Men At Work

I may have mentioned it in another post, but back in the early '90s we used to watch a lot of HBO, especially in the dog days of summer when there wasn't much else to do.  Any time I see that old "HBO Feature Presentation" intro floods me with nostalgia of watching the premier of a anticipated new movie with my family. 

Men At Work was a movie I watched a ton of time.  My mom like it so much I remember she dubbed it on VHS.  It's one of the movies that I could probably go line-by-line for most of its scenes.  Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez had great chemistry, and why shouldn't they, right?  They're brothers after all.  They should have done more movies together, in my opinion.  Keith David also killed it in this movie.

For this card I wanted a way to feature both Carl and James on the same card.  That drew me to the 1990 Fleer baseball "Major League Prospects" subset.  I remember being really geeked when I pulled the George Canale / Kevin Maas  Prospects card.  With all the hype surrounding Maas I was sure that car would one day be worth roughly a zillion dollars.  Yea, no.

Major League Turns 30

Now that the 2018 NFL season has wrapped up it’s time to start gearing up for baseball’s spring training.  We’re also coming up on the 30th anniversary of an absolutely iconic baseball comedy, Major League.  It’s a little hard to believe that come April 7th this movie will officially be thirty years old!  Be that as it may it’s as timeless a  tale of underdogs defying all odds as there is.

I actually made a few Major League cards with an ‘89 Donruss inspired design a few years back.  They were okay but I knew that with all the cards I’ve made since that I could do better.  With the timing of the movie’s anniversary coming up I wanted to make a mini-set for the movie that would be one of my best sets to date, and I think I just may have accomplished that with these.

In thinking what design to use there was a few to consider.  I did not consider Topps’ 1989 design because 5 years ago they had Major League cards in their Archives set for the movie’s 25th anniversary.  I wasn’t looking to duplicate my ‘89 Donruss effort and 1989 Score… super “meh”.  There was really only one correct selection … the set that brought collectors perhaps the most infamous baseball card of all-times.  Of course I’m referring to the 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken F*ck Face “error” card!  It was only fitting that I commemorated Major League’s motley misfits with this design.

I wanted the set to be as comprehensive as I could so, unlike the real Fleer baseball cards, I’ve included the coaching staff, team owner, GM, and even color man Harry Doyle.

I added two cards in style style of the “Super Star Specials” and “Major League Prospects” subsets that were part of the ‘89 Fleer set.  The Hayes / Vaughn Prospects card is easily my favorite of the mini-set.

I specifically wanted to find a picture of Pedro Cerrano doing his voodoo snake ritual.  I wanted that

card to be in homage to another famous Fleer baseball issue; the 1984 Glenn Hubbard card.

The two rival Yankee cards in the set are actually cards I made quite a while ago in the style of the 1988 Donruss set.  I think the Clu and Duke cards in a different design adds a nice contrast for the movie’s goliath-like antagonists so I included these two as official parts of this set.

Lucas

I decided to watch Lucas in order to get the details down to make a mini-set.  First off, it's as cute of a movie as I remembered it to be.  I like that it's a bit of a different take on the teenage high school experience than other films of that genre.

Lucas came out in 1986.  I've used a 1986 Topps football inspired design a few time so that part was pretty straight forward.  I chose to go with the Atlanta Falcons color scheme from that set because the Park High Pirates red and black jersey reminded me of Atlanta's unis.

The biggest challenge for me with this set was what I would call the 'fan accurate' details.  Or, me just being extra anal about my cards.  I always like to have first and last names when available.  I was running into different spellings of Lucas' last name between Bly and Blye.  It was about 50/50 between the two spellings.  It was finally settled when I found some 8" x 10" studio promo pictures on eBay that had the spelling in the picture’s caption as Blye.  Those pictures also helped to confirm the spelling of Cappie's last name.  For whatever reason little details are important to me.  Unfortunately I could not find any additional name info for any of the other three cards in the set.

I had fun with Lucas' football position if you'll notice.  In the scene where Lucas is inserted into the game against Rockford he yells back to Coach asking what position he's playing and Coach yells back "prone".

The Wraith

I got a message a direct message from an Instagram friend, @creature1031, asking me if I had done cards from The Wraith (1986) yet. I told him that not only had I not done any, but I've never even heard of the movie, to which he recommended I go on Netflix and check it out.  So, I did just that.

Within the first couple of minutes of watching The Wraith I knew that "yes" I was going to make some cards.  Then, I started to feel embarrassed for myself having not known of this movie until now.  I even contemplated turning in my '80s kid card but figured I could atone by making some cool trading cards.

1986 Donruss

This movie is so cool. You've got a cast that features names like Charlie Sheen, Randy Quaid, and Clint Howard.  You've got a soundtrack with names like Mötley Crüe, Robert Palmer, Billy Idol, and Ozzy Ozbourne.  Add a smoking hot Sherilyn Fenn, a totally '80s-fied story and some really cool cars to get a movie that I literally love and have watched 4 times since -- some of it was for "trading card research", so save the complete loser accusations, even if it might be the case ... maybe.

For the template it was an easy choice, a 1986 Donruss inspired design. There's no way to build this choice up other than to say that it fits perfectly. In my opinion it fits better with these cards than it does the baseball cards. I could even imagine a similar design on the trim on the inside of the Turbo Interceptor.

I found making cards for this set like potato chips.  This is my largest set to date.  The only reason I stopped at 17 was lack of images to use.