I've got plenty of Kelloggs baseball cards. Probably have every Orioles player that Kelloggs issued but these are my first Kelloggs football cards. I'm not even sure I was fully aware of the fact that Kelloggs made football cards available at all.I know I never picked up any in a cereal box.
The '70 baseball versions were the first 3-D cards for Kelloggs and the football versions are very similar. The set consisted of 60 cards. They were found in cereal boxes AND available through a mail-in offer. John Mackey, John Unitas, Bubba Smith and Tom Matte are the Colts in the set. I picked them up in one transaction recently and they are in generally good shape. They are all curled as you would expect, Kelloggs cards of that vintage all seem to do that. Only the the Unitas card has the usual Kelloggs cracking although they are not as noticeable in hand as they are in the scan. The Matte and Smith cards each have a tiny crack on the upper left only. The corners are sharp.
The cards have a nice write-up on the reverse and a very limited stat summary. They also add a listing of the player's 'Pro honors' i.e. All Pro, All NFL, etc. That's a nice touch. There are no team logos and the copyright credits the NFLPA. I'm not sure about the Matte card but Unitas and Mackey are shown against a background that is Los Angeles' Memorial Coliseum.
Here are the rest of the Colts:
The Matte card may be my favorite of this set since it's not a picture I've seen before.
This Bubba Smith shot proves that Kelloggs got their pictures from Topps.
Kelloggs' football cards returned in 1971 as another 60 card set. Only Johnny Unitas is a carryover player from the '70 set. In fact only five players total from the 1970 sets were repeated in 1971. And the '71 cards are scarcer due to the fact that they were not available through the mail, only in cereal boxes. I had bought a '71 Mike Curtis card from an online dealer but the dealer refunded my money because they discovered the card was too severely cracked.
So the hunt for the '71 Kelloggs Colts continues.
Even though these are all very nice cards, I associate Kellogg's and 3-D with baseball to such a degree that these cards look odd. I wasn't aware of their existence until a year or two when a search for 1970 Kellogg's on COMC brought up football players and I said "What the--????"
ReplyDeleteIt's a bit of a shame that they couldn't arrange that Tom Matte card better so that the helmet graphic wasn't overlapping his head.
I wonder if Bubba Smith had a thing against Topps photographers and they were only able to sneak up on him once over the course of several years. Can you imagine the furor today if a photo of an active player got reused as many times as that one?
I never knew these existed either. At this rate you're going to turn me into a football card collector!
ReplyDeleteVery nice cards. I think I still have 3 or 4 of these that I pulled from the box back in 1970.
ReplyDeleteThese are real nice cards. I will have to hunt down any New York Jets that were produced.
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