The other odd item I picked up recently (after
the JBR 22 "taba") was another "taba" for a late 1980's set - the 1987 Amada "Heat Sensitive Giants" set (JGA 15). This one had 36 packs on a string with a cardboard cover over the whole thing.
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| Front |
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| Back |
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| Side |
The packs for JBR 22 were plain blue envelopes but the packs for this set had text and photos on both sides:
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| Pack Front |
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| Pack Back |
The set contains 36 cards total but there are only 11 players in the set - all members of the Giants (as you might expect from the name of the set). Each player has at least 2 cards - Tatsunori Hara has the most with six. Several of the cards use recropped versions of the same pictures - like these two of Kiyoshi Nakahata:
The cards themselves are a bit smaller than the standard size - around 2 1/4 by 3 3/8 inches. Here are some other examples:
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| Warren Cromartie |
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| Tatsunori Hara |
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| Masumi Kuwata |
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| Kazuhiro Yamakura |
The reason that the cards are called "heat sensitive is because of their backs. There are 10 numbered areas on the back of the card that are black when cold but when heated up (by putting your finger on them) will reveal text. I think the idea is that you could play a baseball game with each area revealing a particular outcome of an at bat (although I don't know how you would randomly generated a number between 1 and 10 unless you had a 10 sided die). There are also three additional black areas on the back that when heated up reveal a rock/paper/scissors symbol:
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| Back of one of Kaoru Okazaki's cards |
I got 30 unique cards out of the 36 packs in the "taba" which isn't too bad although not as good as I did with the JBR 22 "taba". I was a little disappointed because I already had five cards from this set and I got all five again but that's the risk you take when getting a bunch of packs for a small set.
Two of the packs contained a small slip of paper with the card that I think indicates that I won something (although for all I know they could say "Inspected by number 5"):
Ryan had mentioned the other day that frequently the tabas would have cards attached to the back cover. I think that in addition to serving as an example card, these might also be prize cards - cards given to the person who got the "winning ticket" (or a card stamped as a "winner"). So the idea would be if I pulled this "ticket" from a pack, I'd take it to the store owner and they'd give me one the cards from the outside of the taba. Unfortunately, there's no cards on the taba I got and I'm not sure what the prize cards for this set would have been anyway.
4 comments:
In the past, I'm sure you're right in that the sample cards were prize cards. The slip of paper you have is a prize redemption slip, and they still use those today. You would simply give the slip to the clerk and redeem it for whatever prize you earned.
Today, the prizes are just free packs, and for sets with no corresponding premiums that was probably the case in the past. I've been allowed to keep the taba outer cover (with the special card) when I've bought out the remaining envelopes.
This prize slip would get you just another pack. It says (basically): "Winner! Pull another time please!"
As Ryan says, it is a winning paper.
An interesting thing is that the Yamakatsu cards in the 1970s were distributed like that one you highlighted in the previous post in the envelopes that you could pull off one by one. I have a complete taba of Star Wars cards issued by Yamakatsu in 1978. The reason I mention it is because they had similar atari (winner) cards, but they would just stamp the back of about 1 in 5 or so cards with that rather than putting a slip of paper in. I`m not sure if the yamakatsu baseball cards have the same but I imagine they might.
This "Atari" winner stamp was common in the 1970s. On bromides like these sets it was most often for a free extra pull of one of the taba packs( like what you have here). For mini cards, it was almost always for a free prize that came packaged in the same box (rubber toy, card album, box of cards). The attachment of a sample bromide card on the taba packs was mainly for marketing is my understanding. It allowed kids to see what exactly they were getting, and I've yet to see a winner stamp getting the card off the front. I would imagine after all the taba packs were pulled the owner simply gave the empty taba away.
As Ryan L says, prize cards in many releases were just notated on the cards itself. We're all probably familiar with Calbee's Homerun cards in the '70s, and I know they did the same thing at least with Evangelion in the 1990s.
I have seen some packaging where the prizes were attached to the packaging itself, though those weren't too common after the menko golden age.
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