1935 Wheaties

[BobC]

Originally Posted by bigfanNY

Brian yes that is one of the threads I remember. Excuse my laziness for saying series 16 when I should have just looked it up. I have only ever seen the mini series that is similar to series 4.

Bob C.

I think that the popularity or unpopularity of Wheaties can be explained without saying that they are not Baseball cards. Their size, the fact that so many that originally collected them have passed on. The rise and dramatic decline in the Wheaties boxes of the 80's and 90's. These and many other contribute to how popular or unpopular Wheaties boxes from the 30's are. And yet they are treasured by many .You yourself say you treasure some. My point is they should be treasured as the baseball cards they clearly are.
And your point on Post Cereal vs Wheaties innores the example I used, 1960 post cereal cards are full box backs with only one player.

Jonathan,

I am not disagreeing with you, or anyone else at all. I was merely giving a possible explanation to the OP about why these early Wheaties items may not be as valued and collected by some as are other items. I never said that some people not thinking of them as true cards was the only possible explanation, or that these are or aren't cards. Some collectors though are not as into items that aren't more like traditional baseball cards, and that is just a simple fact. -

And I didn't ignore the 1960 reference you made to Post cereal items, but the truth is, those full back 1960 items are not as widely collected as the later Post cereal cards from 1961 through 1963. I referenced those later cards to demonstrate how the size of the card/item being cut from the cereal carton can have an impact on how many in the hobby perceive them as cards, and how much they then want to collect them. Not everyone, but still a pretty large percentage IMO. Also, the 1960 Post items/cards were only on boxes of their Grape Nuts cereal IIRC. I don't know about you, but I was never a Grape Nuts fan as a kid, and suspect a lot more kids would have liked and asked for a whole lot of other Post cereals before asking Mom to specifically buy a box of Grape Nuts. Another reason there probably aren't anywhere near as many of those 1960 items/cards around today as there are of the 1961-62-63 Post Cereal cards. And also, since the 1960 items ONLY came on Grape Nuts boxes, I sort of assumed when you mentioned Post cereal, you were referring to ALL post cereals, not just Grape Nuts, and may have just had a typo in putting down 1960 as the year. Those 1960 Grape Nuts items/cards are great and fantastic items/collectibles as well, but I bet if you ran a poll of everyone on here, you'd find out a lot more people are into and have collections of the 1961-63 Post cereal cards than ever had collections of the 1960 Grape Nuts ones or were that into them.

And another way to look at this, what is the difference between collecting items on the back of Wheaties boxes versus what are on the fronts? A lot of people over more recent years have gone on to collect Wheaties and other cereal's boxes for the front images. But usually, you see those collectors going for the complete boxes, and they don't usually cut the front of the boxes off to collect just those, do they? I never really heard of anyone collecting the fronts of Wheaties boxes refer to them as cards either. You don't suppose that for the many who collect entire, more modern, Wheaties boxes for the front images that they wouldn't think about images on the backs of Wheaties boxes the same way, would you? In other words, they view collecting the backs as part of the overall box as well, just like if they were collecting the front. Or is there some difference I never heard of where if you cut/collect something from the back of a cereal box it is definitely considered a card, but if you do the same thing and cut something off the front of the cereal box, it isn't? That would seem silly to think of that in two different ways.