The Family Guy Star Wars Cards Trilogy Is Complete

Over a year ago I had picked up a promo pack from the Family Guy Blue Harvest DVD release, a 12-card set that included scenes from the movie and the back of the cards made a 3D puzzle. These packs were only released in European DVD sets but are pretty easy to find and they come in English, Italian, Spanish and German.

Just like the Family Guy Blue Harvest Special Edition DVD set FOX also released collector editions of the other Family Guy Star Wars spoofs; Something, Something, Something Dark Side and It’s A Trap. These collector editions also included a pack of cards as well as T-Shirts and booklets and also like the Blue Harvest set they were only released in specific locations, Europe and Australia. The Something, Something, Something Dark Side and It’s A Trap collector edition packs were near impossible to find. I found a single pack last year and it sold for an insane amount and I was deterred.

That was until last May when I found a UK release Something, Something, Something Dark Side Collector’s Edition sealed DVD pack that included the cards. Believe it or not but I paid less than the DVD pack originally cost in stores and that includes shipping from England. Now reinvigorated with my find I went on the search for the collector edition of It’s A Trap and after a couple of days of searching I was able to find a reseller selling an open It’s A Trap Collector’s Edition DVD pack on Amazon.uk but the seller specifically stated the cards were included. Again I paid a realistic price to have it shipped from England.

Here are the cards from the Something, Something, Something Dark Side set and the back puzzle.

My nearly 18-month journey of collecting the set is over now that I have all three set and while I did end up buying two Region 2 DVDs that I cannot play on my DVD player (I actually already have the three movies) I did finally complete the set so it was worth it to me.

Here are the It's A Trap 9-card set with back puzzle.

A Patch That Haunts My Nightmares

In my recent COMC order I picked up one of my Top 10 Wants, a 2016 Topps Pro Debut Mascot Patch card of Weebly, who is the mascot of the Everett Aqua Sox. The Aqua Sox are the Class A short season minor league team for the Mariners located in Everett just north of Seattle.

Weebly is not just any frog but a cross between the Pacific tree frog and a Central American red-eyed tree frog. Which makes for a cute cartoon logo but a creepy ass human sized mascot. The Aqua Sox have three different logos with Weebly being their main logo as well as the mascot. In a nod to the Red Sox and White Sox logos they use a pair of aqua colored frog footed sox (Aqua Sox). In 2010 the team updated their identity and using the Mariners trident logo they rotated it to become a trident “E” for Everett.

  

                  

A One Card GPK Post

I love coming across cards that I never knew about, which is the case with some Breaking Bad cards from the 2014 Topps Garbage Pail Kids Series 1 set. There were various bonus cards inserted in to hobby boxes, retail boxes and jumbo packs. In the Hobby Boxes there were eight different bonus cards which included two Breaking Bad cards (#B4a and B4b) and these bonus cards were inserted one per box.

I was able to pick up the #B4a Breaking Brad last summer for under $10 but I was outbid for the #B4b Weird Walt version. I am still watching for Weird Walt with no luck. On a separate note, when the artwork was originally done for this card in 2013 card #B4a was supposed to be Weird Walt and #B4b was supposed to be Brock Candy, I am not sure why they changed it but I think the names they finally used are better choices.

Goodbye White Whale

Last night I sold my white whale, my 1933 Goudey Lou Gehrig #92. As a collector this was a big blow, I had wanted that card since I returned to collecting in 1992 and finally picked one up in late 2006 or early 2007 after saving up. But what I got for it will really help with my medical bills and someday I hope to find another copy, even if it is a lower grade I will be happy to just have it in my collection alongside my Griffey cards. This is the final picture I took before packing it up for shipping, my wallet card was there to see it off.

Bader Nation Pickups

Besides Ken Griffey Jr and Jay Buhner I also collect MMA fighter Ryan Bader. He is my “homer” pick with him being a local guy. When I was living in the East Valley my son worked out at his gym, Power MMA, in Gilbert and even spent some time with Bader over the years. I worked out at a near-by LA Fitness and when I was at Power MMA he was never around so I never had the chance to meet him.

Ryan Bader currently has 306 total unique cards of which I have 110 of them giving me 36% of his total cards. What makes this a rough go is that of his 306 total cards 91 of them, 30%, are #1/1 cards including printing plates but not counting Topps Vault cards.

But I keep plugging away at his cards and if I can hit 200 unique Bader cards by the end of the year I will be happy. These were pickups late last year during COMC's Black Friday sale and most were base cards or parallels with upper print runs over #/100 so they are nothing special but these are a couple of the big wants for me.

2010 Topps UFC Main Event Tapout Bronze parallel #1/88 WowZZza a eBaYz OnE1 of OnE1 (damn I hate that term, even though I got this through COMC isn’t every card on eBay an eBay one of one?)

2011 Topps UFC Finest Jumbo Autograph-Relic

These cards never show up so this was pure luck to have one show up on COMC during their sale. I don’t mean never ever but this is the first one that I have seen anywhere in the 6 years that I have been collecting Ryan Bader cards so it is pretty rare to me.

2011 Topps UFC Finest Fight Mat Jumbo Relic

I already have one of these cards but it is just the plain blue mat so when I saw this multi-color beauty I just had to have it.

2016 Topps UFC Knockout Dual Relics

OK, I have tried to do some research and I am hitting a dead end due to Topps’ ambiguity used describing relics. I do not like that they create a card like this, specifically list UFC 192 and then say that the relics came from no specific event or fight. If you don’t notice the red arrows in the background you may not even realize whose relic is whose. 

AI, Durant And Warren

My recent COMC order included a large portion of Ken Griffey Jr but I always like to pick up some of the cards off of my personal want list. Usually these are cards that I have on my list that are essentially Gray Whales that I don’t consider unless they are on sale. Here are some of the cards that I had shipped following COMC’s Black Friday sale.

I wouldn’t say that Allen Iverson is one of my player collections but I do seem drawn to his cards. He was arrogant and lets not even touch on his feelings about practice but he is probably one of the most prominent guards of his generation and possibly an all-time Top 10 shooting guard. When it comes to basketball, I have pulled AI hits more than any other player so I kind of became a mini-pc collector by default.

These cards are from the 2012-13 & 2013-14 Panini Crusade releases. They both are from the Crusade Blue checklist.

This card is from the 2014-15 Court Kings release, specifically the Rookie Royalty insert. As I have said before I refuse to collect any player wearing the jersey of the team stolen from Seattle but I do have a couple of cards of Durant in a Sonics jersey and this card is now the top of Supersonics collection. Oddly this card rarely shows up but when it showed up for sale on COMC for a couple of bucks I grabbed it up quickly.

I added a couple of 1996 Pacific Chris Warren Litho Cel cards. These cards were an interesting idea originally coming out as promotional cards, these are the ones listed as Cel-000, and then later as part of the regular Pacific Litho set. When you line up the four levels (Bronze, Silver and two cels) you are supposed to see a color image of the player. I picked up two promo cards and one cyan cel insert card. I will eventually pick up the other cards to put together the image but it isn’t a rush and when I paid about $1 for all three I was happy.

Whataburger Nolan Ryan Scratchy Cards

In 1993 Whataburger handed out packs of lenticular cards that were called Nolan Ryan Recollections, a 10-card set highlighting the exploits of Nolan Ryan. It was a regional set for their Southwest stores.

I didn’t have any luck at my local Whataburgers, they always seemed to be out, not even my local LCS had any. In the end I had to hunt them down at shows finally finding only one seller had them and since it was a sellers market he was asking for an insane price, I believe it was around $5 each, so I only picked up two. After paying that for just two cards I decided the other 8 cards would have to wait and by the end of 1993 I had basically given up on the set. Here are the two cards that I had purchased in 1993.

For whatever reason I remembered the set while I was going through COMC during their Black Friday sale and when I saw the prices of the singles I had to buy them. The other 8 cards were selling between ¢.30 and ¢.50 each, so about $3 for all 8 cards. I will admit I was pretty excited about finally completing this 10-card set that has been out of my mind for over 20 years.

These are the cards that I picked up to complete the set

Three New Hall Of Famers

Congratulations to Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines and Ivan Rodriguez on being selected for entry in to Cooperstown.

This year there were 34 players on the ballot with 16 being removed for not hitting the 5% minimum and Lee Smith for hitting his maximum year limit. I am quite happy to see that Edgar Martinez, with much support from the Mariners faithful, made a double digit jump from 43.4% in last year’s vote to 58.6% on this year’s ballot. He only has two more years of eligibility so he needs an increase of at least 8.2% each year over the next two years to make him the second Seattle Mariner to be selected.

Upper Deck Is Making Their Clerks Set Happen

In 1993 Kevin Smith filmed Clerks for just over $27k, when it was released by Miramax in 1994 it was only shown on 50 screens nationwide but it went on to gross $3.2 million. This simple black and white film became a cult classic and placed Kevin Smith on the map.

While Smith has produced, directed, wrote and appeared in many films and television shows Clerks seems to always stand out because it was the beginning of the View Askinewniverse and the beginning of Jay and Silent Bob so when it was announced in 2015 that Upper Deck planned on releasing a set based on Clerks in 2016 many fans rejoiced. At the 2015 Comic Con Upper Deck handed out a Skybox Clerks promo card and had a signing with Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes and Brian O’Halloran. I have yet to find any of these cards, signed or not, which sucks.

Since the 2015 Comic Con announcement there was nothing and I had actually wondered if the set had been cancelled, with Upper Deck they usually keep upcoming release information close to the chest. Late last year Marilyn Ghigliotti (She played Veronica) posted on Twitter pictures of her signing cards from the set so that was good news but still nothing was officially announced until last week when Beckett confirmed that the set will be released this year and will run around $75-$100 a box and will include 2 autographs and a manufactured patch, additionally there will be sketch cards that will be case hits. Still no release date but this is a good start. 

Faker Fakes Fake Autographs

EDIT- I have found two more accounts: Here and Here

I was doing some Star Wars searches on eBay and came across a new listing Carrie Fisher autograph card from Russia with a $1 starting price and was surprised. I added it to my Watch List planning on comparing the signature to one of her certified signatures. I finally had the chance and it is faker than fake took a look so I took a look at the seller’s other items wondering what else they had and every single one of the autograph cards was clearly counterfeit. Some were close but most were nowhere near what the signature should look like.

There was a third account that was selling the exact same type of items and was also from Moscow but eBay cancelled all of their sales and banned the account. Two of the accounts were opened in 2011, one of them was the banned account, and the third in 2016. To add to the humor is that one of the Carrie Fisher autographs (Topps Star Wars Attax pictured above) from the banned account just showed up on one of the other accounts. I am going to go out on a limb and say that Carrie Fisher never signed a Russian Topps Star Wars Attax card let alone two and they just happen to both show up for sale within a week of each other.

Here are the two sellers: Seller #1 and Seller #2

Take a look at the items, they are all signed by black marker on the bottom left side. When I started watching the accounts about 10 days ago all three accounts were selling similar cards too; Star Wars, Twilight, George Bush and Anime. I did report both of these accounts. I am bummed that at least 33 people bought these items and even left positive feedback, some people just want to blindly accept autographs as real.

Would you like a Jordan autograph for a couple bucks? Each account has one.

Hopefully I wont get any shit for this one, but I think I found the person signing the cards LOL

The Raiders Are Heading To Vegas

On Saturday the Raiders confirmed that they intend on filing relocation papers to move to Las Vegas though an official announcement has not been made but is expected before too long.

 

I know that a uniform change/rebrand probably won’t happen, and I seriously hope they don’t change their logo or colors, because of the history that the Raiders hold but I decided to mess around with some mockups of what might become of the Raiders helmets. I really hope that they keep the silver and black color scheme but this is a What If? situation so of course I have to play the devil’s advocate.

When you look at the Las Vegas area you will notice the use of certain colors, between the casinos and Las Vegas’ various teams from their past and present.

University of Las Vegas: Scarlett and gray

Las Vegas Locomotives (UFL): Red, black and silver

Las Vegas Wranglers (ECHL) Red, black and silver

Las Vegas 51s (Triple-A Mets team): Blue and gray

 

You get the idea, so I worked with red and gray/silver plus there are various gradients so I tossed that in on one of the helmets.

 

With the Las Vegas Golden Knights NHL expansion team finalizing their name and logo I played off of their colors so the professional teams match. They have them listed as steel gray, gold, red and black. I pulled this logo from their official Golden Knights web site.

Thank You

I want to say “Thank you” to those who have given me words of support, it means a lot to me being part of this hobby and right now things are tough and I am torn trying what to do next.

Like many bloggers I have written a number of posts that I have held as a draft until I was ready to post in cases of writer’s block or I wasn’t able to sit down and write out a post. I have now completed many of these posts and they are all set to go as drafts, I have a month’s worth of posts, so I will probably be posting many of these while I figure what I want to do. Some of these write ups go back to early 2016 and for some reason or another I just never posted them but in a situation like this it works out for me having these old posts. Some may be a bit dated or more information has come out, as is the case of the recent announcement by Upper Deck regarding the Clerks card set, so I will update them as I go.

Again, “Thank you” for your support.

LA Is Now The Owner Of Two NFL Teams...Again

*EDIT: Last night I created these mockup helmets, both the Navy & White and the original Chargers colors but I scheduled it to post this morning at 9am local time (8am in LA) because I already posted yesterday and today 4 hours after my post went live the Chargers updated their logo to using the original Chargers colors.

I know that the idea of using the colors was not just my idea but I was the first to post it before even the Chargers posted. Remember, you saw it here first LOL

It is official, the Chargers are moving to Los Angeles after 55 years in San Diego. It is kind of a return for the Chargers who began their franchise as the LA Chargers in 1960 before moving to San Diego in 1961. The team will eventually share a stadium with the Rams in Inglewood, which is scheduled to be finished in 2019 so for the next two years they will play at the StubHub Center in Carson.

 

Last year after the NFL’s plan was announced about the Rams, Raiders and Chargers relocation fiasco I had done a mockup of what the Charger’s new helmets may look like using a similar font to what the Chargers used but with their announcement they included the new LA Chargers logo and it appears that they intend to do some re-branding with the new logo appearing to be similar to the Dodgers logo and color scheme so I created a new mockup using the logo released yesterday. I figured they would use the blue as the primary color and have the facemasks with the secondary white.

There is an NFL rule that dictates how and when visual changes can be made and the new logo will not appear on uniforms/helmets just yet, the Chargers will continue to use the same uniforms that they have been wearing so this is just something I did for fun.

 

I made a plain helmet (Above) plus two more with stripe variations below:  Single white stripe (Top) and Double white stripe (Bottom)

 

 

 

 

To get an idea of what it would look like if they had kept the San Diego team colors: