Dynamite Magazine Panels

[deweyinthehall]

As almost everyone who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s will recall, the Scholastic publishing company blanketed elementary schools around the country each year with catalogs of books - it was an event those in my school (Highland Elementary, Cheshire, CT) looked forward to each year.

From 1974 through 1992, a key feature of Scholastic's offerings was Dynamite Magazine (first cover shown here). Each issue contained a number of recurring features (Bummers, Count Morbida's puzzles, Good News/Bad News, an advice column, craft ideas, etc.) along with feature stories on pop cultural figures from Fonzie to Kristy McNichol and from MTV to Ricky Schroeder.

In just their second issue in April of 1974, they included an article on Topps baseball cards featuring an interview with Sy Berger.

Also included, stapled into the spine, was a small sheet of 1974 Topps cards. Mostly these were 6-card sheets, but some 3-card varieties slipped in as well.

The very first cards I ever owned were from such a panel from 1978 - it was the year I first subscribed, and I received a panel like the one shown here with Darrell Porter, Al Oliver and 2 each of Tony Perez and Cecil Cooper.

Over the years, the Standard Catalog listed a panel or two from some years, but it was always woefully incomplete (probably because no record was ever kept).

I recently became obsessed with tracking down as many varieties as I could for each year and in posts that follow I will posted the results of my efforts.

Dynamite included the cards from 1974 through 1984, but all the posts will be here in the 1980 and earlier page.

A few general notes:

1) Because Topps' sheets were contained 12 rows, the top card(s) on every Dynamite panel were always from the 1st, 4th, 7th or 10th row. However, because they were 11 columns wide, this set up a situation which, if an entire sheet would be cut for this purpose, at least one strip of a single column was needed.
2) There is little consistency to how the sheets were cut - the same sheet could be cut once with column 1 as the single strip, and cut again with column 7 as the single strip. Also, there are 6-card panels where the left column of cards might appear as the right column on another panel.
3) I searched Worthpoint and eBay for my research. I do not know Dynamite's circulation figures, but relatively few issues exist out there in the open. Within that universe, some years seem far more plentiful than others making me thing their circulation numbers changed over the years.