SB Nation: Fleer Trading Cards Captured Everything About The 1990's
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The 1990s were the visual equivalent of a junk food binge. This was the era of sports fandom that gave rise to additive colors like teal and purple in uniforms, hydraulics in sneakers and Christian Laettner hair. The paragons of actual human performance were Michael Jordan and Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mia Hamm and Mike Tyson, athletes who combined an unheard of level of speed, strength and grace. But their rise was marketed with a never-seen-before design language best described as the neon fantasy version of an MC Hammer concert.
We were eating bubble gum by the foot and playing with Gak and both adolescents and adults alike were hoarding Beanie Babies and Troll dolls and Pokemon cards because trickle down economics didn’t work and the only safe economic bet of any age is that overconsumption is an intrinsic American right. Naturally what was happening in pop culture crossed over to sports marketing. Nowhere was that exchange more apparent than in the trading card market. Just ahead of the recession, Time Magazine published article in 1987 speculating that trading cards were a safer bet than the stock market, given that the industry’s sales had doubled to $100 million in the previous two years. By 1992, trading cards were a $1.5 billion industry.
Driving that growth were companies who’d benefited from the Fleer company's monopoly-busting antitrust lawsuit against Topps in 1980, which opened up the market to competitors. Topps still had exclusive rights to MLB and staked their share of the field to the historical archives they could mine and repackage. Upper Deck took advantage of image-treating technology (think the very early iteration of Photoshop) to set the market standard in photography, saturating the color of the outfield grass or sharpening an athlete’s features in an up-close action shot.
Angling to stand out among a crowd that was essentially selling the same athletes on the same 3.5 by 2.5 slices of cardboard, Fleer made a bet that would set them as the standard bearer of 1990s era sports design. The company had just been purchased from its founding family (who invented Chiclets gum and later Double Bubble) and in 1990 brought in as vice president of marketing Jeff Massien, a veteran of Donruss trading cards who’d most recently done a stint in the stationary industry. Massien quickly sussed out the particulars of the booming market.
--Read more: http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2015/10/21/9574259/fleer-trading-cards-were-everything-that-was-great-about-the-1990s ....I'm old enough to remember collecting a crap-ton of these cards back then and they're still better cards than what passes for trading cards nowadays...thoughts?
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