Category: Retro

90s-Era Trading Cards

April 20, 2025

Last year I purchased four old packs of trading cards. They’ve been aging for over six months now and it’s time to open them and see what’s inside…

Tools released these The Rocketeer cards in 1992 and they’re typical of most of their series from that era. The plastic wrapper had become brittle and disintegrated a bit upon opening.

The pack contained the eight photo cards shown above, and they’re all a bit dark and muddy to my eye. Interestingly I saw this film for the first time last year, didn’t think it was very good, and I would have had zero interest in these cards upon release even were I still buying cards then.

The backs of the cards are a little difficult to read due to lack of ink. All of them were like this; maybe it was a production error? As I’ve said before I prefer the synopsis extracts on the backs of sets like this, although for this film I wonder how many read them?

There was a single (non die-cut) sticker in the pack as well, and it’s this somewhat boring movie poster style art. The adhesive had completely failed after 33 years, and when I peeled it off it wouldn’t stick to anything.

Overall a by-the-books set for a somewhat mundane film. I don’t think too many were enthusiastic for these cards when they released.

I’ve not heard of ‘Star Pics’, the company who released these Alien 3 cards, also in 1992. This was a famously troubled film production, and the result divides fans to this day.

Much like the previous packs (and admittedly the film), the cards are muddy and quite ugly. They’re also thin and flimsy, which indicate a low budget product. The screenshots are a bit blurry, which is unfortunate considering they would have been the feature cards of the set.

The backs are ugly and hard to read, but they tell a first-person account of the events of the film. An interesting approach that I think works well, but I wish the design had been more suitable for the theme.

Like other early 90s sets there’s no chase cards, and the budget feel of the material is probably indicative of the publisher. But this set is notably worse than the original Topps Alien set from over a decade earlier, which shouldn’t have been the case.

From 1996, this is a pack of Independence Day cards from Topps. We’re in the chase card era now, and the wrappers says I have a 1 in 9 chance of a hologram card!

I didn’t get one. The above were the six cards in the pack, and you can see they’re in a 16:9 aspect ratio which Topps used for their ‘Widevision’ cards for several years back then.

This is a very poor set. The screenshots are all blurry and pixilated, which is unforgivable in a set that is focused around displaying the images at a larger size. Some of the cards even look like they were photographs of a screen, rather than taken from film stock. Awful.

Furthermore, every card in the pack had ‘edge wear’ along the bottoms, which was likely caused by the machines that cut them. This is of no matter to me now since they’re going directly into the recycling bin, but imagine paying a premium for these packs 29 years ago and finding all the cards were damaged?

A very disappointing product, and another example of how Topps had fallen by the mid 90s.

I got this 1990 Classic WWF pack for KLS about a year ago and today is Wrestlemania so it seemed a good day to finally open it. She’s got a large collection of wrestling cards but since Topps sets have become overpriced she no longer buys any new ones.

Every card in her pack was A-rank wrestling royalty, which is amazing considering the size of the set (>130 cards)! How are there no forgotten or C-rank guys here?

The answer was poor collation. In her 15 cards she actually got 1-14 (and 136), and since card sets like this usually put the ‘big guys’ at the front, she got all the biggest stars. This is objectively bad collation, but in this case it ended up giving her a dream pack 🙂

The photos and bios are good, and the cards sturdy and well cut. This is a high quality product, and I imagine was quite popular with wrestling fans 35 years ago. I’m curious about the other 120 cards, but considering the steep price of the individual packs these days (I paid $10) I’m sure we’ll never open another.

I’ve still got a few more packs stashed away aging in a closet, and three unopened boxes of 1980s era cards. Over the summer I’m sure I’ll finally open one of them 🙂

Japan Pickups: Games

January 15, 2025

I’m using ‘games’ here to describe video games and ‘TRPGs’ (as tabletop games are called in Japan). This is the category in which I’m always hunting for items on my trips and this time I was very happy with my finds…

It’s been a while since I’ve found a new Japanese Fighting Fantasy book for my collection, so I was pleased to see this JP version of ‘Out Of The Pit‘, the FF Monster Manual. Unlike the western version, it’s published at the same size as a normal FF book and is therefore a chunky little volume. The cover is a little tattered, but it’s in otherwise excellent condition and included its obi and even an advertisement for the Japanese Warlock magazine.

Speaking of which, I bought ten more issues of Warlock, which I found once again at Mandarake in Akihabara (where do they keep getting these from?). These weren’t cheap, but with this addition I now have 75% of the entire run of this magazine, including the first and last (#63) issues.

Moving onto one of my other collections, I found the above three Wizardry games. The leftmost had eluded me for years and was surprisingly inexpensive (about $30) but I didn’t even know Summoner had a PS2 version and didn’t hesitate to pay through the nose for it (~$100) when I found it in Nagano on Christmas Day. The last is the JP physical edition of the recent Wizardry 1 remake. Alas I was unable to find the special edition of this release, which comes with a lot of bonuses. One day I will…

This is a remarkable guidebook for all three Game Boy Color remakes of Wizardry 1 – 3. I’ve got many Japanese Wizardry game guides in my collection now, but this may be the best I’ve yet seen.

It starts with some lovely colour pages detailing the history of each game…

And then goes into detail about the specifics of the GBC versions of each title, including monsters, items and maps. Most of the book is in colour as well.

Each game gets its own section and as a result the book is fairly lengthy. The GBC versions of these games are rare and (very) expensive these days, so this book would have a limited audience. But I have all three games and will one day play them again and when I do this ‘bible’ will be extremely useful!

The above is the 1991 revised edition of the Wizardry TRPG rules for the tabletop game based on the video game series. I have read that the Wizardry TRPG was immensely popular back in Japan back in the day – competing even with D&D – but this is the first time I’d found a basic rule book for sale.

It’s got all the usual sections common to RPG rulebooks, and I like that the character sheet resembles those in the video games. I wonder what this game is like to play?

Speaking of the TRPG, I also bought the above. The two on the left are adventures, and on the right is a gamesmasters screen! These date to a few years before the rulebook above, which suggest they were intended for the first edition rules (which I’ve never seen). These were expensive, and only a maniac would buy them if he couldn’t even read them…

The above was an incredible find, not only because I’d never heard of it but also because I have since read it is ‘extremely rare’! It’s a Wizardry card game named after the ultimate wizard spell ‘Tiltowait’!

The description said it was ‘opened but never played’ and while the flimsy cardboard box had seen better days the cards themselves don’t show any evidence of use so I’m guessing the description was accurate.

Amusingly this is a reskin of Uno using monsters and spells from Wizardry as card art. From the included rules it seems ‘Tiltowait’ is the Draw 4 equivalent and other spells (‘Haman’ etc.) correspond to the other effect cards in Uno, with a few additions such as counter and discard spells.

The last game pickups from the trip were the above Switch titles. All of these are compilations of arcade games – mostly shooters. Taito Milestones 3 was purchased not just because it includes Cadash but also all three Rastan games and both Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands. It’s one of the very best arcade compilations I’ve seen! The game on the right is the special edition of Mushihimesama, the insect-themed Cave shooter.

Lots of treasures here, but alas my grails once again eluded me. The hunt will continue in future trips…

Bean Counting

October 6, 2024

I spent many hours this summer in the attic, emptying out boxes that had been sealed in some cases for decades, and disposing of lots of things that we didn’t need to keep anymore. I ended up reducing the attic storage by a factor of about 75%, which was very liberating. In a few years I’ll do another pass and likely toss out more.

The last step of this years clean-out was today, specifically taking care of this:

This is our Beanie Babies collection, purchased during the fad in the late 1990s.

A lot has been written about the Beanie Babies phenomena, but the quick history is that these little stuffed animals became popular in 1996 and very quickly it seemed everyone was collecting them. They were sold almost everywhere, created long lines and shopper hysteria when new ‘waves’ were released, and spurned an entire industry around them as people latched on to the idea they were not just toys, but investments that would one day make them rich. And then in 1999 the whole fad fell apart and by 2000 almost no one cared about them any more, and the world moved on.

We bought them for a few years, then put them in a box and forgot about them until now. Had you asked me how many we had I would have said a few dozen, so I was quite surprised to find we had 111 of the things:

It is surreal to think back on that era. People were legitimately insane for Beanie Babies (there’s at least two good documentaries about them), and in particular went crazy for the teddy bear types. I always found the bears repellant, but we somehow managed to get 9 of them:

People were selling some of the bears for hundreds of dollars in those days. Beanies were about 10% of all eBay sales during the height of the fad, and by 1998 the madness was worldwide. We never bought in to any of this, since it was abundantly obvious since with everyone buying them there wouldn’t be a sellers market in the future 🙂

Some of our Beanies are unusual – including one that isn’t even an animal – but these mostly come from the end of the fad when all the normal animals had already been made.

I don’t like any of these and can’t remember ever buying them. In fact both of us were surprised by some of the ones we own that we don’t find attractive in any way. I suppose we just bought them because they were inexpensive.

That said, one of ours has a $15 price tag on it!? It’s hard to believe we ever paid that and indeed I don’t recall every buying one on the secondary market (like a toy show) so this remains a mystery.

McDonald’s got in on the action as well with Happy Meal ‘Teenie Beanies’ toys several times during the craze. We have 18 of these, from the 1996, 1998 and 1999 series. As with the full sized beanies, these were extremely popular and sought after at the time. In 1996 the first series was the most successful Happy Meal promotion McDonald’s had ever had to that point!

As you can see the McDonald’s ones (on left) are about half the size of the normal toy (in the middle). At the right is a ‘Beanie Buddy’, and no I don’t know why we own that either.

A small few of ours have ‘tag protectors’ on them to keep the red cardboard tag on good condition. But we also had a pack of dozens of protectors that we never bothered putting on, which perhaps shows how much we valued this ‘investment’! Some collectors bought elaborate storage cases or even sealed them in lucite. It was important to keep the investments in tip top condition 🙂

So let’s talk money. In 1996 the suggested price of a Beanie was $5, and it seems this continued until at least 1998. We have one from 1999 with a $5.50 price tag, but that was probably just a store marking up due to demand. I think it’s reasonable therefore to estimate – at the low end – that we paid about $555 for our normal Beanies plus at least $36 more for the McDonald’s ones (Happy Meals were $2 in those days). The above photos therefore represent an ‘investment’ of about $591.

I’ll say again that some people truly thought these would make them rich one day, and such beliefs continue through the endless eBay auctions where sellers don’t understand the market died 25 years ago and never recovered.

The truth is Beanie Babies are worthless today. Every single one we have can be obtained for under $1 on eBay right now, and collections are selling for much less than $1 per Beanie. If you search you’ll find that the vast majority of auctions for these things don’t actually sell at all, since everyone has them in their attics and no one wants them! I’m sure there’s a few diehard collectors out there seeking holy grail error Beanies (and good luck to them), but it doesn’t change the fact that 99.99999% of the things now retain no value at all.

So our $591 we spent between 1996 and 1999 has now become… well maybe $50 if we successfully sold them on eBay, which is not what anyone would call an investment! But what if we’d ignored the Beanies entirely and spent our $591 back in 1999 on a true investment like the Dow Jones or Apple stock?

If we’d spent $591 on a DJIA mutual fund in December 1999 we’d have about $2458 worth of stock today.

If we’d spent $591 on APPL (Apple) stock in December 1999, we have about $171,800 in Apple stock (yes you read that correctly) today.

But we didn’t, and today we simply have worthless Beanies! We selected a ‘favourite’ each (the term is used lightly) – Legs the frog for KLS and a dubiously coloured Platypus for me – and put the remaining 16 kg of them into a different type of permanent storage:

Goodbye Beanie Babies. We’ll ~~never~~ forget you.

Robot Claw