I was watching the Odd Couple and Felix’s brother offers him a job in Buffalo at his bubblegum factory. Felix is in research and development and Felix’s great idea is “bubblegum cards for kids that don’t like sports.” He has a line of opera and ballet bubblegum card among others. (He also wants brussel sprout flavoured gum and putting a wet wipe in each bubblegum pack but I digress…)
Anyway my question is does such a thing exist. I remember as a kid we collected baseball cards and I guess there were card for football and such but I really don’t recall them.
If such kinds of card exist what are they?
(I am not sure if this is the right forum so MODS feel free to move it if necessary)
If you don’t count WoW, Pokeman, Yugi-O and the like as sports, kids do collect them. When I was a kid, there were trading cards of the Osmond Brothers and the Jackson5, as well as the ones with the parodies of household brands. Oh, yeah, and the Garbage Pail Kids.
I didn’t (and still don’t) like sports, but I still sorta collected baseball cards for a while. You didn’t have to know who Player McPlaysalot was to know that his card was considered valuable and you should hang onto it or get a good trade for it. You just needed someone who had a recent Beckett’s guide or something similar.
Also, I collected the aformentioned Garbage Pail Kids, and occasionally cards for movies like Star Wars or Superman.
I also remember Star Wars cards. Some of them had part of a picture on the back and you had the set you had a poster sizes pic. There were also the typical statistics on the back of some (space ship info for example)
When I was a kid I collected bubblegum cards with stills from monster movies given funny captions. I also had a collection of Beatles bubblegum cards. In the present day there are hundreds of lines of non-sports trading cards out there, based on movies and TV series, comic books, pop music, porn, etc., although they are no longer packaged with bubblegum.
There were also Mars Attacks! bubblegum card sets in the 1960s, except I don’t think there were exactly called Mars Attacks!. The aliens in the movie Mars Attacks! were based almost exactly on the aliens in the card set. There was a thread in Cafe Society about these cards within the last few months.
Also, there were Wacky Packages cards sets that were huge in the 70s and early 80s. They were revived a few years ago, and new sets are being made to this day (their website is worth perusing … really nostalgic for some of us )
EDIT: whaddaya know … the Mars Attacks! cards were, in fact, called Mars Attacks!.
In the 80’s (and presumably the 70’s) everything had card sets. I collected baseball, football and basketball but I also had Michael Jackson, ET, Gremlins and Pee Wee Herman cards. The big big big thing when I was a kid was Garbaga Pail Kids.
Barrington Cards bills itself as the largest non-sports card collectible outlet.
They appear to do just recent card sets, though. Over the past 100+ years cards were issued on every subject imaginable. I remember I had cards of famous railroad trains as a kid. (Planes were still pretty exotic in those far-off days.) Cards of the Presidents were also pretty common.
Neither of these sites has what I remember, but here are some examples.
The ones I linked to are from the 30s and 50s. As I said, they go back to the 19th century.
The card market in the 70s would not have resembled today’s any more than the computer market would have. Opera cards would have been a comic exaggeration but non-sports cards definitely existed.
I was going to bring up Wacky Packages, but I see they’ve already been mentioned. When I was in elementary school around 1975, they were huge. Every single one of us kids was collecting them. I still remember “Raw Goo” (a parady of Ragu).
Throughout the 90s, various comic book companies licenced - or, I’m sure, in some cases, created themselves* - cards based on their characters. There was even a line of superhero cards meant to introduce characters who were, as yet, unpublished. (Few of which ever actually materialized as actual comics at any point.) Not that this started in the 90s - I’ve seen a set of Batman cards from the 60s (art wasn’t good - Joker looked like Ronald Reagan).
These ranged from cheap-o cards which were only glossy on one side (think a cereal box), to top level ones with holographic chase cards (which were very popular at the time).
That reminds me, there were also a crossover of sorts - Upper Deck released several series of Loony Toons cards featuring the characters as baseball players, which told a story when you took all the cards in order. (Why I was reminded of this - they had holographic chase cards, too.) They were awesome.
Topps, for instance, had a comic company for a few years in the 90s - I’m not sure if they ever released any cards based on their comics (though I think they did, at least as bonuses included with the books - also common at the time), and they only released a few comics based on Mars Attacks, as far as adapting their card sets.
In the '60s I bought Batman cards featuring photos from the TV series. I recall that some of the backs were sections of larger puzzles that you could put together when you collected the right cards.
People have covered alternatives already, but I just wanted to point out that, in my childhood, MOST “bubble gum card” weren’t sports cards.In the earkly 960s, when I was a grade school kid, we had:
James Bond Cards
President Kennedy Cards
Beatle Cards
Civil War Horror cards the Precursor to the “Mars Attacks Cards” Mars Attacks! Cards (Yes, that is what they were called, I’m the guy who started that other thread) Batman Cards
Monster Cards (at least two different series, one with AIP movies) Jack Davis Joke Cards
Whacky Book Covers
Monster Stickers
Dinosaur Cards
Space Exploration Cards
Gilligan’s Island CardsWhacky Packages Stickers
Monster Joke Cards
Monster Movie Flip-Books (These were cool – they had brief svcnes from Universal Monster Movies that you could see move when you flipped through them) "Cedar" Sign Cards
Man From U.N.C.L.E. cards
I’m sure there were many more. In 1969 I collected almost the entire series of Apollo 11 Cards.
Not since the early 90s - I’m not sure if Topps has stopped completely (haven’t bought, or even seen, cards by them for a long time), but most of the cards I bought in the 90s - lacked gum. If not all…I’m actually not sure if any of the cheap-o Marvel cards I bought in wax paper packages (rather than plastic or foil, like they’re in now) had gum, but MOST of the cards I bought in the 90s were plastic/foil wrapped, and had no gum.
Because nobody wanted the gum, and it could, potentially, damage the cards, harming resaleability for purely collector cards, and usability for playing cards (a stain, or scratch from the stick of gum would be a great mark).
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