Wacky Packages by The Topps Company
|
List Price: Our Price: $11.33 You Save: $8.62 (43%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $5.36 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Wacky Packages
Book Review: Wacky Packages Book
Summary: 5 Stars
This was great! I bought two! One for me and one for my brother who is turning 40 this year. Everything that brings me back to my childhood when I collected them. A real find for Wacky Packages fans!Book Review: wacked out!!
Summary: 5 Stars
i use to collect these and still have some. now I know all the ones i missed. fun to look at.Book Review: 70's pop-culture in convenient book form!
Summary: 4 Stars
I'm sure anyone who was in elementary school in 1973 remembers the craze that was Wacky Packages! We brought them to school. We stuck them to the backboards of our beds (and everywhere else!). We traded them amongst our friends (although I needed to trade *two* to a boy at school to get one Hungry Jerk pancake mix to finish my 3rd series).
If any of the above rings true to you, then this book will be a great trip down memory lane!
This book reprints all of the cards from the first seven series of Wacky Packages. Most of them have been printed directly from transparencies made off the original art, so those look fantastic. Others were printed from stickers, so those look like...large stickers. And while they do look OK, you will definitely notice the difference between the sticker-based reprints and the higher-quality transparency-based ones.
The book has more going for it too! The dust jacket has the texture of an old wrapper - and it's complete with "imperfections" printed right on (so it *really* looks like an old wrapper!). Take the dust jacket off and there is a piece of that hard-as-a-brick bubblegum printed on the front cover of the book (and a broken piece on the back cover...!)
You will also find a small packet of four "lost" Wacky Package stickers inside the back cover. Opening this packet will give you the same kind of "I wonder what I got?!" thrill you used to get all those years ago! It's a nice touch.
But, there are a couple of minor things that I wish were done differently...
Originally, many Wacky Packages stickers were designed and printed in a "landscape" configuration. But instead of reproducing them top to bottom (so you'd have to turn the book to better see them), they are printed to fit each page (which is designed for "portrait" configuration). This makes it easier to read each landscape-style card, but it also means that they are reproduced a lot smaller than the ones that were portrait-style to begin with. It might have been better to print them "sideways" as turning the book is preferable to having smaller-sized art. ("Hipton Tea" also looked kind of odd. So after a bit of research, I learned that the book used the Hipton Tea artwork from the WP poster series, not the original 4th series sticker.)
It also would have been nice if the book reprinted checklist cards from each series. The checklist / puzzle-piece cards were just as much as part of the whole Wacky-experience as the rock-hard gum and the stickers. And every pack had one of these cards! Trying to figure out ahead of time which product was being lampooned was a big part of the fun, so I kind of felt the book was lacking just a bit due to this one detail. (I mean, they reproduced everything else - even the gum - so why not the checklist cards..?)
All in all, this book is a treat for anyone who got yelled at by her father for ruining the backboard of her bed with original WP stickers, or anyone else who remembers Skimpy Beanut Putter, Putrid Cat Chow, Land O' Quakes butter, or ...Hungry Jerk pancake mix...!
Book Review: Makes buying the vintage cards unnecessary
Summary: 4 Stars
I was getting nostalgic for the things of my youth and remembered Wacky Packages. Coincidentally this book was published just about the time I was considering going on EBay and purchasing some of the cards of my youth. I have to give this book high marks overall.
The pros:
The layout is superb, with one card on each page. The cover of the book is clever, looking like one of the card packages. This book makes buying any of the vintage cards unnecessary.
The cons:
For those of you who have read my Amazon "So you'd like to know more about..." guide to comedy of the 1970s, you know what my tastes are. The big letdown of this book was that I have largely outgrown this sort of humor. I was into MAD magazine as a kid, but I really can't sit down with an issue now. Same thing with these cards. About 1 of every 10 is funny to me. That said, the execution is incredible: world class artists doing world class parody illustration.
The other con I have, and you'll probably notice this if you read through the book in one sitting, is how many of the products feature dead, poisoned, or ill-treated dogs. Can't say any of those were at all funny to me.
Book Review: Very good, but a tad less than I'd been led to expect
Summary: 4 Stars
I got my copy of the book today. Most of the images do indeed show a level of detail and a richness of color largely unseen until now. However, several of the images were clearly scanned from the mass-produced stickers and are muddy and misregistered to varying degrees (see Lavirus for very obvious example of this). I'm just happy and amazed that Topps had retained as many of the original color separations as they did. Nice li'l book, and count me in for the sequel. Until then, you'll find me at wackypackages(dot)org.