Well, I’m finally back from my winter hiatus and I have a lot of stuff I want to write about here at Branded in the coming year. 2016 marks my 10 year running this site and I’m kind of floored that I’m still loving it after all these years. Hell, I’ve officially been writing about the 80s as long as that decade lasted and I still have a ton of articles in mind that I’d love to tackle. Bottom line, I want to take a second to thank each and every person who has ever stopped by to read an article, leave a comment, or strike up a conversation on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. I’ve gotten a chance to meet a bunch of you at various conventions and live events, and there are still a lot of folks I’d love to say “Hi” to in person someday. It’s been a crazy ride and it’s not even close to being over yet.
I wanted to ease my way back into writing articles so I thought this would be the perfect time to share another set of digital trading cards that I’ve been slowly working on over the last year. Looking back to the beginning of this site, there was one 80s brand that came up a lot when I was fondly remembering obscure nostalgia from my childhood. It’s a toy line that is a real underdog when it comes to under-loved properties, and one that has had a great resurgence over the past couple of years. I’m talking about those loveable, hugable robots, Maxx Steele’s Robo Force!
When I started designing these digital 80s trading cards I knew that I wanted to not only fill in the pop culture cards for sets based on TV shows and movies, I also wanted to create sets for other fun stuff like bands, book series and toy lines. Robo Force was always right up there at the top of the list of sets I wanted to work on, not only because I have a lot of fondness for the line, but also because there is a lot of great artwork that really hasn’t been showcased.
I took this opportunity to scan the back of one of the packages that had some great art featuring all the characters from wave one of the toy line. I also scanned in some of the book covers and took some fun screenshots from the one cartoon episode that was finally released on DVD this past year…
All in all, I had a blast working on this cards. To beat a dead horse, I really wish that I could get these professionally printed up, but until I can make that happen I guess I’ll just have to be content in creating them.
This is also one of those sets where I had a hard time holding back when it came to the amount of cards I wanted to design. Between trying to feature all of the characters, the great artwork from the books and screenshots from the DVD, if I had the time this set would have easily had 100 cards or more. As it stands I tried to cap myself at 26 to keep it down to a manageable project.
I was really happy with how these turned out. In fact, I’m toying around with the idea of making a second series that exclusively focuses on the animated special so that I can try my hand at putting together a set that is more in line with the Masters of the Universe cards that Topps did (complete with scene by scene breakdowns and speech bubbles added to all the screenshots.) But we’ll see…
