Zack Morris

I've revisited this Zack Morris card I made back in May of 2017 and have added another card to make it a 2 card mini-set. 

At the beginning of that same episode Zack is sitting in the Max stressing over finishing a take home test.  Enter Slater and Kelly all worried that Zack, team captain, isn't going to make the pep rally.  The ever scheming Zack tells that he's got it covered and in walks Screech exclaiming that he can be called Air Zack to which Slater quips "more like air nerd".  And there you have, a custom card is born.

Hey, remember that time right before the big championship game that Zack tripped over Mr. Belding and hurt his knee so bad that he had to have surgery that was preformed by Lisa Turtle's mom?? Good times.  So good in fact that there should have been a basketball card produced...

The episode, which premiered in September of 1991, is "The Surgery" (season 3, episode 5) - or "Operation Zack" (season 4, episode 5) if you're planning to stream it on Hulu.

For this card I chose the 1990-91 NBA Hoops set to emulate.  A couple things to take note of; this is

1990-91 NBA Hoops

the first card I put a brand on, sort of.  I never put Topps or Donruss etc. because I'm not trying to pass it off as one of their cards but rather a fantasy (or phantom if you will) card with a vintage inspired design.  The area that would normally display "NBA Hoops" looks incredibly bare with nothing in it.  To remedy this I put "HS Hoops" (i.e. High School Hoops) down there, which beat out "TV Hoops". Secondly in the text that would usually read the player's position I had a little fun and put "Preppy".  In the episode it was never revealed what position Zack played, I would assume forward?  Slater does state however that Zack's the team captain, which is what I originally had there before changing it to preppy.

I couldn't find a good enough picture online from the episode so I decided to try to get my own screen capture.  After quite awhile of trying to get screen shots of a few different scenes this was the best one I came up with.  I doctored it a bit, but that's as crisp as I could get it.

Okay ... now here's where things get interesting.  When I went to pull a Bayside Tigers logo I noticed that every single example I found online just looked different than I remember.  It then dawned on me what exactly it was.  At some point the Bayside Tiger was replaced with an impostor tiger and everyone just went with it, and bought the t-shirt.  Everyone that is expect for me. You see I recalled the tiger bearing a striking similarity to my hometown Detroit Tigers logo at the time.  And, as it turns out, my memory served me well.

There's no great screen captures, but you can look at the picture above and clearly see what I mean. I'm too anal retentive to let that slide, so I made my own mock up of the Bayside Tiger logo that now resides in the lower right corner of this card.

"I'm In The F*ckin' Zone!"

It's been a minute since I posted a new card.  I've been extra busy with grown up type stuff.  But, I had to share this one right away.

This is a card I've wanted to make for some time now.  I'm a big basketball fan, it's actually my #1 sport to watch or play.  White Men Can't Jump and Above The Rim are my favorite basketball movies.  I had wanted to do a Billy Hoyle card using the 1991-92 Skybox design but I hit a road block seeing as I have no idea how to make those three dimensional geometric shapes, so the idea got shelved in my brain.

See, those ^

I prefer to use a card design that is the same as a movie's release.  It's part of my card's shtick. Since White Men Can't Jump came out in 1992 I really wanted to use the Skybox's design, but like I said I didn't know to pull off those floating shape thingys (I'm not an actual graphic designer so I don't know all the correct jargon).  I looked at designs from the other brand's 1991-92 sets but they just really didn't do much for me I guess.

I love Skybox's first few sets.  They had a futuristic digital design that really made them stand out from the other brands.   Then it just sort of dawned on me that the basketball card sets all span two calendar years because of how the basketball season runs.  So, why not take a run at the 1992-93 Skybox design (duh).

Even though the design looks simple enough I spent a little more time on this one then I usually do when recreating a card design.  I was pretty excited about this one.  One, because the majority of the cards I make are baseball designs, they're overall just more iconic.  And two, because of the more modern digital look was something new for me.  To date this is the only design I've done past 1990.

Making the hot pink gradient design element wasn't all that difficult, but I did take a little extra time masking out Woody.  I just wanted it to be extra crisp.  I sharpened the image and added a little more contrast as well as made it a tad darker than the original because I noticed most of Skybox's images were a bit darker - probably to make the bright colors pop a bit better.  I didn't want to go too dark though seeing as how all of WMCJ's hoops scenes were on outdoor courts in California.  This was actually the second image I tried. The first was at a different point in Billy Hoyle's drive and just presented too much challenge with getting all the elements to work together correctly.

In searching for an image that would work better with the design I lucked up on finding the logo that was on the jerseys from the two-on-two tournament that Billy Hoyle and Sidney Deane were in. Originally my card wasn't going to have a team logo but finding the Brotherhood Tournament logo was such a rad touch.  Isn't the internet cool?

I worked awhile on getting the glowing basketball trail right.  I tried to over complicate it, but in the end it basically came down to putting a motion blur on a simple vectored shape.  Then it was over to Dafont to find a couple of close enough font matches to the original.

For comparison's sake 

I decided pretty immediately that there will be a Sidney Deane companion card.  I also started to think of other roles for both Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes.  There's Major League, Wildcats, The Fan, and Semi-Pro to putz around with in the future.

Also, in looking for images I came across this blog that had some really cool custom basketball movie cards too.