for the longest time, i ignored those non-mlb licensed discs that came out in the mid-1970's. i had a garvey isaly's disc in my collection just so that i had one, but otherwise i had no interest. over the last few months, however, i have picked up a few team sets, including the isaly's. i bought that one because it had an andy messersmith card in it. how could i not want that?
the latest addition to my dodger disc team set is the 1977 burger chef variety. these discs are smaller than the isaly's, and have some cartoonish characters on the back.
i suppose if you didn't care about baseball players, you might care about halloween themed caricatures. the burgerini is my favorite - i would like the burgerilla if he were slinging something other than a banana peel like real gorillas do.
it's too bad that the burgerini is on the back of the lopes card and not cey's, since he's getting beaned in the head and all. it looks like he swung his magic wand, so he doesn't get to go to first base.
here's a close look at the fronts - i'll give steve garvey the honors
you will notice those perforation tabs - these things were punched out of food trays, apparently. i never visited a burger chef restaurant, but they supposedly were the first to introduce 'funmeals' which were a precursor to mcdonalds' happy meals. here's a link to the burger chef wikipedia site if you care to learn more.
and, here's the entire team set - 3/4 of the infield, 2/3 of the outfield, 3 pitchers and the catcher of the team of my youth
here's a close look at the fronts - i'll give steve garvey the honors
and, here's the entire team set - 3/4 of the infield, 2/3 of the outfield, 3 pitchers and the catcher of the team of my youth
reggie smith is stylin' for sure. and, while it is cool to see the likes of doug rau and rick rhoden, couldn't bill russell get some attention once in a while?
5 comments:
Some interesting character names in there......and then "Jeff".
HA!
those are different. did they only do the dodgers? were they regional or national?
i will guess they were national. i was not aware of any burger chefs in socal, but the wikipedia page linked in the post notes that they were on both coasts and in between. i'm not sure why they would have made cards of so many dodgers otherwise. in fact, all 24 teams are featured in the set (no expansion blue jays or mariners, however).
http://www.teamsets4u.com/checklist/1970s/1977burgerchef.html
Yep they were national (or as national as Burger Chef restaurants were in '77). I'm pretty sure they had one for each team (not sure if they had an "All-Star" set or not).
I still have the ones I had gotten back in the day (Angels and Dodgers or Reds - I really should check which ones). Plus I have a full "tray" that I had gotten off of Ebay. The discs were attached to the kids funmeal trays/boxes (the precursor to McDonalds Happy Meals). The boxes opened up to become the meal tray.
The meal tray/box for these was set up like a baseball field and the box also had some of the characters you could punch out for tokens to run around the "field". I recall playing with it as a kid. The box(es) I had didn't last long but I kept the discs.
Every once in a while the team trays will pop-up on Ebay and sometimes the entire "set" but most of the time for way way too much.
Ah it was Angels and Giants (thanks to my website I did ages ago http://klandersen.com/kknookepisode016.html - I didn't show each and every one just a sampling - argh I still have some links to the geocities version of stuff on some of my old pages)
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