Good man. You're right to stop there for a bit, the MLB series is weak - solid art, poor gags. Restricted by what MLB would allow? Who knows.
The 50th series - is that all computer art? Really bad. An insult to the anniversary.
And Goes To The Movies? Just unbelievably stupid aside from a handful of solid cards. More really bad art, too. I only collected the subsets.
The care that the Attacky, Postcards and Old School series get put them head and shoulders above most of what we've got the last 10 years, though ANS2023 was a solid entry and leaves me hopeful for the future.
Stop for a
bit? I'm stopping for
good this time.
First of all, Mitch, you're absolutely right...
MLB,
50th Anniversary and
Go to the Movies deviated
enormously from the basic Wacky format so much (in fact, as I've said before, the last two of these were both made
entirely out of subsets) that I didn't even
consider getting them
at all.
However, I'm also not getting
2014 S1 and
2015 S1, for these main reasons:
*they're both not titled what they
should've been titled, namely
ANS12 and
ANS13 (if they
had been,
then I'd have bought them anyway in spite of the other two reasons listed below),
*
2014 S1 was really messed up. First, only the base stickers had the classic white backgrounds with black borders, while all of its subsets had what was called in it "Mod Rad" backgrounds, which was a mere variation in said base stickers. Second (and this one was admittedly very, very
strange, I must say), two of said subsets - Ridiculous Reads and Terrible TV - had
white borders instead of black ones, which had never been done before and which have never been done since.
*
2015 S1 was a
little bit better, but it had
one major flaw: there were three subsets originally announced for it on Cardboard Connection's page on the series when it was first released: Crazy Collectibles (with five stickers), Batty Baseball (with 10 stickers), and Coming Soon (again, with five stickers); however, instead of releasing them as such and even having the subsets' titles on the card backs like what was
supposed to have been done in the first place, Topps merged them into the base stickers instead (their formats as the three subsets, meanwhile, were still preserved for unknown reasons).
Btw, unlike the various
Garbage Pail Kids series at the time that were having two mainstream series released every year (this is still being done to this day, I believe), only one mainstream
Wacky Packages series was released in both 2014 and 2015. Big mistake, Topps, big mistake indeed. If you had only done
that like you've done with
GPK,
maybe Wackys would've lasted in retail stores a
little bit longer.
Also, does anyone else besides myself figure that what would've been the Batty Baseball subset in
2015 S1 just
may have been both the basis and the inspiration for
MLB Wacky Packages in 2016? It's certainly worth both some thought
and consideration.