Tron Game Tip #4

Here's another tip for the vintage Tron arcade game. While the lightcycle level was the most relentless level, I think the Tank Maze was probably the most vicious. A few levels into the game the tanks begin to rocket along, firing everything they've got at you. I'm not sure I've ever been past the third level of this stage of the game.

Tron Game Tip #3

This is technically Gape Tip #4 ... but astute readers might have noted that the previous #3 was am accidental repeat of #1. I was asleep at the recognizer that day and apologize.

This tip shows the "break out" style level of Tron that challenged players to blast a hole through the MCP shield before it descended onto your character. It was harder than it looked.

Jaws 2 trading cards

Here's a scan of the Jaws 2 trading card series from 1978. I'm going to go ahead an apologize for the size of this file, because it violates most forms of Internet etiquette. It's a half-hearted apology, though, because I love me some 1970s Jaws.

The image contains all 70+ cards in the series. Click on it for a closer look.

Jaws 2: Sticker Set

Here's a complete set of images from Topps series of Jaws 2 trading cards from 1978. One of eleven stickers was randomly inserted into each pack.

To fill out the odd numbered design I've included an image from the back of the stickers which explains how to use them. I'm assuming sticker technology was new in 1978, with the recent invention of glue and paper. That or Topps thought their customers were idiots.

Tron Game Tip #2

Here are more tips for ... well, not "beating" the Tron arcade game. I don't think any arcade game from those days could be "won," but tips like these could help you get more play for your money.

To your left is a sticker released with the 1982 Tron trading card series. The front shows the light cycle game (duh) while the back offers advice on how not to go out like Clu. You know, the guy in yellow who screamed like a little girl right before he crashed and derezzed.

Click the images to get a closer look.

Jaws 3-D Theater ... DAY 9

Bad Idea # 175: Bringing a bamboo fishing pole to a shark fight.

Jaws 3-D Theater ... DAY 8

9 out of 10 sharks agree: Dolphins are assholes.

Jaws 3-D Theater ... DAY 6

With special guest stars Johnny Quest and Bill Mumy.

Jaws 3-D Theater ... DAY 5

I think the whale wants to join in.

Jaws 3-D Theater ... DAY 4

That look of abject horror on the swimmer's face makes me laugh. Does that make me a bad person?

Jaws 3-D Theater ... DAY 3

Fish are friends, not food. Sea World employees are still on the menu, though.

Jaws 3-D Theater ... DAY 2

This card brought to you by the good people at Starkist.

"Starkist ... it's dolphin safe, but when it comes to great white sharks you're on your own."

Tron Game Tip #1

Tron had some of the geekiest merchandise ever produced for a movie. And I mean that in a good way.

In addition to the Gummi Bear-influenced action figures, rip-cord powered lightcycles, trading cards, hand-held LCD games and the rest of it was a series of trading cards from Donruss.

With these cards was a small sticker set which included tips for the arcade game on the reverse side. I've scanned this series of stickers, both front and back, and will be posting them in coming weeks. Here's the first:

Trading Card Crazy

For the last year I've gone mad with power concerning my new-found ability to acquire classic trading cards at lightning speed.

I didn't get bitten by a radioactive bug or anything. A combination of factors — specifically, the economy's tailspin combined with a general lack of interest in traditional collectibles — has made trading cards cheap and available.

How cheap? How about $4 for a set of Twin Peaks trading cards. Or $6 for a set of Tron cards. Or $5 for a factory sealed set of Robocop 2 cards.

While I'm not holding out hope that I'll ever be able to afford a set of Six Million Dollar Man cards, I've been very fortunate in my recent hunts. My latest trophy arrived today: a set of Rocky Horror Picture Show trading cards from 1980. A set of Star Trek: The Motion Picture stickers ought to be in my mailbox tomorrow.

If you're not interested in actually hunting for these cards and just want a vendor with decent inventory and inexpensive prices, make sure you check out Marchant Non-Sport Cards. While they participate in Ebay auctions, I've found their direct-sales prices to be so reasonable that auctions are often unnecessary.

Jaws 3-D Theater ... DAY 1

I've been scanning some classic trading card this week, which I plan to share here soon. On my stack of crazy crap to scan was a complete set of Jaws-3 cards. Let's face it, though ... the movie is crap.

But it's not unredeemable crap. You remember how the backs of old trading cards were filled with puzzles, on-going story narratives and lots of other stuff nobody really cared about? The cards for Jaws 3 were one of the rare exceptions where the backs of the cards were more fun than the fronts.

On the back of each card in this series was 3-D line art re-telling the movie in a way that was actually interesting. Each pack of cards came with a miniature set of 3-D glasses.

If you're hanging around this site, odds are you've got access to a set of red/blue 3-D glasses. Go get them and check out the first installment of Jaws 3-D Theater!

The Cost of Doing Business

Comic book artist* Chrissie Zullo was recently commissioned to create sketch art for a Star Wars Galaxy trading cards subset.

Funny story ... she was paid $1 per card for a set of 100 original sketch cards. These cards are now selling for as much as $549.99 each on Ebay. She makes her sentiments plain on her Facebook page:

"My LEGO Snowtrooper Star Wars Sketch Card is going for $550 on eBay. Suddenly, I want it back now."

This situation is part of the long-standing difficulty between professionals and the collectors market. Many artists are leery of dealing with collectors because a few of us are ... what's the term? Oh yeah, "Outright Fucking Crooks."

Michael Golden has been bilked by scammers and, at one time, stopped selling his original comic pages to anyone (his policy might have changed, but I don't think it has.) Steve Ditko is another who'd rather toss his pages in the garbage rather than see collectors get rich of his work.

On the other hand, without collectors there would be no demand for products like trading cards that require the work of commercial artists. No collectors = no market ... no market = no jobs. And it's fair to say that whoever is selling these cards on Ebay has a right to get whatever they can for them as long as it's all legal and above board (which the referenced Ebay auctions appear to be.)

I don't see a solution to this mess. Unless her contract demands otherwise, Zullo could always whip up a few cards and underbid these Ebay vendors right out of business. And that might be fun to watch.

(*Wow, that title sounds limiting, doesn't it? She's actually quite an accomplished artist and not the kind of person usually paid to draw guys in capes and shiny underwear.)

Wax Paper and Bubblegum

Early last year I came across a great website that I thought I'd share.
I'd been interested in tracking down some of the old non-sport trading cards I'd loved as a kid (as well as a few I'd only heard about.) Naturally, Ebay was my first stop.
Now the prices at Ebay are erratic, to say the least. If you get two people determined to win an item, it can often sell for far more than it's worth. At other times, coincidence can end in an item selling far beneath its true value. Those are the ways of auctions.
I forget what card set I was bidding on, but I eventually got a good deal on something or other from a store that was selling its merchandise at Ebay. And then I found another great deal. Before long, I decided to eliminate the middleman and go straight to their online ".com" store.
You know those trading card sets I've mentioned in previous posts? They came from Marchant Non-Sport Cards in St. Louis. I've managed to get many, many (too many?) sets are cards at amazing prices. My most recent purchase was a sale on a complete set of Star Wars cards from the 1970s ... a set that included the blue, red, yellow, green and orange series. And I paid less than 50 cents per card for a complete set of 330 cards fresh from the wax packs. And I so didn't deserve it.

Anyway, check the store out. They've extended their current sale for a few more days.

(NOTE: The image at the top is taken from the wax wrapper of the original Star Wars Topps series in 1977. It's sized to be used as wallpaper for 1024x768 resolution.)

Wax Packs: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

So, I've been re-discovering my love of "non-sport" trading cards in recent weeks.
As it turns out, these cards aren't worth much these days, with only a few exceptions. Many of these cards I had as a child, but haven't seen them in 20-25 years. My memories of them are still vivid — such as walking down to the local Junior Market to buy Star Wars or Jaws 2 wax packs — and it's surprising how well I still remember the small details about these cards.
What's also surprising are some of the things I didn't notice.
This is one of the few non-sport series I can think of that relies on such as dark design. Later in the year Topps would also adopt black borders into the design of the Jaws 2 series, and it works pretty well for both movies. It also makes them stand out from the blue/red color schemes that were so prevelant because, I presume, of the success of the Star Wars cards.
As a kid, I was a little weirded out by the "Starring Melinda Dillon" card in the CEOT3K series. The lighting was strange, and it was so tightly cropped that it was hard to tell exactly what was happening in it. It looked overtly sexual for some reason (I don't know why.) I came across this card, as well as the Teri Garr "actress" card when something occurred to me ... where was the Richard Dreyfuss card? I flipped quickly to the set only to find that the star of the movie appears nowhere in the entire set. There were probably legal reasons for this, but it's still damn bizarre.

REVIEW:

Cover Card: (0 out of 5)
Nope. The series kicks off with a #1 card depicting a parked fight plane from the 1940s. Yawn.

Design: (8 out of 10)
There's a lot to be said for simplicity. The front design never intereferes with the photography. In fact, the dark borders actually make the color in the cards that much more vivid.

Photography: (8 out of 10)
Overall, pretty good. The series is hampered by the absence of Richard Dreyfuss, so the movie's lead character — and participant in the film's most important scenes — come off as a little awkward. Still, the solution is kind of fun ... LOTS of photos of the "mother ship" landing from the end of the movie make for some colorful, if slightly repetitive, cards. Oh, and Steven Speilberg ever gets a card!

Production: (8 out of 10)
The photos are pretty sharp, but nothing to get excited about. Considering how inconsistent Topps' photo quality was in its nonsports cards (which might have been the fault of the movie studios and not Topps,) CEOT3K is a solid, if unspectaular, set.

The Other Side: (4 out of 5)
Story synopsis, trivia and a puzzle. Pretty much what you'd expect from Topps in the late 1970s.

Stickers: (7 out of 10)
The stickers reprint many of the "mother ship" landing cards on slick paper. While they look nice and hold up well as an independent set, the problem of repitition in the cards is even more pronounced. Still, there are some nice SFX photos here, even if the alien card looks a little scary.

TOTAL: 70 PERCENT (35 out of 50)

Wax Packs: Battlestar Galactica

I'm one of those rare beasts who like the original and "re-imagined" Battlestar Galactica. While I'll concede that the new series is better on pretty much every level, there's still a lot to love about the original, which is more Flash Gordon/Star Wars than The Shield.
I had a lot of these cards as a child. Even had some of the Wonder Bread cards, which were printed in better card stock but lacked the crisp design of the Topps series.
And what a series it is! Somehow, BSG skirted the rules of non-sport trading cards by producing a massive 132-card set, with a 22-sticker subset. That's twice as large as any single-series of Star Wars cards.
BSG burned out quickly, though, and was gone by the end of it's first year. Naturally, it took the Topps series with it, and it would be many more years before BSG returned to trading cards.
This series also includes a few cards of my first boyhood crush, Maren Jenson. By all rights, that honor should have fallen on Batgirl, but Maren just happened to be in the right place at the right time, I guess.

REVIEW:

Cover Card: (0 out of 5)
Nope. The idea of the "cover card" hadn't really caught on yet at Topps. To add insult to injury, the first card in the set features Lorne Green striking a sexy pose.

Design: (8 out of 10)
Crips and bright, though a little generic. While the "cutline" is a little dull, I love how the logo is prominently displayed on the front of each card. (Weirdly, BSG had two different logos, one that appeared on merchandise like cards and comics, and the one that was used in the title credits.) And the design allows for both verticle and horizontal positioning without disruption.

Photography: (9 out of 10)
Just short of perfect. This is a case where a card set's reach exceeds its grasp. The cards were produced using (primarily) images from the pilot episode. By trying to squeeze 132 cards from a single film, some of the images get a little repetitive. On the plus side, though, there are a few promo photos used, apparently taken on the Universal Studios lot. Outside of Star Wars, it's hard to find "behind the scenes" cards. Remember what I said about Miss Jansen?

Production: (9 out of 10)
Pretty good. Not as sharp and clear as some of the Star Wars cards, but leaps and bounds beter than the photos in the second Return of the Jedi series. There are a handful of dark, grainy photos in this set, something that could have been corrected by reducing the series to 100 cards.

The Other Side: (4 out of 5)
A puzzle, trivia and details about the cast and crew. Good stuff, but nothing groundbreaking.

Stickers: (8 out of 10)
With a set this ambitious, ,there's bound to be some re-runs. Many (all?) of these stickers reproduce photos already found on the cards. That's not such a bad thing, though. Also, the stickers are based on the designs of the Star Trek/Star Wars stickers, so there's a great sense of lineage in this set.

TOTAL: 76 PERCENT (38 out of 50)

Wax Packs: On its way from Ebay

Here's a little something I recently picked up on Ebay. I don't see too many people talking about this (probably for fear of creating bidder competition,) but Topps has opened its vaults and is currently selling off a lot of amazing artifacts.

Among them were two little items I picked up: a 1980 4-color positive for the final card in The Empire Strikes Back series, and a 4-color positive for a trading card from the final "orange" series of the original Star Wars set. Here they are:











And here's what the Star Wars card looked like when printed: