Thursday, July 3, 2014

More Late-80's Calbee Laziness

A few months back I had a discussion with Sean that lead to a post about some 1988 Calbee cards that appeared to feature pictures taken from a TV screen,  (He later did a post about a Bill Gullickson card from that set that also appeared to feature a picture taken from a TV screen.)  I recently picked up a bunch of Calbee cards from the 1980's from Ebay and as I was putting them away, I noticed that I had a couple cards from 1987 that also appeared to be photographs of TV screens:

1987 Calbee #377 Hiromitsu Ochiai

1987 Calbee #378 Carlos Ponce
The Calbee Collector's web page for 1987 shows a couple cards that he suspects as having TV images - one is the Ochiai card above and the other is card #376 of Suguru Egawa.  Since these three cards are in sequence, I'm kind of curious what the other cards around them look like.

Calbee's late-80's laziness does not appear to be limited to not wanting to send photographers to the ballpark.  Check out these two 1989 cards of Yukihiro Nishizaki of the Fighters:

1989 Calbee #157

1989 Calbee #217
You can almost hear the editor in Calbee's office going "Don't worry about it.  We'll just crop the photo differently.  No one will ever notice..."

1 comment:

Sean said...

Great finds!

Actually it is funny, I was just going to do a similar post. After looking through my 1987s I noticed a few that looked like TV screen grabs (particularly a couple of the gold-bordered cards, in addition to the ones you spotted in this post)!

I find it amusing because there are actually some really quality, in-action photos on a lot of the cards in the set, but on some they are just mind-bogglingly lazy!