Terror Beastball Creepy Cards and Topps Baseball Trading Cards compared...
When I look at Beastball, what usually crosses my mind is how at the time I was pursuing both the Wacky parody and its real-product counterpart at the same time, or almost the same time. How often did that happen? I remember buying 1975 baseball wax packs from an ice cream truck that stopped on our school block during lunchtime recess, a maybe 10-minute period after lunch when we were allowed to go outside on the street while both ends of the block were temporarily barricaded from through traffic. That was early spring, April-May timeframe. The 13th Wackys pursuit, for me, started a little later when the weather warmed up more and the ice cream trucks were more consistently present at our local park, say late May through June. I remember the Hank Aaron card being so sought after that I traded a maybe 4-inch thick stack of 1975 commons for a heavily worn and weatherbeatenHank Aaron card, I wanted it that badly. Guess the HR record the previous season raised his profile big time. Looking back on it, I always wonder, how does a relatively brand-new card get that beat-up that quickly?
On Beastball, would it be fair to say that the popularity of the Planet of the Apes movie and TV franchises inspired the use of simian characters in many Wackys? There are quite a few of them, and the parodies themselves don’t always reference apes directly, like Gulp Oil. Guess the same could be said for the various monster characters.
Anyway, anecdotal trivia aside, great Wacky that does justice to a great wrapper. If you look over all of Topps sports wrappers through the 70s and 80s, there are a number of drab, boring ones, but this one is at the top of the list in my book.