Category: Retro

Retro Wax Packs (Part 5)

  • September 12, 2024

Continuing the post from a couple of days ago, here’s four more ancient packs of trading cards…

Knight Rider (Donruss, 1982)

A few years ago I bought this entire series on DVD since Walmart had it for a silly low price. I haven’t yet opened it. But now at least I’ve opened a pack of these trading cards 🙂

Given this show was all about David Hasselhoff, it’s remarkable that I didn’t get a single card featuring him! And is that card in the top right the mysterious secondary girl character they wrote out after season one? As you can see the cards feature a lot of exciting KITT action, no doubt of interest to the kids that would have been the target customers.

The gum was permanently stuck to this card, and although it was rock hard it seemed less ruined by rot than the others I’ve opened recently.

The backs of all my cards are puzzle pieces, but the ones I got were so featureless it’s difficult to tell what it shows. Is that Michael Knight’s hand?

Overall a so-so set based on this single pack. I was a fan of the show at the time and probably bought have bought a pack had I seen them. I wonder if I did?

Fright Flicks (Topps, 1988)

This is an infamous card set featuring photos from many different horror films. Topps didn’t skimp on the gore and the set is depicts images of extreme gore that caused some of the films to be banned in the USA!

I had wanted a pack of this for years but it’s not easy to find today, and I paid almost $10 for this single pack. There are four pack designs and apparently the Freddy Krueger one is the most desirable today.

The cards in my pack nicely illustrate the variety of the set, with images from eight different films including some very obscure ones. How many of these do you recognize?

The gum was in near perfect condition and not stuck to the card. Of all the gum in these packs this was the one I would most likely have tried to eat were I inclined.

The cardbacks are unusual. They include the name of the film shown on the front, as well as a fictitious story of the supernatural. I think a summary of the film plot would have been better, but at least these ‘Did It Ever Happen’ stories are well written.

I got a diecut sticker with a nice shot of the Predator on it, and the back of only one of my cards was a puzzle piece. I checked and there are only 11 stickers in the set and I’d rank this one in the top three. Will I ever stick it?

This is a great set, and if I’d known about it at the time maybe I would have at least bought several packs… or maybe not since I was 16 and I’m sure trading cards were horribly uncool at that age!

Star Trek The Motion Picture (Topps, 1979)

I have dim memories of owning some of these cards as a child, even though I didn’t really understand this film when it came out. I like the purple pack design!

I love the design of these cards. As with most of Topps products of this era they show the influence of the Star Wats sets, but the white borders and dramatic font works well together. It’s interesting that one card (middle right) is a ‘behind the scenes’ photo, which were very rare in card sets in those days.

The gum was rotten and brittle but loose in the pack and hadn’t damaged any card. In the bin it went!

All but one of the backs of mine are puzzle pieces, and based on the borders there are at least four of them to assemble.

One card contains a (prophetic) Shatner quote. I wonder if any cards in the set contained a film synopsis?

The sticker is die-cut and a little boring, especially with the copyright info and number included (I would cut both off if I stuck this). There’s a lot of stickers in this set, and only a minority are spaceships. As it turns out I’ve owned one of the other stickers for years:

Isn’t it beautiful? I daresay Star Trek fans in 1979 probably bought these card packs in droves just to get the fantastic die-cut character stickers 🙂

This is a wonderful set, and I’d love to crack open an entire box. Given it’s collectibility though, I imagine that’s all but impossible these days.

Moonraker (Topps, 1979)

I’ve had this pack for over a decade, and it’s been aging carefully in a box. Finally it was time to break the wax seal and see what was inside!

Much like the Star Wars series, there’s no bad James Bond films. Lesser men may mumble about the qualities of Moonraker, but for this fan it’s always a cracking watch! The cards illustrate the film well, with the typical Topps design from those days.

I believe this is the oldest pack featured these past two posts, so it’s interesting the gum was intact, apparently not rotting, and arguably still edible. Should I have tried it?

The backs are a mix of puzzle pieces, a puzzle guide and a synopsis. I like the line art of Bond in the space suit.

And here’s my magnificent sticker. There were 22 in the set, only five die-cut, and only three of those featuring Bond so I got lucky (although this is arguably the worst of the Bond stickers).

Amusingly my pack even included this misprint card! Surely this is worth a pretty penny these days? I think I’ll sell it for a nice profit to Bernard 🙂

And that ends my recent opening of ancient card packs. I can’t think of any old wax era packs I haven’t yet opened here on the blog, so I doubt there will be a further update like these. However that doesn’t mean this series is entirely dead, since I may have a few other packs to open one day…

Retro Wax Packs (Part 4)

  • September 10, 2024

I’ve got some more retro packs of trading cards to open! Once again these are all from the wax era (the packs are sealed with wax), which means they’re (almost) all over 40 years old. I’ve had these for about a year, so let’s see what’s inside…

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II (Topps, 1991)

These date from the last years of the wax pack era, and by now Topps has abandoned bubble gum. I’ve shown a few other series from this period before, and these cards are similar in design.

The cards all have nice shots from the film, surely of interest to young fans. As you can see the borders and basic design aren’t too different from the Star Wars series from over a decade earlier. Even in 1991 the cards were still printed on non-glossy cardstock, which I still prefer to this day.

The backs contain the usual story synopsis. To this day I’m not sure I’ve even seen this film. I probably should.

The pack includes a single sticker, which unfortunately is not die-cut. The back of the sticker is a puzzle piece, and with only one sticker per pack I imagine completing this puzzle was a costly task.

Overall it’s a decent product, although it’s from the post-80s era with the lesser quality stickers and too early for the flashy chase cards of the mid to late 90s. If you like TMNT, these would have been great.

Magnum (Donruss, 1983)

I watched this show when I was a kid (why?) and I loved trading cards even then. But I don’t remember ever knowing Magnum cards existed, and without any monsters or spaceships I probably wouldn’t have bought a pack even had I known!

The cards are great, and I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence or not but of the eight in my pack more than half featured the ruggedly handsome face of Tom “I was almost Indiana Jones” Selleck himself.

The pack included a stick of gum, which had weirdly puffed up during the 41 years. It had a disturbing smell (of mold?) as well, and had strongly adhered to the card. I discarded both 🙂

The majority of cardbacks are puzzle pieces with just a single card containing a pithy thought from Magnum himself. Did kids enjoy this?

There were no stickers, and while the cards were well printed I doubt they would have appealed to anyone outside of the small group of card-collecting Magnum fans. I’m guessing it didn’t sell well.

Alien (Topps, 1979)

This is a somewhat ‘famous’ card set and I’d been after a pack for years. It wasn’t inexpensive, at about $8, but it was fun to finally open a pack again…

The cards are beautiful! Obviously following the Star Wars design template, these show off the movie extremely well, and would have been a wonderful collection for fans back in 1979. Remember these were the days before VHS, and cards like these would have been one of the only ways for people to see images from the film outside of the cinema.

The gum was rancid and moldy but hadn’t stuck to or damaged any cards. No, I didn’t eat it!

Most of the backs contain tantalizing snippets of puzzle art that I don’t recognize. Did Topps commission art for the puzzles since the movie poster was too simple and since Giger art would have been inappropriate?

The remainder of cardbacks contain a story summary. I like the egg border!

Here’s my die-cast sticker! Certainly not the best from the set, but charming regardless. I wonder if this actor has a copy of one of these to this day?

And one single card has an advert on the back.

These are fantastic. I recall opening one or two packs of this as a child, although I only remember sticking (with glue) a single card into my scrapbook. I wish I still owned that scrapbook; what a blog post it would have made! I’d love to find a box of this for a decent price, and complete the set 🙂

Old Tech

  • July 20, 2024

I’ve been doing another attic purge, and in the midst of book recycling and comic donating and unwanted toy trashing I found a few boxes of almpst-forgotten old tech. Let’s see some of what was in them!

The above is a small Polaroid camera that used special film to produce tiny stamp-sized photos. The photos we took using this have mostly faded over the years, so this is a classic example of ephemeral technology. The same technology continues today in the Instax cameras, which I’m sure will fill attic boxes in years to come.

The above was our first Polaroid, and produced the full-sized pictures that were known worldwide. We never used it much since the film was so expensive. Over the years the plastic of the flashbulb yellowed, the rubber used for the strap became brittle and broke, and the adhesive on the back of the brand sticker lost its stick.

This was the only portable CD player I ever owned in the US (or ever?) and I don’t recall ever using it except perhaps in a car via the cassette adaptor. It no longer works, probably due to a belt for the motor having perished long ago.

To my great surprise this portable minidisc player worked, and the disc inside contained a recording of a physics lecture I attended about 24 years ago! The detritus on the microphone cable is the remains of an elastic band that had perished over the years. I used to have a minidisc player in my car, and we still have a console-sized minidisc player set up downstairs, although I haven’t powered it on for many years!

This is a relic of a bygone era: a wireless mouse from the days before Bluetooth! That thing on the left is the receiver, which connected to the PC via a serial port. I can barely remember ever using this, although I imagine it was wonderful when I got it.

We used our first (and only) camcorder a lot, although these days it seems impossible large and cumbersome. It also no longer works, having problems reading the tape and with the eject mechanism. Many years ago I encoded all the movies from cassette onto CDs but we haven’t watched any for decades.

Some computer memory and an Ethernet card. These were for old laptops, including…

My first laptop! I loved this and used it mostly for gaming. It seemed fairly small and portable at the time, although by todays standards it’s far too large and heavy to port around. I plugged it in but it doesn’t get past the above screen. I recall the hard-drive failed one day when I was using it and it has basically been a brick ever since.

This was my last laptop, a still-small Sony model. I used this a lot including to code my PhD simulation and have very fond memories of it. Alas it broke in two ways: first the harddrive started failing and then this happened:

I had another laptop as well; a very small VAIO model I took with me when I traveled. I recall it also broke but don’t remember what I did with it. Perhaps it’s still in the attic in another box?

The left was Kristin’s first phone, the middle my first, and the right my first that could message. The Virgin one still feels wonderful to hold, and closes up to be extremely tiny. I remember I had to pay per text sent, and since I didn’t have a contract I had to purchase top-up cards at the store!

There’s also this phone, and to be honest I don’t remember it at all. The Ultraman Tiga sticker on the back is proof it was mine, and my guess would be I used it between the two in the previous photo, in the very early 2000s.

As technology improved so did our phones, and the above were what we (and most other people!) were using before smartphones took over. They’re still beautiful little pieces of tech – especially the ones on the right – and I have fond memories of them.

Incidentally I attempted to power on the phones I had chargers for but none of them would get past the startup screen. Maybe they’re looking for a signal that no longer exists?

We’ve had lots of digital cameras over the years, and the above are what remains. A couple of them are dead and the ones that still work utilize memory cards I can no longer read and even the best one (the lower right) produces images of quality much, much less than our current phones. They were all great in their day, but they’re just curios for non-collectors now.

This one is very small and I remember I loved how easy it was to carry it around with me. We even had a smaller one, but the CCD failed and I’m sure I trashed it years ago.

As Apple users for decades now we have a good collection of obsolete Apple products including the above two tiny iPods. We actually have seven iPods in this house, two of which are still in active use!

All the above – two iPads, two iPhones, an iPod touch, an iPod (that went through the washing machine and emerged unscathed) and a first generation AppleTV – are old enough now they can’t be updated and some can’t even hold a charge. They’re all electronic junk now, and will soon be recycled at our local Apple Store.

With a few exceptions (the minidisc player, iPods and one phone) everything on this page has now been trashed or recycled. This is only a selection of what I found, and the amount of items tossed was heavy enough that I could barely lift it all.

A few of the other items I kept are worth sharing here as well, although special enough they warrant their own dedicated posts. Watch for them!