1993 Cardz William Shatner's TekWorld

Springing forth from William Shatner's TekWar book series were many things: Branded bop bags, an ill-fated licorice product, children's sheet and pillowcase sets, a television series, and a chain of animatronic pizza palaces. Foremost among these, however, was TekWorld, a comic book published by Marvel. These are those cards.

Let's tear in.

Top to Bottom:
40 (There are no names for each card scene, so I'll give them my own based on the picture.) Grace Jones: Dare to Fly

41 The Day the Earth Took Pills

42 Hairscaping by Guile

43 Robinson JanSport on Mars

84 "This Tanning Bed Has an 11-Minute Limit"

85 I Spy With My Little Eye…

86 Ineffective Close-Quarters Combat

I don't know about you, but I'm not a big fan of a mostly sequential pack of cards. Not sure what sort of story these were trying to tell, and I'm not going to make an effort to find out.

1994 Comic Images Blueprints of the Future

"Prophetic Visions From the Art of Vincent Di Fate"
I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked this pack out of a cheapie bin at a local card shop. The guy running the place threw it in for free with the other stuff I bought, so at least my curiosity didn't cost me anything. As it turns out, these cards are in the style of 1970s sci-fi paperbacks, the type of which you might find in dozens in a shoebox at a rummage sale. That style of art isn't exactly my favorite. In fact, to me it's the stuff nightmares are made of. I'll try to explain how each card gets under my skin.

Let's tear in.

Top to Bottom:
26. Ringed Giant
The boredom of reading a story like this frightens me.
There's not really enough going on in our solar system to excite anyone, so a trip to Saturn (stated so on the back) would likely put me to sleep.

60. The Mission to Heaven
The ideas behind this winged goddess frighten me.
The back of the card asks, "Can we one day visit the home of God?" If this maternal being packing a ray gun guards the entrance, I sure hope not. Babes like this in the sci-fi universe are more likely to rip your spine out than fulfill any carnal desires. And are we supposed to believe that that rocket can blast off without any surrounding space equipment?

43. Hyperspace
Space combat frightens me.

49. The Iron Claw
The sterlie, mechanical lovemaking of the future frightens me.
The exterminating machines are no match for human ingenuity, which will eventually expose their tripod design flaw. After the dust has settled, though, all Spaceman Spiff gets is an insertion into the G-valve and a few seconds of rigorous, pulsating pumping. No thank you.

50. Artifact
This card is in landscape format and didn't make the scanner cut. Sure, I could scan it again, but why?

77. The Shape of Things Future
Unsustainable architecture frightens me.
The large, funnel-shaped mass can only be used to store waste. This means the 500-member colony lives in one of the upper rings in 75-square foot chambers. Claustrophobia is the rule, not the exception, of future housing.

69. The Veil
The specificity of basic cable expansion packages frightens me.
This satellite beams 30,000 channels into people's entertainment quarters, 95% of programming being infomercials or on-the-job reality programming about the drudgery of being a southern janitor.

51. Mechanical men.
Jesus, this mechanical man frightens me.

12 Batwing
Technological anachronisms frighten me.
If we are going to be so advanced, why all the antennas? Is over-the-air media going to make a storming comeback?

34. The Red Giant
"Also Sprach Zarathustra" frightens me.
Most of the cards in this pack, and thus the set, are derivative of Kubrick's 2001. New sensations have overtaken me while perusing this pack, chiefly among them the sound of Strauss's symphony and the smell of musty paperbacks.

Excuse me while I head out to the grocery store for a slick, glossy, brightly colored celeb trash magazine to cleanse my suffering palate.

1996 Upper Deck Johnny Quest

The date of my birth puts me in just about the perfect wheelhouse NOT to be a fan of Johnny Quest. The original series aired in 1964-65, and probably lived on through the 1970s through reruns. This was followed decades later by The New Adventures of Johnny Quest, which theoretically should have been on my radar, but wasn't, probably because the series lasted only 13 episodes. The the time the series on which this pack of cards was based, The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest, was on television, I was nearly finished with high school, and the only cartoons I watched were The Simpsons and Space Ghost Coast to Coast. This pack of cards is as problematic as the final TV series. I'm familiar with the broad outline of the show, but none of its intricacies. Adult Swim meta-cartoons have provided much of my knowledge of Hanna-Barbera staples, namely the simmering undercurrent of homosexual tension between Benton Quest and Race Bannon.

Let's tear in.

Top to Bottom:
26 Dr. Jeremiah Surd
Good God, these cards are a mess! I cannot tell you how difficult it was for me to identify the subject of each card. With no fewer than seven separate places for text on the front of the card, the design seemed to combine early Geocities elements with a seventh grader's myspace page circa 2005. I don't know where to look, and I feel defeated.

35 Dr. Jeremiah Surd (???) Again?
I'm not sure if this card is part of the base set or not. It doesn't seem to be one of the listed inserts, but the card numbering is of a different style than the first one. Surd's profile is on the back, but we have this URL group shot on the front. I want to track down a laserdisc of this show so I can unscramble my brain.

22 Hadji
Back to the base design, I see. Hadji is a familiar main character, albeit with a rebooted wardrobe. The post-1993 WTC bombing environment most likely dictated a turban-free cartoon. Also clearly a Power Rangers derived look.

HC2 Hadji's Clues - Courage Overcomes Fear
If I rub off a portion of the back of this card, I'll get a clue that will help me while I play the Johnny Quest CD-ROM Adventure. I'm not falling for that one. (Turns out I was wrong on the turban thing, too.) Odds on this insert were 1:5.

47 Villain ^2 -- Ezekiel Rage / Dr. Jeremiah Surd
All Surd, all the time baby!

44 Tools of the Trade - Surd's High-Tech Wheelchair
Seriously, I cannot get away from this guy. And another design shift. Can anyone tell me what the base design even is? I give up. Just watch Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. At least that has more Race Bannon than this pack.

Menudo (Topps, 1983)

For those of you wanting more Ricky Martin-related stuff in their Pack a Day reading, I present to you Topps' Menudo!  Although I'm not sure if Mr. La Vida Loca is actually on any of these cards. He was in the boy band at some point but maybe not this combination. I'm a poor judge of aging and my knowledge of Meduo is limited to one 25-year-old pack of cards.

 

The year was 1983. Future hall-of-famers Ryne Sandberg, Tony Gwynn and Wade Boggs were all making their cardboard debuts as Major Leaguers. The A-Team ruled, Michael Jackson hit the really-big time with "Thriller" and Plinko debuted on The Price is Right. I'm guessing since Topps went out and made a set of cards for the boy band, Menudo must have been selling some albums at the time as well.

 
 

(44) I don't know if you can tell by the scan, but judging by the blur of this guy's hands, he plays a wicked air guitar.

 

(3) If there ever was an awkward card, this is it. Face it kid, 12-year-olds don't know love so please don't sing about it.

 

(23) The outfits - lame, no matter what the time period. I'll use this card to mention that most of the cards have little Menudo tidbits on the back in both English and Spanish. There's also the classic Topps puzzle backs. Skip to the end of the post if you want to see what Puzzle C looks like. But I warn you, it's frightening.

 

(22) I'm calling pandering to the "Tiger Beat" crowd. It doesn't get any cheaper than looking sideways while riding a horse. Have I mentioned these cards are really bright and that Topps should use it as the basis for 2009 Topps Heritage Baseball.

 
 

(25) Rumor has it these shirts were prototypes for camoflage shirts for those wanting to hide in crates of McDonald's fry boxes. They never made it past the prototype stage.

 

1980s Topps Sticker! (16) I knew I bought this pack for a reason and it wasn't headache-inducing brightly colored pixel backgrounds.

 

(33) Little-known Menudo fact: This incarnation of the band disbanded after they got into a fight with a couple of kids named Ponyboy Curtis and Soda Pop.

 

(59) R Kelly sang "I Believe I Can Fly" for the Space Jam soundtrack. I think this kid wins with those wings in his hair.

 

(4) Why did I spend a dollar on this crap?

 

(17) Apparently the rumors were true. Anytime was good for a party with Menudo - even when your plain crashes.

 

(44) Seriously, I could have gone to McDonald's and had a cheeseburger rather than getting this pack.

And now for the grand finale, the image for Puzzle C (from the back of card 4). Collect all 24 pieces and you get:

Seeing as how it's Sunday night, here's some football, Menudo style:

Star Wars CCG: Jabba's Palace

I don't even want to think about baseball tonight. In fact, I haven't wanted much of anything to do with baseball for the past week and a half as my Brewers are trying their damndest to keep themselves out of the playoffs for the better part of a millennium. For such an emergency, I've set aside a pack of Star Wars cards received as a throw-in from a trade from dayf. The little metal rod thingy on a chain has broken through the glass to retrieve a red-tipped fire axe. Behind the axe was this pack.

Let's tear in.

Top to Bottom:
Nikto (Literary reference: The Day the Earth Stood Still, and later on, Army of Darkness.)

Weequay Hunter (Literary reference: Melville.)

Skiff (The vehicle that was built to fail. Few of these, if any, make their way out of a Star Wars sequence unscathed. Where is Ralph "Unsafe at Any Speed" Nader when you need him?)

Don't Forget the Droids (Worthless in so many ways. I am in no way familiar with the rules of this CCG, but I'm willing to bet this is not a very desirable card. After all, someone in the Rebel Alliance had the forethought to design a backpack large enough to fit a Wookiee with the sole purpose in mind of carrying around the disassembled parts of a droid following a beatdown. Sure, R2D2 had that screwdriver/communication device thing that interrupted the garbage compactor, but any good tradesman could have done the same job in half the time. TK-427 my f--king ass!)

Ishi Tib (Starfish-shaped head. Worst background character design since Ree-Yees.)

Sandwhirl (In no way a part of the Original Trilogy. Think, this card could have been a Sarlaac. It's like buying a Yellowstone National Park collectible card pack and expecting Old Faithful and getting a Columnar Basalt card. Geology lesson, bitches!)

Jabba's Palace Sabacc (Instead of an action shot of a sabacc game, which has never been shown in the films, we get an exterior shot. What is the one thing you expect to see in a gambling montage segment of a movie taking place in Las Vegas? Slots...lots of 'em, hitting lucky 7's. Jump cut to the close up of a hand shooting craps, jump cut to a close up of a roulette wheel, track out to reveal happy 1960s gamblers surrounded by women with Mount Rushmore-esque heads of hair. Instead we get this. This card fails.)

Yarna d'al' Gargan (Six tits, none of them attractive. I'm curious to know if she's a meth addict like so many American strippers are. Be careful what you wish for...)

Fozec (The rent-a-cop of the Star Wars Universe. I can imagine that when the shit started hitting the fan above the great Pit of Carkoon, this guy ran to the nearest pay phone and called the real Empire P.D. Either that or he escaped into the the most convenient Conan film he stepped out of earlier.)

The first two cards were cool, but the rest sucked. I'm not quite out of my doldrums, but this helped a bit.

Bigfoot Sighting!

With all this talk of frozen yeti costumes and such, I thought I'd make like Encyclopedia Brown and get to the bottom of the legend of Bigfoot, A Pack a Day style. Two decades ago a company named Leesley put out a set entitled Bigfoot and offered to explain the story, the myth, the machine. Wait a second, this pack isn't about Yetis and beasts who gobble up seals for breakfast, kittens for lunch and cute puppies for dinner. This is about that truck that was never had the street cred Gravedigger did but had a better marketing team and got a cartoon out of the deal.

 

We'll start with a bad scan of an unopened pack. Five cards all about the "original monster truck." Let's get crushing.

  

013. Bigfoot 1

Oooooooo, it goes through big puddles. Give this truck a toy. All sarcasm aside, cool picture, bad design. Bigfoot and its monster truck brethren are meant to be tough machines capable of flattening anything in its path. The baby blue borders don't read "TOUGH" to me.

On the flip side, I'm digging the simple design on the back. It has a definite early-90s SkyBox feel to it. My one complaint is the text reads a little to much like propaganda. But what are you going to do when you have a set dedicated to one truck.

 
 

043. Bigfoot Tundra
A really big monster truck crushing another monster truck. It's like being bullied by the bully in high school all over again.

 

032. Bigfoot
I have to say, I'm kind curious as to what kind of race that brown 2 car was in. I'd also go out on a limb and say Bigfoot won (or was a poor sport about not winning). 

 

022. Bigfoot 3

Such destruction. I can smell the gas fumes. I think I just let out a nostalgic flip of my one-time faux mullet as well.

 

0 

083. Bigfoot

The pack finishes with a double take of two Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) charging through the big puddle. I wonder if one is Bigfoot and the other's Bizarro Bigfoot?

I was hoping for more crushing and a little less puddles. Going by this lone pack of a cheap product, perhaps the monster trucks are best left for the racing equivalent of a freak show and not plastered on cardboard.