This past October I had a whole hell of a lot of fun spending the entire month talking about one of my favorite movies of all time, The Monster Squad. Part of what made those 31 days exciting for me was working on a project where I I got a chance to utilize my meager design skills to fix a hole in the pop culture past by creating a small set of vintage-style Topps trading cards for the film that never existed, but should have. Not only was it fun to design and create them, but through doing that and sharing them I was able to chat a bit with a bunch of the cast and crew from the flick, and eventually a friend of the site (Justin) even took the time to actual print out a set of the cards and ship them to me from Australia! So now I have them in 9-up card pages in a binder right next to my Goonies cards and Garbage Pail Kids, a true dream come true.
That got me thinking about all the other films and TV shows that were never really merchandised back in the day, properties that I felt should definitely have left more collectibles in their wake. So this past week I carved out some time to work on filling in another hole in the “These Should Exist” category by designing and creating a mini set of Topps-style trading cards for the flick Adventures in Babysitting! So without further to do, here are some more digital trading cards to collect from Branded in the 80s…
Part of what I love about working on stuff like this is getting a chance to visualize and design aspects of branding that could have existed 28 years ago. I love wax wrappers from trading cards as it is, so screwing around in Photoshop designing them is a real blast. They’re far from perfect, but I feel like they push that nostalgia button fairly well.
I also love the excuse to dig into a film I love to both take a closer look at it (sort of like I do with the Awesome 80s Bedrooms breakdowns, including the one I did featuring Sara’s room from Adventures in Babysitting) and find the little things that I never noticed before while passively watching, as well as curate a bunch of trivia for the flicks that not everybody may know.
That really applies to flicks like Adventures in Babysitting that have never had a real public outlet for discovering these kinds of behind-the-scenes facts and trivia. Though the film has been released on every home video format from VHS & Laserdisc to DVD & Blu-Ray, there has never been an official making-of or any released commentary tracks. All these home video releases have been bare bones affairs.
Similarly there was never an official souvenir magazine, and I haven’t been able to track down that make vintage articles about the making of the film because it wasn’t the sort flick that was covered by the geekier rags like Starlog or Fangoria. In fact, the only piece of official non-video release merchandise that I know exists is the 1987 Scholastic/Point novelization of the flick.
So after combing through a bunch of more recent website interviews with the stars I was able to gleam some fun facts to share and ended up learning a lot more about the the film that I have previously known. I guess that’s another great side effect of tasking myself with a project like this, it gives me an excuse to discover and read a bunch of interviews that I usually don’t feel like I have the time to dig into.
Bottom line, it’s a shame that a flick like Adventures in Babysitting never had fun junk to collect like souvenir magazines and especially a set of Topps (or Fleer or Donruss) non-sport trading cards back in the day. So hopefully this scratches an itch for anyone who also wishes that these existed.
What other flicks and TV shows do you think should have had sets of trading cards? I know I have a dream list that I’d like to work on. Share your suggestions in the comments section below!