You'll Die Laughing Once Again! (Topps Creature Feature Trading Cards Pt. II)

Last year during the Countdown to Halloween, I posted a remembrance of an old series called Topps Creature Feature Trading Cards, but that most people just call You'll Die Laughing, because those words are pasted across the backs of each card in the set directly above the joke section. If you did not see it, click here to play catch up, as this is Part II of the piece.

This is a posting of the next thirteen cards in my You'll Die Laughing collection. I do not have a full set, which has always bothered me considering how much I love the cards, but the opportunity to grab a full set has just never presented itself to me. I know that I can find them online, but just haven't done it. In the meantime, I am still fully appreciative of that which I have.

Because the series was released in 1973, some of the jokes reflect the mores and politics of that time. As an example, card #26 features the mummy Kharis carrying a woman (whose face, as I mentioned in Pt. I, is one of those that has likely had the face of a Topps employee superimposed (rather badly) onto it; cards #23 above and #29 below are other examples). The joke reads "You're not going to that Women's Lib meeting and that's final!" 

As 1973 was a big year in the Women's Lib movement with the passing of Roe v. Wade and Billie Jean King defeating Bobby Riggs in a highly publicized "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match, the card certainly reflects the battle going on in the public eye at that time. But it plays the same today considering how much the news has been filled in recent months with rape trials with ridiculous outcomes, the ongoing fight over abortion rights, squabbling over public breastfeeding, attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, women still not getting equal pay for equal work, and a presidential nominee talking brazenly and proudly about molesting women, but also seems in constant forward motion in his ongoing reign of terror by demeaning any women that cross his path.

Some of the cards (like the ones above) featured wisecracks that became stock jokes in our household, at least while my brothers and I were kids and were still being directly influenced by regular readings of these cards. I have always been fond of the one featuring the Creature from the Black Lagoon as an opera-singing gondolier, or the one where Frankenstein's Monster gets upset with the Wolf Man over saying his mother has a mustache. (Mother jokes are always funny... always...)

The card with Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera dressed as the Red Death above, where he proclaims "My girdle is killing me!" was probably one of the earliest drag jokes that I enjoyed as a kid. Yes, I know men can wear girdles as well, but the selection of the shot with the Phantom having a "clutch the pearls" moment has always read more feminine to me, thereby making the Phantom's action into a drag-style joke. Another fave is the image of Kharis (above, with Lon Chaney, Jr. under this particular makeup) where he asks "Who fooled around with my butane lighter?," looking for all the world like he had just lit himself on fire.

I was never as much of a fan as a kid of the cards that were marked with "American International Pictures, Inc." on the back instead of "Universal Pictures Co., Inc." Some of the one-liners on the fronts were just as good (or bad) as the Universal ones, but I didn't take to the AIP cards the same way as I did the Universal ones because the AIP ones featured monsters or characters that I didn't know (for the record, I had barely seen any of the Universal films at that age, but every kid knows Frankenstein and the Wolf Man anyway). Frankly, even now I have a hard time identifying some of the AIP copyrighted films, even though I have probably seen all of them several times.

AIP Example #1

AIP Example #2

AIP Example #3

That's all for the second batch of You'll Die Laughing cards. I will post another group for your enjoyment in the near future. In the meantime, drive all of your family and friends crazy with the stupid jokes on the backs of the cards. They'll thank you for it! No, honestly... they will...

RTJ

[As before, all of the images of cards in this article were scanned from my personal collection. Feel free to copy and use as you wish, but if you repost on your website, please credit The Cinema 4 Pylon. Otherwise, please share in the silliness.]

I Wouldn't Trade This Memory for Any Other...

It's 1973 and my brother Mark and I are on a Halloween spree. It's dark, cold, and snowy in our mountainside neighborhood in Eagle River, Alaska, and we have largely completed our October 31st rounds, collecting as much free candy as we can from the houses of our neighbors. I am nine years old, and already a veteran of several Halloween campaigns; my brother Mark is still two months away from turning five, and this may or may not have been his first trip around the neighborhood. What is important is that it is the oldest Halloween memory I still possess.

Because it is small town Alaska in the winter, our Halloween route is completed by motorized vehicle instead of foot, especially in a neighborhood where the houses are spaced at least one or two acres apart, if not more. Practically every kid celebrating the holiday used his parents in this way to collect their Halloween tribute as they wound around the gravel roads covered in snow and ice. The upside is that there is considerably less wear and tear on costumes when you only have to climb out of the car and back into it, instead of wandering about from house to house getting into all kinds of residual Halloween mischief with your friends. The downside is that you miss out on that residual Halloween mischief, which is why I always wished I grew up in a regular town with normal, paved streets.

I don't recall what Ben Nye-branded costumes we were wearing that year. The truth is that I don't remember any of my costumes when I was a kid, just that they were the kind you got in a box, had a plastic face mask of a cartoon or comic strip character, had a rubber-band stapled to the sides of the face mask to hold it on your head, and a flame-retardant outfit that was often more of a theme design featuring the character rather than the character's outfit itself. What I remember most solidly, however, is the moment that I discovered monster trading cards.

I was not yet the avid baseball card collector I would become. That would start up in two summers, though it would only be one more year before I watched the World Series with any interest (the A's versus the Dodgers in 1974) and actually became a baseball fan. And that was only after playing it miserably in Little League for the first time. I would also play it miserably the rest of the time. I am not a natural athlete. Or an athlete at all. 

When I got rolling with the hobby in the summer of 1975 (the year our local Proctors' store carried the 10-cent Topps baseball packs with the mini-cards, which are worth twice as much as the regular cards today, and I still have all of mine), it would stick with me until the mid-'90s. That was when I finally got fed up with the speculators and card shop owners that were ruining the hobby for me (part of my job at the time was as a wholesale seller of new trading cards to those same assholes), and I didn't really look at my sports cards again until a couple of months ago. But that is a story worth fleshing out at another time.

I never gave up on my monster cards, however. I also still remember the exact house we visited where Mark and I each received several packs of Topps Creature Feature Trading Cards. I don't recall who lived there (I think their daughter was a friend of mine, but I can't bring her to my mind), but I can even now get on GoogleMaps and point to precisely where their house was. They lived at the end of the same street as our babysitter, right in front of an empty lot that was used by us for years for pickup baseball games. And I also still recall being very nervous about knocking on their door, even though I had been there before. I did not like the dark of the Eagle River night in those days (with the only illumination coming from porch lights -- no street lights at all), and was always looking out for Bigfoot and werewolves in the woods that surrounded all of the houses in our neighborhood. (We weren't concerned at all about the actual bears that strolled through every now and then.)

I have a very clear memory that has never left me when I got in the car. I looked in my bag at one of the packs of cards, picked it up, and said "What are these?" In those days, like most little kids, I wanted candy. It was until I got home, when we went through our stash that I got a really good look at them. And I fell in instant love. (Didn't forget about the candy though...)

The Topps Creature Feature Trading Cards set from 1973 [see accompanying pictures] was comprised of cards with white front borders framing a black and white photo from mostly old Universal horror films (with some other studios like AIP, Hammer, Toho, etc. thrown into the mix). I did not know they were old Universal horror films at the time; I had not yet begun my deep dive into the studio's offerings. That was still a few years away. In some cases, these pictures were my first encounter with many of these monsters, such as the Mole People and the Metalluna Mutant from This Island Earth. I just knew that these were the coolest things I had in my possession at the time. These had monsters all over them, and they were mine, all mine! Mwah-hah-hah-hah!!

The purple and grey backs of the cards were another story altogether. The top of each back had the words "You'll Die Laughing" emblazoned on it; for years, because I threw away the wrapper (who knew to keep them in those days?), I thought "You'll Die Laughing" was the name of the card set (and so do many other people). The bottom two-thirds of each card was made up of text relating some of the most terrible jokes ever proffered on the card buying public. "Why is it useless to send letters to Washington?" "Because he's dead." You get the picture.

The jokes on the front of the cards weren't much better, but I am very fond of many of them. My friends and I took to appropriating many of the jokes and slogans in our own stupid games, often involving monsters, regardless of whether we understood them or not. My personal favorite were the ones that involved references to actual products used in the home, because it made things easier when riffing off of them. One of my faves is the one with Oliver Reed from Hammer's The Curse of the Werewolf, playing the titular monster in a ragged shirt, and who just has to be odiferous, asking desperately while raising one seemingly sweaty, fur-laden arm, "Who took my Right Guard?"

There is a very odd thing about the set that I noticed even without having seen the films yet. It was a mystery to me for years until the internet age. In several of the cards, the faces of the non-monster characters, i.e. the humans, don't exactly match the bodies and clothes of the figures on which they appear. The rumor I have seen stated in several places, esp. on many card sites, is that Topps replaced the heads of the human characters with those of employees at the Topps Trading Card Company. I don't know the reason for this, except possibly Topps had the rights to only use the monster images but not the photos of the regular actors, or maybe it was just a fun prank on the part of the card company.

There are a few good examples of this within this article. If you compare the photo in card #8 featuring the 1925 Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney, the woman to his right looks nothing like Mary Philbin, the actress who played Christine Daaé in the movie. [See below...]

I am unsure, but I think the same woman appears in the card featuring a scene from Universal's The Mole People (1956) [card #2, the third one featured in this article]. So, the same woman in photos from films 31 years apart without losing her looks? Is she a vampire?

Even more lovingly egregious is the head that is several sizes too big for the woman's body in a card featuring Lon Chaney, Jr.'s famous Wolf Man. Just look at the size of her noggin!...

Or maybe his breath caused her head to puff up as he knocked her out with it?

It was all good, stupid fun; no more idiotic than the goony jokes my friends and I loved in MAD Magazine or Cracked. They were actually closer to the jokes in Cracked; even as kids, we knew the difference in quality. We also understood that MAD skewed just a bit older in its humor, which had tremendous appeal to us even when, once again, we may not have gotten much of what was being mocked. Within the year, I would see my first of the latter issues of the original run of Famous Monsters of Filmland, whose wise-cracking, pun-filled pages went hand in hand with the Topps Creature Feature cards, and would also allow me to learn more about the movies featured on the cards.

Following Halloween, I managed to find a few more packs of the cards at the store, and also supplemented my new collection via a series of small trades with my friends and brother. There was one more trick involved in maintaining my pile of Creature Feature cards: keeping it.

Over those early years, I recall a couple of times where some of my brother's cards needed to be rescued from the trash, and also a conversation between my parents about whether the cards were appropriate for me. There is nothing gory or bloody about the set. Aside from the outright monsters, which I was already considering to be friends rather than something to be feared, the most shocking thing to the tender-hearted would be some fairly gruesome posed skeletal remains. But even those are just there to tell goofy jokes. [See the "reducing pill" skeleton below.] There are a few girls in nightgowns, so that may have been a concern, though there is nothing featuring outrageous amounts of cleavage. It is a fairly tame set overall. If anything, there is a small amount of misogyny and political incorrectness in some of the jokes, but that would not have registered much in the mid-1970s.

Whatever the conversation between my parents, I won out and got to keep my cards. I never completed the 128-card set (there were two series, one with 62 cards, and the second with 66), and to this day, I still have exactly 70 monster cards from that Halloween season kept neatly in an individual notebook that resides by my desk alongside some of my movie guides (and not with the rest of my huge card collection). The cards are fairly easy and relatively cheap to get, so perhaps I will one day make an attempt to complete it. But I still have the ones that I first loved, and that is the most important part to me.

And finally, one of my favorite cards...

[All of the images of cards in this article were scanned from my personal collection. I will be posting images of numerous cards on Twitter and Facebook through the remainder of the Halloween season. Feel free to copy and use as you wish. Share in the silliness.]

Some Gigantic, Turned-On Ape... [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 3]

[Before traipsing deeper into the jungle, read Pt. 1 and Pt. 2...]

A side-trip to another Kong: As I hinted at briefly before, something else happened in the summer of '77 that didn't start out as having anything to do with King Kong, but ended up furthering my giant ape obsession regardless. Star Wars fever had slammed into the earth like a meteor, and my brothers and I were no exceptions to the rest of humanity that year. I had already read the paperback novelization (with the original, purplish Ralph McQuarrie-painted cover released the winter before, not the gold-colored movie poster-draped cover that was in circulation that summer) five times, I had the first couple issues of the comics, and was already buying the trading cards. I was a primed and raring-to-go convert to the Lucas cult before I had even stepped into the theatre.

Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for our parent's pocketbooks, we lived in a town without a movie theatre. In fact, we lived a good fifteen or so miles from the nearest movie theatre, and thus our sojourns into the big city were far and few between; we only saw new movies maybe four or five times a year, if we were lucky. So, when we went, we made sure that we were seeing something we really wanted to see. Usually, it would be, due to our tender ages, the newest Disney flick (like the Witch Mountain movies) or the latest in the Pink Panther or James Bond series (thankfully, my mother was a fan of both). I had started to push things a little more as I reached my teen years, and was able to convince them to see new science-fiction or fantasy movies like Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. So, it was not even a light certainty that we would get the opportunity to see this movie that well-timed mass merchandising had already brainwashed us into believing that we had some sort of moral imperative to go see.

This story would have no purpose if we hadn't gone to see it, and yes, after a small amount of pleading and begging, my brother Mark and I eventually wore down my mother's resolve. Meanwhile, my best friend Rusty and his little brother Rodney worked a similar magic on their mom, and thus, we found ourselves crammed into one vehicle one Saturday afternoon, heading into the "big city" of Anchorage, Alaska to make our acquaintance with R2-D2 and the rest of that motley crew of rebel heroes. It would have been a sad situation if the movie had sucked, but even if it did, we did not possess the critical faculties to say so, inexperienced in the ways of movies as we were at that time, and really, we were kids. If someone in the media had convinced us watching paint dry was the hottest and greatest new fad, we would have adopted the consumer lock-step and marched to the nearest house, staring at freshly-brushed walls all summer. So, whether Star Wars was actually any good was beside the point. It's just a happy coincidence that it actually was good.

So, where do you take five sugared-up, buzzing kids who have just spent the late afternoon and early evening watching droids, aliens, lightsaber fights, spaceships, and laser blaster battles? To the local ice cream parlor to get them even more sugared up and buzzing! The parlor, in this instance, was a local establishment (and failed attempt at franchising) called Soapy Smith's, named after the ever so-popular Gold Rush gangster and conman Jefferson "Soapy" Smith. (Because, if there is anything that goes perfect with a banana split, it is extortion and murder. "Would you like a cold case of murder with your strawberry parfait?") But, sugared-up and buzzing Star Wars fanatic kids aren't worried about such ironies; we just wanted more candy and ice cream. As I recall, the plan was actually to get us to eat some actual food, and I do remember having a hot dog, followed by the previously mentioned and murderously intentioned banana split. But I also had five dollars to spend on candy, and because I was deep in the early throes of a both a burgeoning card collecting habit and movie fandom, I bought a couple packets of Topps King Kong trading cards from the candy counter.

These cards were not for the 1933 version that had somewhat recently begun not just my Kong obsession, but also my jonesing for Fay Wray, a woman 57 years my senior. No, these were for the 1976 Dino de Laurentiis version, a film which I had not been given the chance to see (though in a couple years I would get a chance to see it and regret it highly). But standards of quality were not a factor that evening, instead it was the simple fact that I had the opportunity to purchase an item that had a snarling, roaring Kong on the wrapper, and the hope that inside of that wrapper, I would see numerous cards featuring dinosaurs galore. This hope reared its head only because I was unaware that Mr. De Laurentiis did not see fit to loading his Skull Island up with prehistoric beasts, but rather merely with a giant python. (And the man's name is Dino? Talk about not living up to your billing. Tsk tsk...)

So, I bought the cards, but did not open them until we were in the darkness of the car ride home, where Rusty and I began flipping through the cards, the only illumination provided by our pocket flashlights and intermittently glowing streetlights that our vehicle passed. What we discovered, to the complete opposite reaction of horror, was that we had in our hands little cardboard pieces of what to our parents' eyes would have been damn near pornography: a progression of images of a young and scantily clad Jessica Lange being drenched with a waterfall and in various other states of undress that seem like nothing now, but were certainly provocative enough for a couple of young boys at the time. Especially of interest to me was the "waterfall" card, where Kong douses Dwan to wash the mud off of her. Dwan sits with her legs under her on the palm of the giant gorilla's hand and takes her shower. On the card, while it is clear that she is wearing garments, it was easy enough to trick one's mind just enough to convince oneself that she was completely nude. While I have never been that into the Jessica Lange type, at the time, she worked for me just fine.

I said that our parents (or at least one of mine; my mom would have been fine with it) "would have" considered those cards nearly porn, but they never hard the opportunity. We never let our parents see the more intriguing cards, and we managed to keep our cards to the same level of secrecy that our little neighborhood gang eventually managed to keep our fairly well-stocked Playboy collection, which we obtained through means of having sharp little eyes always on the lookout for displays of female pulchritude. Playboy, Penthouse, Oui, Gallery, Genesis, Nugget, High Society, Hustler... we had them all. Never to be discovered by the elders of the village, our "comic book" collection was revered by the neighborhood boys. If you heard us say to one another, "Hey, you want to read some comics?," three out of five times we were heading off to look at titty mags.

But that was in the very near future; that collection would come about in the next year or so. For this moment, all that we had were these, for all purposes, completely innocent trading cards in our pervy little hands. I managed to keep my set of those cards -- completely innocuous by even the standards of that day, but that didn't matter to me then -- hidden from my parents. And I still have each of those cards today. [The images on this page are from my collection.]

It is always astounding to me the moments that stick with you as you shuffle through life. Embarrassing moments, squandered opportunities, and early small perversions all seem to exist in the same file cabinet in my head, while what most people would consider the larger, more important events in a life, like weddings and such, seem to have filtered out of my brain almost as soon as they happened. Somehow, this whole Kong card thing, along with most other movie-related "trivia," has convinced my gray matter that it is of far more revelatory importance to me than those other mislaid events. Somehow, this reveals more of my eventual character than I would realize at the time. And it is probably right.

[To be continued in Pt. 4 here...]