Had a strange thought while thinking about some of my
all-time favorite cards that I collected as a kid...and that was how
God-awful some of the
follow-up cards were the next year.
You know how in
weight loss ads the gorgeous photos are always featured in the
'after,' not the
'before,' section? Well, it seems
Topps preferred to sometimes switch up that narrative.
Case in point: in
1976, my older brothers and I were constantly ripping through the bounty of card packs our parents rewarded us with for
being decent human beings.
Besides gobbling up all of the
Mets, the prized gem was finding a menacing
Johnny Bench 'standing tall in a swirl of dust' card.
Man, what a frickin' epic image!!!!
Remember the joy of those days?
I sure do, but what no one seems to recall is having that same obsession
the following spring when the new cards started appearing at the
stationery store.
Gloriously searching through packs while annealing ourselves
(I believe that metaphor works) to the 'foreignness' of the
strange, new design, a pack finally yielded a
Mr. Bench...and you suddenly found your brain
imitating the
screaming guy on the bridge in that
Edvard Munch painting as you thought,
"What in high f*ck is up with this noggin nonsense??? The card is all head and nothing else. Oh, how the mighty have fallen."
BeforeAfter03Bench.jpg
Luckily, that bitterness was soon assuaged when
(with a face full of plank-like gum) a phenomenal
Dave Kingman card dropped out of a new pack, making you the
envy of your friends.
"My goodness!!! What an awesome shot of 'Kong' (never called him that) launching one at Shea. And the All-Star banner is the icing on the cake!!!! Holy freaking cow!!!!" Life was good again, and that esteemed
Kingman always sat atop any pile of cards I assembled.
The cream always rises to the top. (We, of course, had no idea that our tears would be flowing shortly as his first stay in Queens came to an abrupt end, but in hindsight, #26 will ALWAYS be a Met.)
Unfortunately, time is on its
Harley forever speeding forward and
1978 arrived much too quickly...and with it came another embarrassing follow-up card.
What did they do to Dave Kingman???? They
Johnny Benched his head
to ensure it filled up as much space as possible, and the
(apparently) drunk
Topps Art Department did a kindergarten-level attempt at
airbrushing him into the uniform of his fourth different team of
1977.
Yuck!!!!!!!
BeforeAfter02Kingman.jpg
And again following a pattern, a beautiful
vision in cardboard appeared to soothe our ever-desirous eyes -
REG-GIE!!! gracing the surface of what is widely acknowledged to be the
greatest card of the (then) modern era, and it left everything behind it in the dust.
The previous
World Series had turned legions of
Mets fans towards loving
(or at least NOT hating) the
Yankees. This was anathema to everything we believed in, but it was impossible to not get caught up in the fervor of him finally helping the
Yanks become champs again!!!
A beautiful era, that...but here came
1979 with yet another
saddening headshot. Did
Topps not realize that kids imitate their favorite players'
batting styles or
glovework, and no
13-year-old cared at all about what a player looked like in
close-up???
We wanted
cool action shots, not cards that resembled the
yearbookish (is that a word?) photos mom got of our siblings from the
Sears Portrait Studio.
Growing up is tough, I guess.
BeforeAfter01Reggie.jpg
Anyone else have any other examples of these types of failing forwards??