Something has been filling the children’s toy shelves over the past few years: mystery boxes. You have to buy a bunch to get the whole set. While this is a trend that has exploded over the years, I think it comes from something that has both changed and stayed the same for over a hundred years: trading cards. Grab a pack of cards, and it’s always a mystery which cards you’re going to get.
So let’s chat about some of the most popular trading cards through the generations!
Boomers (1946-1964)
These cards may not have started in the 1950s, but they certainly were popular in the 1950s in a whole new way: Baseball cards! Before they might have just been packed in with a stick or two of gum, but now they were back with a vengeance. These cards were in full colour, with a players’ statistics, biography, and even containing autographs!
I think this was really what kicked off the Trading Card boom!
Generation X (1965-1980)
For the kids of the 70s, there were a lot of parodies, whether on TV or on cards. Wacky Packs, or Wacky Packages, were cards with parodies of all sorts of popular products, each had their own card and their own art that was an interesting blend of stylized and maybe even realistic at a glance!
From Rot Wheels, to Milk Muds, to Dr. Popper, there were all sorts of fun products to play on words!
Millenials (1981-1996)
In the 80s, the parodies were mixed with the popular gross-out humor of the time. Garbage Pail Kids cards were a cross between Wacky Packs and the ever-popular Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, with an added gross factor.
It’s still something remembered fondly to this day, and something I could also see coming back these days, and maybe being just as popular.
Generation Z (1997-2012)
In the late 90s and into 2000s, anime was the name of the cartoon game, and that, of course, came into the trading card market, too! Pokemon and Yugi-Oh were both big names in the Trading Card Game market for Gen Z kids. It seemed like everyone was collecting at least one of these games, even if they didn’t really know how to play. Hey, at least they looked cool!
Those are just a few of the popular trading card properties through the years. Have you brought out the old card binder for a nostalgic look-through yet, or did I miss out on something you loved collecting?
-Tie-Dye Tam
