Wacky Packages
11th series sticker (1974)
|
|
| Type | Trading cards |
|---|---|
| Company | Topps Company |
| Country | United States |
| Availability | 1967–present |
| Official website | |
Wacky Packages are a series of humorous trading cards and stickers featuring parodies of North American consumer products. The cards were produced by the Topps Company beginning in 1967, usually in a sticker format. The original series sold for two years, and the concept proved popular enough that it has been revived every few years since. They came to be known generically as Wacky Packs, Wacky Packies, Wackies and Wackys. According to trader legend, the product parodies once outsold Topps baseball cards.
Relying on the talents of such cartoonists and comics artists as Kim Deitch, George Evans, Drew Friedman, Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, Norman Saunders, Art Spiegelman, Bhob Stewart and Tom Sutton, the cards spoofed well-known brands and packaging.
The very first Wacky Packages series was produced in 1967 and featured 44 die-cut cards that were similar in size to baseball cards (2.5” × 3.5” or 64 × 89 mm). This series featured parodies created by Spiegelman and primarily painted by Saunders. Two of the cards – "Cracked Animals" and "Ratz Crackers" – were pulled from production after an initial run and have since become extremely rare. "Moron Salt" was pulled later, and replaced by "Jolly Mean Giant" which was also pulled soon thereafter and became almost as rare as Ratz and Cracked Animals. This series was followed by a somewhat different Wacky Ads line in 1969, featuring gags and roughs by Lynch and Deitch with finished paintings by Sutton. These cards, approximately three-by-five inches (76 × 127 mm), were designed more like miniature billboards with a die-cut around the parodied product, so it could pop out of the horizontal billboard scene. Card #25 "Good & Empty" was removed from the initial release, after Leaf Brands sued. There were two different versions of the "Ads": the long perforations (believed to signify the first printing) and short perforations (believed to signify the second printing), as well as an early 5-cent wrapper for the first printing and a later 10-cent wrapper for the second printing.
...
Wikipedia