Herman Munster

As I've written about in the past it seems like nearly every television series that was worth its salt had a baseball episode.  The newest card comes from one such episode from the 1960's monster sitcom The Munsters.  Although the original air dates were a bit before my time I got to see my fair share of episodes with the show staying in syndication for a good long time.

The design inspiration for this card is the 1987 Hygrade All-Time Greats set.  I remember getting this set as a gift as a kid.  I don't remember which relative got me it but I do seem to recall they came in a blister pack.  I really liked these cards when I got them.  I actually thought I had cards of guys like Mickey Mantle, Yogi Bear and Jackie Robinson.  I wasn't wise enough to realize that they were just reprints.

1987 Hygrade All-Time Greats

All of the cards listed the players playing years.  For Herman I chose 1964 - 1966 because it's the years that The Munsters originally aired.  The backs of the '87 Hygrade's would summarize the baseball legend's career.  For Herman's card I give give you the plot line of the episode, the baseball portion at least. 

I don't like making up information so I research as much as I can about all the cards I do.  It's said that Herman is 150 years old, the episode aired in 1965 ("Herman The Rookie") so when you take 150 from that you get a birth year of 1815.  Fred Gwynne is 6'5" -which helped him get the role as Herman Munster- and in the show his boots had a 4" rise bringing Herman up to a height of 6'9".  Gwynne weighed 220 lbs. and his Herman getup added 50 lbs., that's where I got the weight of 270 lbs.

The Monster Squad Redux

I've been messing with making cards from The Monster Squad for a little while now but never "officially" released them as one of my mini-sets.  I just get sidetracked sometimes.  There's a few movies I've made cards out of that should be a set by now but I get too excited to make new cards that I don't go and revisit those ones.

I got an extra urge to make this set when my son took an interest to the movie's VHS cover and wanted to watch it.  He literally watched it 4 times in a row.  Personally I was a little conflicted as to whether that made me an awesome dad because The Monster Squad rules or not so great because the language used by the Squad has aged like a glass a milk left in the hot summer sun.  I split the difference having a little chat about what things we were and were not allowed to repeat.  Hopefully he listens so I don't get taken aside by his teacher when picking him up from school.

After the movie marathon I decided to buckle down and get this mini-set done.  I switched it up a little bit from the original "prototype" cards I did, well they're prototypes now I guess.  Instead of the areas that are grey on the 1987-88 Fleer basketball I switched it up to a blue color drawing a little inspiration from the iconic Monster Squad movie poster.  I usually try to stick closely to the original design I'm using for the cards but I wanted these to have a little uniqueness knowing how beloved The Monster Squad is by my generation.