I don't know about your mom, but by 1981 my Mom had unfortunately stopped buying us Count Chocula and Franken Berry cereals, and the only cereal allowed in the house was either Team, Total or Cheerios. None of these moderately healthy breakfasts were made by Kellogg's, and thus I never got any of these 3D cards. Here's the deal with them: it was the first year in 12 years of making these that Kellogg's made them in the quote-unquote regular size of 2-1/2 by 3-1/2. They'd been minis or "skinny" up to this point. I may go back on this at some point, but I'm just not interested in accumulating an entire set of minis/skinnies. I'll just grab the Giants out of them, thanks.
Speaking of Giants, Vida Blue was San Francisco's sole representative in this 66-card 1981 set. Every team got at least one representative - even Seattle! There are a few guys in here whom I'd mostly forgotten about - Ken Landreaux and Larry Gura among them. Super stars! I do remember Cleveland's Joe Charboneau quite well; he was a real breath of fresh air for that city and that team during a pretty grim time. Poor guy was out of baseball by the following year.
Each of these cards has a waxy-feeling plastic coating on them that actually gives a pretty weird tactile sensation that I kinda like, definitely different than the usual cardboard. I grabbed the whole set for not much money at all on eBay, and I'm happy I did. Here's an article about the set, and here are some of the other Super Stars from this set whom you may have heard of.
Willie Wilson, one of my favorite players of all time:
There are a few weird inclusions, but the star rate is high.
ReplyDeleteFour Phillies after winning the W.S. Royals won the AL and also got four.
Yeah, there are guys like Terry Puhl and Larry Gura that I'm just like, oh YEAH, those guys. But of course Schmidt, Rose, Ryan etc.
DeletePretty sure the 1981 set is the only non-skinny Kellogg's set from the original 1970 to 1983 run, so it kinda stands out. That Rickey looks fantastic with the yellow jersey and the yellow borders.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of my favorite Kellogg's designs, and the standard-sized cards have a lot to do with that. The yellow borders are fantastic and I've always loved the way they matched Rickey Henderson's jersey on his card.
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