Alyssa Milano

Any male who grew up watching Who's The Boss? at some point developed a thing for Alyssa Milano, I would think anyways.  She was always super cute and continued to blossom into a total knock-out as an adult. 

The picture used for this card was taken in 1987 during a (I believe) charity celebrity game at Dodger Stadium.  The card itself of course is done in the style of the 1987 Topps baseball.

With just a little bumping around the internet I found out that to this day Alyssa is still a huge Dodgers fan.  I think she's actually a really big sports fan just in general.  She's got her own line of official team apparel for female sports fans.  Even more reason to stay crushing on her, eh?

Bert Hearts To Fart

I came across this infamous photo of Bert Blyleven and knew it had to have a card of it's own.

I was having a difficult time chasing down the exact year of this image so I put in an email to a pretty resourceful friend of the site and he was able to find that the picture was taken in 1984 in the locker room of the Cleveland's Municipal Stadium where Blyleven spent the '84 season as a member of the Cleveland Indians' rotation.

Bert has all the statistical criteria needed to be enshrined into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but it took him 13 years before he finally got in in 2011.  Perhaps that can be attributed his casual attitude about busting heat on reporters during post-game interviews?  I have to imagine that's not really going to endear you to any of the writers that vote on who gets in.  To Bert's credit he's never hid his high regard for a good ass blast as he told Big League Stew in a 2008 interview:

"That’s why I wore it. I love to fart. I do. When the time is right, I do it. I’m not going to hide it."

I first made this card in the 1984 Topps  baseball inspired template but I just wasn't 100% happy with the final card so I went with my original idea to make it in the style of Topps' long running Turn Back The Clock subset.  Like, "hey, remember that time when Bert Blyleven was photographed in that I love to fart t-shirt?".

The Turn Back The Clock cards remained very similar for a number of years with just the background color changing.  I chose the blue of the 1989 edition to put a couple years between the that and the year that the fateful pic was snapped.

Claudia Schiffer

While doing some mindless scrolling the likes of which most humans engage in now on a daily basis I happened upon this image of the German born goddess Claudia Schiffer used for this card.  I want to say it comes from a Guess? Jeans campaign. 

Claudia Schiffer, like Cindy Crawford or Christie Brinkley, is one of those names that put the "super" in super model.  Those women's names for any of us guys growing up in the '80s or '90s immediately conjure up the vision of feminine beauty that almost didn't even seen real, too perfect.  Like if you were to mention the name "Claudia Schiffer" it was probably in jest of her incomparable good looks, like "yea, but she's no Claudia Schiffer".

Seeing that this image is black and white it's makes are great addition to the other two Dream Girl card's I've made that are patterned after the 1991 Score baseball Dream Team subset. 

Vision Quest

I really, really like the movie Vision Quest.  It's one of those movies where if I'm staring at my VHS collection wanting to watch a movie but nothing is really jumping out to me I could always watch Vision Quest.

I would call Vision Quest a quintessential 80's movie, complete with training montage and kick ass soundtrack.  Any time I watch it I really feel inspired by Matthew Modine's portrayal of Louden Swain.  It's not only for the character's determination but also Louden seems like a genuinely good person, an all-american kid who is still naive and yet to be hardened by pressures and experiences that come with adulthood.

When I started messing around with making cards Louden Swain was one of the very first cards I did.  It was natural because I love the movie so much and since it came out in 1985 which was the first template I recreated for custom cards.  Upon a recent viewing I was inspired to revisit my admiration for the movie and add a Brian Shute card.  At first I was just going to add a card to the Louden I'd already made in the '85 Topps baseball design but I decided to do go a different direction and make two new cards.

I went with a Star Co. basketball inspired design.  For me it has a classic trading card frame and it's also a bit of a cheat since Star used the same exact template for their cards from 1983 through 1986, they would just switch the color of the card's frame for the different NBA teams.  The Star design allowed me to add the the weight class where the player's position would normally go.  That's an important detail of the movie with Louden pushing himself to his physical brink in an effort to test his mettle against the reigning state champ in the toughest weight division.

Fun facts: The actor who played Brian Shute, Frank Jasper, had wrestled but leading up to the movie was doing body building, was closer in 190 lbs ... Jasper literally had to out wrestle the other guy  vying for the part of Shute ...

Big Trouble In Little China

I’ve been wanting to do a Big Trouble in Little China set for quite some time now but I kept putting it off and putting it off.  The reason why is that I knew it would be time consuming.  I knew it would just be a couple of cards because I wanted to do the movie cardboard justice.  I try to make to make the best cards possible not only for my personal satisfaction in a job well done but anyone who may be a fan of the card’s subject.  All of my cards take time to make, but this set a little longer due to the size.   Big Trouble may not have been a box office smash -- grossing about half of what it took to make the movie -- but it’s garnered as big of a cult following as most any 80’s cult classic, especially after being released on VHS in 1996.  I added three new complete revolutions on my tape’s spools while making this set just so I could get down more of what I would call fan-accurate details.

Big Trouble would have been ripe for a card set.  There’s all of it’s colorful characters and scenes that just plain look great as cards.  Director John Carpenter has gone onto say that Twentieth Century Fox never got behind the movie not really knowing what they had with Big Trouble in Little China.  I think a card set could have gone a long way to help capture the imagination of kids who would have bugged their parents to take them to see the movie.

I knew I would be doing more of a storyboard type set than just a principal characters set with Big Trouble.  There’s so many great scenes in the movie that I wanted to include but I kind of had to take what the internet would give me, which fortunately was the majority of what I wanted to include.

This set ended up being 38 cards that is split evenly into a Series 1 and 2, but it could have easily been double had I come across more images.

When I thought about how I wanted the set to look there really was only one template I seriously considered, the 1986 Donruss design.  I was so pleased with how the design complimented my Wraith and Thrashin’ sets that it really was an easy decision to use it once more, just this time in an all too fitting jade green colored border.

This set features a couple of firsts for a Phantom Cardboard set.  For the first time I finished a set off with a checklist.  The second first is a 6-card puzzle back of the Lo Pan’s catacomb monster.  The puzzle is complete with three cards from the first series and three from the second.

Update: See - Jose Canseco Would Be Proud