Monday, February 10, 2020

Some unopened 1977 Packs of Pepsi Sadaharu Ohs!

 Dave did a post about a pretty cool set the other day, the 1977 Pepsi Sadaharu Oh Bromides (JBR 149) which I thought I'd do a little follow up on since I have another piece of information about the set: how they were distributed.

Basically its an 8 card set featuring color photos of Sadaharu Oh with a facsimile signature.  The checklist is easy since the back of every card has a picture of all eight (and encourages everyone to go ahead and collect them):

Its a really great set with some amazing photography, released in the year that he hit #756. Pepsi seems to have used three of the photos in this set on their Round Menko set from the same year.

I picked up something interesting recently, which were a couple of unopened packs, still pristine from all the way back in 1977!  So now we can learn a bit more about how they were distributed.

In the below photo the blue pack on the left is a complete pack, which contains four of the grey packs like the one in the middle, which contains one card. So the blue packs have four cards in them.

Unfortunately that is about all that I have so far.  I'm a bit uncertain if these were given away with bottles of Pepsi (seems unlikely since they are quite big, larger than a postcard), or if they were a mail-in promo offer or something like that.  Most likely the blue packs weren't meant to be distributed to consumers but were simply how they came out of the factory to be distributed either to retailers or to the mail room at Pepsi or whatever, while the grey packs were what people actually got.

Anyway, its still kind of neat.  I have only the one opened pack which came already opened, potentially I have the entire set waiting for me (I have a couple of the four card blue packs) but I can't bring myself to open them since for all I know they might be the only ones left like that out there!

8 comments:

  1. You gotta open a couple of them!

    Between these and the 1976-77 Yamakatsu cards there were some great looking big cards back in the 70's.

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  2. It really is tempting.....

    I also have an unopened taba of the Yamakatsu postcard sized set sitting there begging me to open it.....though at least with those it is technically possible to just put them back in after you've opened them up.

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    1. I've never been able to resist the temptation to open old Yamakatsu packs

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  3. Very cool collectibles. I understand keeping them intact. That's why I started an unopened Japanese pack collection a few years ago. All of my packs are very plentiful... but I wasn't sure when I'd ever come across them again, so I kept them sealed. Considering these are possibly one of a kind items, there's no way I'd consider opening these either.

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    1. Oh cool, an unopened pack collection? You must have a lot of willpower to leave them unopened.

      One thing that really reduces my temptation with this set though is that there are no surprises waiting for me if I open it: it'll be a Sadaharu Oh card no matter what! I have some unopened Yamakatsu packs from the same era which are way more enticing since I don't know who I'll pull!

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  4. I’m all about the unopened packs. Love the 1970s Japanese sports cards. So much variety.

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    1. There really is a surprising amount of stuff out there from the 70s!

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