Clue

I've made a couple of Clue the movie cards characters cards just for my personal collection for autographs.  I thought a custom gaming card would make for a really unique trading card to have autographed, which I was successful with on 3 of the 4 I attempted.  I've now decided to just go ahead and make a custom card set out of them as Clue is a pretty beloved '80s movie with a great cast.

There's a number different card designs since the game was originally released back in 1949.  I chose to go with a design inspired by the look of cards released with the 1972 edition of the game because they are the ones I remember growing up.

The set is 13 cards.  A title card and 12 character cards.  The cards all have the same back to stay with the theme of being cards from a board game.

Rachel Hunter

If you're talking a who's-who of elite '80s goddesses then you must include Rachel Hunter to the pantheon of unimaginably unattainable super hotties.  

With the addition of Rachel to the 1991 Score baseball Dream Team inspired Dream Girls lineup it completes the iconic 1994 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit "Dream Team" cover alongside Kathy Ireland and Elle Macpherson.  

The Shockmaster

For any of you that might not know who The Shockmaster is, he's an extremely short-lived World Championship Wrestling character of great infamy.  In 1993 at WCW's Clash of the Champions Pay-Per-View event the promotion was debuting a new character... live.  

Fred Ottman (formerly Tugboat/Typhoon in the WWF) was set to make a dramatic debut as the mystery partner for Sting and The British Bulldog.  The plan was to have him bust through a wall with pyrotechnics going off and then do a little spiel about an upcoming Pay-Per-View.  What happened was Ottman busted the wall from his waist up and when he tried to come through it the unbroken bottom half turned him into a human teeter-totter upending him onto the floor and causing is glitter covered Storm Trooper helmet to fall of and start rolling away from him.  It was such an over-the-top botch that off camera you could hear the other wrestlers break character and laugh at something that was originally intended to be an intense confrontation.  

Obviously whatever credibility the character would have had rolled away in that glitter-glued helmet, and the gimmick was essentially D.O.A. I have read that in the years since Ottman has been able to have fun with the whole thing, which is good to hear because I could see it really getting the best of some of those guys back then who really lived their gimmicks.  

With the Shockmaster's standout adornment being a glittery Stormtrooper helmet there's only one right answer for a custom card, that being the iconic 1977 Topps Star Wars design.  I thought the blue starfield border would be the cheekiest choice for The Shockamster.

Mr. Miyagi

In my never ending quest to leave no Karate Kid custom card stone unturned, I present to you Mr. Miyagi's 1984 Donruss style baseball card.

This is the first card I'll have made using the a 1984 Donruss style design.  This card plays up Mr. Miyagi being in full catcher gear while training Daniel-San on the art of the punch in the original Karate Kid movie.  Now that we know Mr. Miyagi's actual first name as "Nariyoshi" -thanks to the Cobra Kai series translating it from Japanese written form in The Karate Kid Part II and then used on Miyagi's headstone in the Cobra Kai series- I was able to incorporate that on this card instead of just his "Mr." moniker. 

Then came the card back.  I did a little research on the Miyagi character so the card bio area of the card got the richness that Mr. Miyagi deserves. 

I'm real happy with how this one turned out and excited to add it to all the other Karate Kid customs I've made.  

Blink 182's First Date Video

I'm not sure why, but one day I got on a binge watch of late '90s into early '00s alternative rock videos.  Music, for me, has always been a way to bookmark years.  Most times, almost a little Rain Man-ish, I can tell you the exact year a song came out.  The songs I was listening to took me back to my late teens and early 20's.  I guess I do the same thing with cards but that stops around the mid '90s because that's when I stopped collecting, so I'm unable to connect a card design to a year.  Music gives me a broader timeline in which to recall the who/what/whens of my life.

One video I've always liked was Blink-182's "First Date" off of their 2001 Take Off Your Pants and Jacket.  Actually, I like the video but I don't much care for the song.  I like that video because it's funny.  I always like videos that have 'rock stars' who aren't taking themselves super serious.  Set in 1974, Blink plays this sort of immature slacker El Segundo, CA garage band.  The concept stemmed from Tom DeLonge's (whom also "Fist Date") reaction to an over-the-top Bee Gees documentary where he recounted them "on top of a mountain, singing face to face, with the sunset behind them".

I thought it would be funny to make a card from this video with a 1974 Topps baseball inspired design.  I did a mash-up of a horizontal base card and a multi-play rookies card. 

1974 Topps baseball

The information on the back came from the end of video where they did a Fast Times at Ridgemont High style still frame of each member catching you up on what they've been up to since the events of the video.  There's three characters in the video, but obviously DeLonge's "Boomer" is the star.  A  random thought though... DeLonge was "Boomer", Mark Hoppus was "Spaulding" but Travis Barker is just..."Travis"?