Review – Weird Wheels Stickers

Last week we looked at robot stickers and trading cards (Fleer Robot Wars review here) so this week it feels only fitting that we step back to 1980 and pull out the Topps Weird Wheels sticker set. I managed to grab five sealed wax packs for a low price and over the Thanksgiving weekend I tore them open. Surprisingly, the gum had almost no taste at all. It was quite rock-like, though.

Hey, the gum was just as good today as it was 29 years ago!

Eleven Years After Odd Rods, Topps Brought Us Weird Wheels

Odd Rods (Wikipedia, official website), launched in 1969 by Donruss, blended monsters and wacky cars together to give kids a trading card/sticker set that was heavily inspired by the work of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth (Wikipedia, official website). Kids loved the stickers and Donruss did fairly well with the packs, eventually going on to produce three complete new sets and a number of reprints.

In 1980, Topps stepped up to the plate and dropped Weird Wheels, a 55-card sticker set clearly inspired by the various Odd Rods card sets. With over twenty cards painted by Norman Saunders (of Mars Attacks fame, and recently celebrated in the completely awesome hardcover book compiled by his son David*), almost half of the set had some real artistic talent and experience behind it. Unfortunately, the other artist on the series is still “unknown” (even the official Saunders site doesn’t identify the artist), but luckily for us Topps didn’t fill out the set with crap. Every card in the set (see all 55 cards at bubblegum-cards.com) looks great.

A Great Card Mix

Out of five packs of cards I would up with only six duplicates; that’s a fantastic mix and beats the hell out of several trading card sets I’ve encountered in the past. If that mix holds true across the entire run then it should only take me eight or nine more packs of cards to collect a complete set; too bad I have to pay more than the 25 cents a pack that these originally sold for in 1980. Still, with luck and patience I should be able to pick up eight or nine more packs for about $10. Not a bad price to pay for the joy of opening ancient trading card packs.

A Bit Worn by Age

Even though these were sealed packs of cards, the 29 years of their life has started to wear a bit on the cards. Some of the cards I opened were a bit rough, with the packs having either been stomped on or left beneath something heavy for too many years. Plus, besides the physical wear, the cards are also a little yellowed (I tweaked the colors of the photos in Photoshop, so what you see here is a bit richer than the actual cards). It’s nothing terrible or unexpected for the age of the cards — or for the type of stock used back in 1980 — but it does make me question how much more these will deteriorate as they age. Time to slip these cards into some acid-free sleeves and hope that helps them withstand another 29 years.

Puzzle Cards!

Most of the cards show the “peel to use” image that you can see above, but nine of the cards in the set are “puzzle cards.” These were a big deal back when I was a kid, because collecting nine cards allowed you to create one big image. As you can see, out of the five card packs I opened I picked up seven of the nine cards. The image is just a reprint of card #1, which is a little sad since it would have been much cooler if this had been a bonus piece of art.

Anyone creating trading cards today, please bring us some more puzzle cards! But make sure you give us bonus art and just don’t reprint art from one of the cards in the set.

A Few Sample Images

Here are a few cards from the set to give you an idea of what these look like. I selected these four cards as my favorites out of the 24 different cards I’ve got — how can we not love the Killer Bee? — but if you want to see the complete set hit either www.bubblegum-cards.com or Branded in the 80s.

Closing Thoughts

Weird Wheels isn’t intelligent or deep, but it’s a fun set of stickers. I was never big on sticking stickers to things, but I love that these are trading card-sized and can be sleeved into a binder. As far as trading card sets of the eighties go, Weird Wheels is a wacky, obscure card set that actually doesn’t have a terribly high value. This is a good thing, since it means that guys like me can go back now and try to track down an entire set of the cards.

Blending fun artwork with crazy car concepts, combined with the low price of individual card packs (or even lots on eBay), makes Weird Wheels an excellent trading card set for anyone who loves low-brow and underground comic-styled art. If you enjoyed the humor behind Wacky Packages (reading post here) then you’re gonna love Weird Wheels.

*Affiliate link: Orders using this link earn battlegrip.com cash, which is applied to buying toys.

Philip Reed is having fun opening old packs of trading cards, but this was the last time he sticks a sliver of that old gum in his mouth. Bubblegum does not age like wine; terrible gum in the eighties is not any better today.