I just read that Topps was making Wacky Packages again, and was slammed back into my early childhood— especially after I followed another link to a web site that has an exhaustive index of all the old stickers from the ’70s, with close-up pictures of each one! Wow.
I have vivid memories of my friend Keith’s massive collection—I imagine he had all of them…at least it looked like it—plastered all over his closet doors in his bedroom. (Man, my parents never would have let me do that! :wink:) There was something about the artwork that fascinated me and repulsed me at the same time—that gooey, twisted, MAD Magazine aesthetic. And the awful pun-parodies were absolutely hilarious to a gang of pre-teen boys. Some were, of course, inscrutable to us, others were kind of gross, and a couple we liked so much that they became our de facto sponsors whenever we recorded news programs and radio dramas on our cassette recorders. But that’s a story for another day, I imagine…