Heat

Here goes another card idea I've been sitting on for quite some time and finally went ahead and executed. Anyone who has seen the movie knows that Heat goes hard.  That shootout scene downtown towards the end always gives me goosebumps.  So badass!  I thought everyone in the cast was excellent in this movie, De Niro, Val Kilmer, the whole lot.  And of course Al Pacino with his bat-shit crazy line delivery.  

This card was simply inspired due to the fact that De Niro and his antihero cohorts wore hockey goalie masks during the opening armored truck heist scene that sets the whole movie into motion.  I thought it would be fun to frame the four participants in an older hockey card design, I just needed one that featured four players.  That's when I came upon the 1974-75 Topps hockey Team Leaders design.  Once I had my template it was just a matter of filling in the details.  

Enthusiasms

I started thinking of movie characters that used a bat, but not necessarily for baseball. Robert De Niro as Al Capone in Untouchables immediately came to mind with maybe the most memorable scene of the movie being where Capone beats a crime associate of his to death with a baseball bat at a dinner gathering. The crazy thing is that actually happened in 1928 after Capone found out he was being plotted on.

Untouchable came out in 1987 so I chose the ‘87 Donruss baseball as the design inspiration. I utilized the “Rated Rookie” logo in place of a team logo. I listed Capone as a designated hitter as a tongue-in-cheek reference to him bashing brains in.