Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

I didn’t buy just football cards as a kid; I bought lots of Wacky Packages and other stickers, too. I can’t say I collected them, though, because I mostly stuck them on stuff: notebooks, bicycle, little brother, dog. At any rate, I thought I remembered an old Wacky Packages sticker that parodied Topps football cards, so yesterday I went looking for it. I didn’t have to look hard: the sticker is called “Sootball,” and there are lots of them on eBay. Oddly, there is no mention of cards on the sticker.

Though the Sootball sticker is from the 1975 series of Wacky Packages, it was modeled after the 1974 Topps football card wrapper pictured here. I don’t remember, but I’d guess that Topps released the 1975 Wackys before football season, so they had to use the prior year’s football card wrapper.

Speaking of wrappers, I recently tidied up my wrapper page, added an image or two, and linked the images to the cards that came in the wrappers. If you haven’t seen the page recently, take a look!

Also, if you’re an old Wacky Packages fan, you must visit wackypackages.org. It appears that the site creator, Greg Grant, has images of just about all of them.

My friend Andy sent me this scan last week; it’s a wrapper from a five-cent pack of 1961 Topps football cards. He asked if I could use it for my wrapper page. Sure thing, Andy–I cropped it and added it to the page this morning.

The five-cent wrapper features an illustration of a cloth emblem insert. I presume that these inserts were included in five-cent packs, but not in one-cent packs–a bonus for kids who splurged and spent a nickel. Somewhere along the line we started calling these inserts “flocked stickers.” Why? Just a guess, but I’d say some price guide writer needed a name for them, hadn’t seen a wrapper or a checklist, and decided to show off his vocabulary. See I is for Inserts for a description of the cloth emblems and a picture of one.

Thanks, Andy!