Please sir, can I have some more?
Another round of food, glorious food for you this week.
Back in the mid '70s, Hostess began printing three-card strips on the box bottoms of their various snack cakes. So if you took home some tasty Twinkies, Ho-Hos, or cream-filled CupCakes, you might be lucky enough to score a panel of, say, Garry Maddox/Carlos May/Bud Harrelson.
And if you were anything like me, your tween scissor skills were kind of erratic, and you probably ended up slicing a long gash through Bud's primo porn-star stache.
Fortunately for posterity, the card-collecting hobby was well-formed enough at this point that folks would break down the boxes and save the package flats intact.
Then at some future date, someone would cut out singles with laser-like precision, leaving us with gem-mint 10 examples such as this one.
Topps supplied the photos for these cards, but it seems pretty clear that they mostly went with their second-tier portrait shots, like this one of Bud pretending he's a left-handed hitter.
The card backs contain a five-year run of stats, a basic biography, and full player names. I'm looking at you, Derrel McKinley Harrelson.
All in all, the set is more gruel than foie gras, but we hungry orphans of the '70s knew better than to be picky, and I'm happy to have it in my collection today...
I'm not sure what year this started with the Hostess cards, but there were definitely single cards included in the individual servings at some point during their run. I remember getting the three-card panels on the jumbo boxes that mom would buy in the grocery store and single cards in the twin packs I would purchase in the convenience stores.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the individual cards started this same year (1975), and were available with individual packages of Twinkies only. The cards are essentially the same as the panel versions, except they have a couple of thick black bars on the back. These are a little harder to find than their panel counterparts.
ReplyDeleteThe thing about the individual cards is that they were inside the package, touching the dessert. I remember getting these cards in packages of cupcakes, which would have been later than '75, I guess. I have a few Hostess cards with smeared chocolate on them.
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