The 1981 Kellogg's 3D Super Stars Set

The sets I'm currently working on, I'm working on the proverbial "old-fashioned" way: with individual pick-ups and card-by-card building. I have almost zero interest in buying a straight-up completed set of anything, and yet this 1981 Kellogg's 3D set totally caught my attention recently, and I went all-in in one fell swoop.

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: