The Animal Is In The House

Being a child of the 70s and 80s the weekend was the best time of all, it started with Saturday morning cartoons and then on Sunday we had the USA Express cartoons followed by WWF wrestling at noon.

 

I think every kid at one point loaded all of the couch cushions on the living room floor and imitate everything we saw in the ring on television, long before it was necessary to post a warning message before the telecast telling us not to imitate the moves. We came off the top rope, the arm of the couch, like Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka. We did our best Macho Man imitation to taunt our brothers and we even taped rubber bands to our face to look like Captain Lou Albano. We had our favorites (JYD and George Steele were mine) and of course everyone hated the Iron Shiek and Nikolai Volkoff.

 

Because these guys all wrestled long before autographs became a staple of the modern day releases there was little chance of coming across one of their signatures outside of a TTM or in-person autograph, that was until Leaf stepped in and took the reins. Over the last couple of years Leaf has released a number of wrestler’s signatures in Pop Century and Wrestling Originals.

 

While I may never own a Junkyard Dog autograph, he died in a car accident in 1998, I have finally been fortunate enough to add a George “The Animal” Steele 2014 Pop Century autograph to my collection. I prefer his Wrestling Originals autographs and I hope to still add one to my collection, I could not argue with the $9.98 shipped BIN price for the Pop Century card.

 

The design here is a little odd, when holding the card in hand the image is actually quite pixelated. As if a smaller image was originally selected but increased in size to fit and this caused distortion. Additionally the meandering border line around the image is confusing. It looks like someone had clipped the image, which was too small, increased the size and then tried to clean up the border before adding a 3 px. stroke. I just can’t figure why someone would green light this design where using just a nice close up shot would have sufficed. Maybe a simple border design to tie the card together and send it to print.