite color is magenta and his favorite place to eat is Chicago’s Taco & Burrito Palace, is tempered by McDowell’s statements that his favorite athlete is Roger Clemens and his favorite show is American Gladiators. A complex one, that Black Jack.

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.