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!

Sadaharu Oh 1977 Pepsi

I've been focusing a bit on my 1970s Pepsi collection recently.

Ah, that's kind of a lie, I really haven't been focusing at all recently and just picking up random stuff as I find it and coincidentally a lot of that has been 1970s Pepsi stuff.  But I need to rationalize my purchases, so lets just say I've been focusing on 1970s Pepsi stuff recently.

In 1977 Pepsi released a couple of round menko sets (JRM 31 and JRM 40, very similar except one is larger than the other).  As with their previous sets these mainly featured players from the Chunichi Dragons, but unlike those sets Pepsi also landed Sadaharu Oh who is shown on 3 cards in each set.  My recent random pick ups include his three cards from the JRM 40 set.

These are some of the coolest Oh cards out there, the images on each of them are really well chosen and composed.  Each features a gold embossed signature and the 1970s Pepsi logo which looks pretty cool  The backs seem to have been printed in three colors judging from the three I have:

As the top of each indicates, these were in some way connected specifically with 300ml bottles of Pepsi, but otherwise I'm not sure how they were distributed.  Engel rates them R3 (less than 100 copies known to exist) which seems about right, they are pretty scarce, and makes me wonder if that is a result of them having been distributed in a really limited area or simply because everyone threw them out long ago.

An interesting thing to note is that these cards seem to have been issued at slightly different times during the 1977 season.  The one with the green back asks "Will he be the first to hit 756 home runs?" and then notes that as of July 14th he had 22 home runs (which would have given him 738 for his career at that point, he came into the season with 716).

But then the blue back one notes that this year he had been the first person to hit 750 home runs (presumably in NPB).  So it must have been released after the green backed one, but probably before the end of the season since he broke Aaron's record in September of that year and it would have been odd to not mention that.  Maybe it came out in August, after he hit #750 but before he hit #756?

Anyway, these are some of the cooler cards released in the year Oh broke the record.  They would release some more in the following couple of years as Oh extended his record.  I've picked up some of those recently too and will be doing a post on them in the near future.

Some more 1976 Pepsi Round Menko

My 1976 Pepsi Round Menko collection took a pretty good step forward the other day with the addition of these babies.

I really do love the mid-70s Pepsi sets since they are quite colorful and just look pretty cool.  The cards are kind of hard to find (Engel rates them R2 on his rarity scale) and, being menko, most of them that still exist are in pretty rough shape (though this lot is in decent condition).

I'm really curious about these cards and how they were distributed back in the 1970s.  Pepsi issued several sets in the mid-1970s that all had one thing in common: the Chunichi Dragons.  For some reason all of their sets seem to have only been issued in Nagoya (home of the Dragons, and me!) since, with the exception of a few Sadaharu Oh cards.

This is kind of weird for a big corporation like Pepsi that does business nationwide.  Nagoya and the surrounding suburbs (the Chubu Metropolitan area) has about 9 million people and is Japan's third largest urban centre, so its not a rural backwater.  But at the same time, back in the 70s and even today it paled in comparison to Japan's two baseball centres in the Kanto (Tokyo) and Kansai (Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto) regions which combined had about 2/3 of all the team in Japan (less today but still considerable).

So its kind of a mystery, why lavish Nagoya baseball fans with these awesome sets but not Tokyo or Osaka, which would have been more logical choices?  My main guess is simple convenience: the Dragons might have been way more willing partners in business and might have sold the rights to produce the cards to Pepsi cheaply (free?) while the more popular Giants and Tigers in Tokyo and Osaka might not have been interested.

Its also probably a by product of the weakness of NPB as an organization back in the 70s (and today) - card makers would negotiate with teams rather than NPB for licenses, which would have made creating a team set like these ones a lot easier and cheaper than making a league wide one (though oddly there aren't a lot of team sets from the 70s, at least relative to other types of sets).

Of course the downside though is that you create a big promotion that is only going to be used in one city, so I'm not sure if this actually spurred sales of Pepsi (and Mirinda and Patio, two other drinks sold by Pepsi which were also in the promotion).

Another thing I remain curious about is how these things were distributed.  I've never seen any sort of ephemera related to them - no packs or boxes or advertising signs or anything.  Which leads me to suspect that they were simply distributed to Nagoya area stores that sold Pepsi and cashiers would hand them out to customers.  But did they give them out on a one bottle/one menko basis?  Or were these prizes that only some bottle purchasers got?

So much we don't know about these, I hope to one day solve some of these riddles but in the meantime I'm satisfied to just add these to my collection!

The Most Insanely Colorful Set of All Time: 1975 Pepsi Dragons Menko

 Today I present some cards from the 1975 Pepsi Dragons set (JCM 71).  It is the most colorful set of cards....or anything for that matter...that I have ever seen.  I feel I should probably have put a disclaimer at the top of the post warning that these cards may induce photosensitive epileptic seizures in some readers.  They are that insanely colorful.  They make the 1972 and 1975 Topps sets look like 1948 Bowmans.

I fell in love with this set a couple of years ago when I saw the first images of it online, but I hadn't been able to get any actual cards from it until recently.  Its a fairly rare set (Engel rates it R2) and was probably only issued in the Nagoya area (it only features Chunichi Dragons players).  Every once in a while a beat up little pile of them would show up on Yahoo Auctions with a high BIN price, but never anything enticing enough for me to buy one.  I waited so long I was getting tempted to splurge on one of the beat up ones just to have a single from the set though.

Then it happened.  An antique dealer (love em!) put a huge pile of them up for auction last week with a low starting bid and I scooped up an amazing find of these.  72 of them, almost all in minty condition!  What a haul!

 When I received them, most of them were wrapped in bundles of 8 like this:

Its pretty flimsy but I suspect this is how they were originally distributed.  These were given out in selected stores one by one to the purchasers of Pepsi and other drinks put out by Pepsi Co like Mirinda (a Spanish drink that used to be sold in Japan but no longer is).  I assume they had stacks of these by the cash register and just handed them out. That must have been a pretty cool site.  I'm curious if they had any similarily colorful promotional ads for this campaign (posters, etc), as those would be neat.

I mentioned that "almost all" of the cards I got were minty.  One of these bundles had obviously been dropped by somebody as all the cards had the same dinged lower left corner, but otherwise the cards all looked like they had come straight from the factory.

The backs of the cards aren't quite as colorful as the fronts, but then nothing is:

Ah....colors!

 One of the things that surprised me (in addition to the colors of course) about the cards was how big they are.  Looking at them in photos omline I had assumed they were the same size as the tobacco sized menko, but these are actually much bigger, the dimensions are close to those of standard modern baseball cards (just slightly narrower).  And they are on insanely thick cardboard, even for menko, which makes them kind of neat to hold.

 The complete set has 20 cards and guess what? I was able to put together an entire set from the lot!  Here they are:

Its got a few Hall of Famers, the most notable being Wally Yonamine (manager) Morimichi Takagi (who would also later manager the Dragons), Senichi Hoshino and Kenichi Yazawa.  It also has two American players: Ron Woods and Gene Martin.

One enticing thing that eludes me though is that while I have a "complete set" I do not have a "complete master set".

There are quite a few major variations in the 20 cards in the set, basically the same card comes in multiple color schemes.  For example, here are two of the Wally Yonamine cards, same picture but radically different background color schemes (also one has silver embossing while the other doesn't):

According to Engel there are up to four different versions of each card, though it doesn't seem to actualy be known how many variations exist in total.  There could  be as many as 80 cards in the "master set" if each card comes in four different color variations.

Unfortunately my lot wasn't big enough to figure that out, but putting together a master set would definitely be a challenging goal to pursue and one that probably nobody has accomplished to date.  I also have to keep looking for cards from the 1976 Pepsi Menko set which I haven't been fortunate enough to find a major pile of yet.  I'll have to find another big lot to do that.

Just writing this post has made me want to drink a Pepsi, so I can say that they are a pretty effective marketing tool.  For some reason in recent years it has become difficult to find Pepsi in Japan though.  Pepsi Co still sells tons of drinks in Japan, but for some reason they don't seem to sell just regular Pepsi anymore (just crappy versions of it like Pepsi Next or whatever.....)  Its kind of unfortunate as Pepsi put out a lot of really cool baseball promotional items in Japan over the years, the most recent that I recall being in 2001 when they put little Ichiro figures onto bottles of Pepsi.  I have a set of those somewhere that I actually put together in 2001, I'll have to dig them out for another post!

Some 1976 Pepsi Dragons

Another day another Yahoo Auctions pick up.

I got these four from the 1976 Pepsi Chunichi Dragons Round Menko set (JRM 13 in Engel).  I had picked up seven others from the set earlier this year, so these give me 11 in total.  I really love this set, the bold colors and gold foil give them a really striking appearance.

I'd like to complete this as a set, but I'm a bit unsure of how many there are.   Engel says there are "60 +" cards in the set, implying there may be some not in the catalogue.  He also only lists 29 players and two team logo cards, but most were issued with different colored ink on the back, either in pink, brown or violet, which I think gets you to 60 cards with those variations.  The four cards I got in this lot were all brown ink backed, though the ones in my earlier acquisition came in a variety of colors.

Fortunately these new additions contained the card of Hall of Famer Wally Yonamine, who managed the Dragons from 1972 to 1977.  He is of course also famous for being the first American inducted into the Japanese Hall of Fame.  I only had one old bromide of him, so I'm glad to add a menko featuring him to my collection. According to Engel his card is the most valuable in the set.

I also got Morimichi Takagi, another Hall of Famer (and recent Dragons manager) in the lot too, which is kind of cool.  Takagi's card is the only one that doesn't say "Pepsi" or "Pepsi-Cola" on it, but instead "Patio" which I assume was another soft drink that Pepsi sold in the 70s (doesn't exist today!)

These were a pretty huge steal, just 500 Yen (about 5$ US) for the lot! The Yonamine alone books for 35$ in Engel, so this is another one of those "Japanese under appreciating their old cards as reflected in how cheap they sell for" things.  The Yonamine does have a small crease in it but otherwise they are in pretty nice shape.

Picking over the remains of a dying card shop gets: 1976 Pepsi Cola Chunichi Dragons Cards

 One of the big stores in Nagoya, Caps, is closing up shop and recently I've been taking advantage of their online liquidation sale to pick up some neat oddball items.  The best so far are these Pepsi Cola Chunichi Dragons circular menko which I am completely in love with.

I've seen various Pepsi Cola Dragons issues like these over the years, it seems they had some sort of promo deal with the team in the late 1970s.  Not all of them are circular, some were rectangular like these ones.

The lot of seven I bought has a pretty decent player selection - Yukitsura Matsumoto, T. Martin, Kenichi Yazawa, Hisato Aoyama, Hiroaki Inoue, Yasushi Tao and a gold embossed Dragons team logo one.  The colors are quite striking (especially Matsumoto's) and the gold embossing is quite cool for cards of this era.

The backs are cool, featuring the player's name, number and position, a trivia question about the rules of baseball and a rock-scissors-paper (janken) symbol.

Usefully they also tell us the player's age, which allows me to date them to 1976 since it says Yasushi Tao was a mere 22 years old when this came out!

I'm not sure what the checklist for these is (buying a copy of Engle is still on my to do list) but I might add them to my list of things I'm collecting.

I have a few more things I have picked up from Caps recently which I'll highlight in future posts. I have mixed feelings about their liquidation.  On the one hand I love getting bargains on neat stuff.  On the other seeing a card shop go out of business brings back memories of me and my dad's store closing down way back in 1993 and all the sad memories that accompany that!  So much effort into making a shop work that it kind of hurts to see it all getting broken apart, even if it isn't your store.