I feel like I should apologize for a string of entries about things, but they’re the easiest to post about when there’s a sumo wrestler sitting on your sinuses.
So check out what I just pulled out of the closet that hasn’t seen the light of day for three years: our framed, uncut sheet of Wacky Packages stickers (1st Series 1979 Rerun Sheet)…
You’ve seen Wacky Packs, right? Made by Topps, they included six stickers and a pack of gum. The stickers spoofed the products of the day and were illustrated by cartoonists like Art Spiegelman. Pretty silly stuff…
We thought the back was pretty awesome, too, so we had the sheet framed in glass so we could flip it over and look at it…
Now that you’re saying to yourself, “that’s so cool!”, let me tell you the backstory behind this particular sheet.
Picked this up at a Manhattan flea market 11 or 12 years ago for $30. Curiously cheap. We figured it was cool enough to hang up whether it was legit or not. Wackypackages.org claims it’s not counterfeit, however…
This is the infamous 1979 rerun sheet. Tens of thousands of these suddenly showed up in 1999, before that they would sell for around $150 each, now they can be obtained for about $20 (at one point you could get them for under $10), certainly the cheapest sheet at this time. There has been a lot of speculation as to why so many showed up.
It came out that these sheets were part of a planned promotion for Bond Bread around 1985. Bond Bread was apparently going to use them like Wonder Bread had. They were printed in the same factory in Philadelphia that the rest of the wackys were printed at. This was around 1985… They were printed and die-cut, and yet they were never shipped, due to some sort of cease and desist or perhaps due to a change of plans on the corporate level, we are not sure. So there they sat on a pallet for 15 years, with the “stop shipment order” stuck on top. Eventually the factory went out of business and went abandoned… There the sheets sat, until they were found sometime in 1999.
… It appears there were on the order of 100,000 of these sheets.
So there ya go. Our sheet will likely never be worth anything but that’s not really why we bought it. Wacky Packs rule.