(Greetings on National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. There are no chocolate chip cookies in the house, nor do I see one for me on the horizon today -- certainly not buying the package in the downstairs vending machine at work. I shall distract myself with Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 355th in a series):
Continuing my recent trend toward devoting Cardboard Appreciation to oddball sets, here's another item -- that I didn't know existed until last week.
I mentioned a few posts ago that I was asked to assess a collection that was given to a church thrift shop. The collection was once owned by a boy who is now 25 and includes mostly cards from the early 2000s to the mid 2010s.
I also mentioned that the co-worker who asked me to look it over gave me permission to pick out some cards for my own collection. I added a handful -- no more than 15. A lot of it was familiar stuff that I either already own, don't like much or don't collect (football and basketball mostly).
There were also a couple of oddball things in the collection like the above card, which came in a three-card cellophane package. It was strange enough that I took it. Some sort of marriage between MLB and Nicktoons. The Brandon Phillips card was the top card in the pack. Here are all three:
Not the most exciting players or toons, for that matter. The only one I know is "Aang" and my daughter wasn't interested in "The Last Airbender" or any of those Avatar offshoots.
But my daughter was once very interested in the WII game console. She spent many hours playing it and had all the gadgets. Thanks to her I probably played Mario Kart on the WII hundreds of times (That had cards, too), and she found other stuff I was willing to participate in like WII golf or bowling.
But I didn't know there was a WII baseball-Nicktoons game.
Nor did I know that the packaging advertised baseball cards inside:
That could have prompted me to buy the game for my daughter totally unprompted!
Looking at TCDB, I found out the Nicktoons/MLB cards were issued in the WII game in 2011. There are nine cards total, each featuring an MLB player with a Nicktoons character.
There is one Dodger in the set, Matt Kemp (paired up with some character called "Fanboy"). The only Nicktoons on cards that I knew were SpongeBob, Stimpy, Aang, Danny Phantom and Patrick Star -- several of them were on the air when my daughter was watching Nickelodeon daily.
I looked up the cards on COMC but just about all of them are soldout. Then I looked at ebay, and the couple available are not money I'd pay (looking at the completed sales, though, they go for a lot less).
I don't have an interest in these -- except for the Kemp card. It's just a nice bit of nostalgia from that time. I don't know where all the WII stuff went in the house and I see that the WII died out about five or six years ago. You could have told me it was still going strong and I would've believed it. It was crazy popular 15 years ago.
Comments
b) I forgot what b was supposed to be, but I meant it.
On a completely different wavelength, I can tell you that 'Fanboy', who was paired with Matt Kemp, was a character from an early-2010s CG-animated superhero-themed cartoon show called Fanboy and Chum-Chum, which was... how do I best put this?...after my time watching cartoons. I peaked around the area where Invader Zim, Avatar: The Last Airbender and SpongeBob were in their heyday. Couldn't tell ya who Dudley Puppy was though.
Never knew about a Nicktoons set. Too bad there weren’t any Rocko’s Modern Life characters in it.
That makes sense, because my daughter has been all about the Nintendo Switch for several years now.