These 1984 Donruss BMX trading cards are Rad!

There are a lot of great 80s era pop culture collectibles on display at Branded HQ; toys, books, lunchboxes, stickers, vinyl albums, animation cels, and heaps of magazines and comics. Though I love all of that stuff, when I’m feeling really nostalgic the one collectible that I find myself going back to time and again are my vintage trading cards.  If you think about it, flipping through sets of cards is a lot like getting lost while surfing the internet.  They’re like a hard-copy version of tumblr, only instead of snarky memes and gifs there are pun-laden captions and lenticular or hologram chase cards (well, at least later on the 80s and into the 90s.)  And though I spend a lot of time flipping through my stack of card binders, it’s rare that I actually share these here on the site.

Sure, I’ve been making my own digital sets of cards to share here (for movies like The Monster Squad, Adventures in Babysitting, Young Guns, Young Guns II and Rad), but I typically tend to skip scanning and sharing vintage trading card sets in lieu of concentrating on any sticker-card subsets that may have been included.  Unless a set is completely comprised of sticker cards (like all the Little Shop of Horrors, Three’s Company, Supergirl, CHiPs, and all of the Garbage Pail Kids sets), I usually held off on sharing them for some odd reason.  Well, today I thought I’d finally share a set of straight up trading cards that are pretty darn cool.  Hailing from 1984 and printed & distributed by Donruss, here is the complete set of BMX cards…

This set consists of 59 different cards (yeah, that is a weird number) that are broken up into 10 different BMX bike brands including Redline, Torker, Hutch, Murray, Schwinn, Kuwahara, Hyper, Diamond Back, Huffy, and Raleigh.

This consists of a pretty wide swath of 80s era BMX bike brands, though noticeably absent are GT, Haro, Skyway and Mongoose. I’m actually wondering if this set involved a partnership between Donruss and the included bike companies where these cards basically were issued as collectible advertisements.  I mean, I know that yes, literally that’s how these cards function, but I’m wondering if the companies paid a set price per card to be featured? It would explain the odd number of cards and the lack of some major BMX companies being represented…

Though the cards are broken down by company within the set, each company section is divided into two categories, riders and bikes.  The cards that only feature the bikes have a list of specs and a description on the back, while the rider cards feature either company blurbs, short biographies and/or vital statistics…

   

Also of note, this set is almost strictly geared towards BMX racing as opposed to the freestyle movement, so there aren’t any cards featuring “tricks”, mainly just riders getting air off of track jumps (or potentially while riding in and around skate and bike parks…

I really loved that the set also included female riders…

…well, one female rider.  Still though, I’m glad they included Christy Anderson.

Going back to the idea that each one of these cards was a paid advertisement from the bike companies, again, it would explain why there were 7 cards for a larger company like the Redline team, yet only 1 for Hyper (above) and 2 for Torker (below).  I’d never even heard of those brands until I got my hands on this set of cards a few years ago…

It seems like most of the teams topped out at 7 cards, like Hutch,  Redline (both above), and Schwinn (below), but Team Murray potentially had a much larger budget as they feature on 11 of the cards in this set…

Yet, there are also inconsistencies where some of the riders go unnamed on the cards as is the case for Schwinn.  All three pictures below appear to be of the same rider, but he isn’t named on the cards and his number plate on the bike is always hidden.  If these were all paid advertisements, Schwinn seemed to have wasted some real estate on these three cards…

One of the brands that I was really happy to see in this set is Kuwahara, the company responsible for all the bikes in the film E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial.  In fact the first card in this article is the Kuwahara Laser Lite, Elliots bike in the film and the card features a very familiar backdrop…

If you enjoyed taking a look at this set and you love 80s era BMX, then take a moment and check out the set of cards I made for the 1986 Bill Allen movie Rad as there’s a good chance you’ll dig those too!