Sunday, February 7, 2021

Posters on Walls

Question: 
 
Do kids still hang posters on their walls? Posters of music groups? Cars? Celebrity crushes? Pro athletes?
 
Well, I know I had at least a couple of posters of baseball and hockey players on my walls over the course of my childhood. If you did too, you might remember the feeling you got when you found a display like this one in a retail store:
 
 

 
You'd run over there and flip across those frames. If you found a poster featuring one of your favorite players, you'd have to follow the letter/number code on the frame down to the storage racks underneath, and hope the particular slot you needed wouldn't be empty. (The display shown above seems very well stocked.) Then you'd hope mom or dad would treat you to one.

Being a baseball-loving kid who grew up in the 1980s, the poster brand I remember the most is Starline. Have a look at these three all-time great hitters and tell me if the poster style looks familiar:
 

It's a classic memory for many kids of the era, I'm sure. But the thing is, the images you see above are not posters. They're trading cards!
 
That's right. I recently discovered that Starline put out trading-card versions of their posters in 1990.

Most of the sets were 7-card promos that were sponsored by either McDonald's, Burger King, 7-Eleven, Coca Cola, or Domino's. The bigger one is the 1990 Starline Long John Silver's set. There are 40 cards in that one.
 
But the checklist is rather wacky. Of the 26 MLB teams that existed in 1990, you'll only find 14 represented. And across those 14 teams, there are only 18 total players featured. That means quite a few players were given two (or even three!) different cards, while other players you'd imagine should have gotten a card weren't given any. 
 
Take the Royals, for instance. They had two cards in the 40-card set. Do you think you'll find legendary Royal George Brett on one of them? 
 
Nope! Both cards feature Bret Saberhagen.

Let's get to a card back now. 
 
 
 
 
They're nicely done and neatly arranged, which reminds me a little bit of the card backs that the Score company was creating back then.
 
Note the clunky writing of the blurbs, however. Every sentence begins with the player's first name. My fifth-grade English teacher would have never let me get away with that kind of thing.

Regardless, this Starline set provided me with an immediate sense of nostalgia when I stumbled across the checklist a few weeks back. I'm happy to have Mattingly, Gwynn, and Boggs in my collection now for future doses of that same nostalgia.

Did any of you readers who grew up in the '80s or '90s have Starline posters? (I had New York Yankee third baseman Mike Pagliarulo and Montreal Canadien goaltender Patrick Roy.)
 
Share in the comment section, and thanks for reading!

24 comments:

  1. Nice find! I came across one of these when searching for All-Time Team set fillers (I bought a Ruben Sierra card) I don't think I've seen another blogger mention them before. The fronts are really sharp and recreate the poster design (otherwise I'd complain about the unused space at the bottom).

    I'm sure I had a couple of Starline posters on my wall (and Costacos Brothers for sure) possibly even that Mattingly. Definitely had plenty of rock band and celebrity crush posters, too. That poster rack picture brings back loads of memories!

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    1. Makes you want to look through childhood photographs to see if any would reveal the specific posters you had on the walls, right?

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    2. Kinda, yeah! Maybe next time I'm at my mom's :)

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    3. If you find some good ones, I hope you'll consider sharing them on your blog!

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  2. I had posters, but none that looked like that.

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    1. I just checked eBay and there's a surprising amount of Starline posters for sale. It's not too late for you to get one!

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  3. Too old for those posters, I know that design as on baseball cards only.

    Loved the poster display at stores. I wasn't a big poster-on-the-wall kid but the two I remember is Ron Cey, which was on the wall forever, and then, in college, Janet Jones (the future Janet Gretzky).

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    1. Good choices there, Night Owl! Do you still have those posters tucked away somewhere?

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  4. My wall was covered with NASCAR posters as a kid and then bands as a teen and college student. Ironically, I don't think I had any baseball posters. In retrospect, that's kinda weird. Love those Starline cards though!

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    1. Must have been quite a room! (Going to check out your blog now.)

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  5. When I was a kid I had a Yankees Magazine subscription. Each month there was a poster in the middle of the magazine, and my wall became full of them.

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    1. Oh man, I forgot all about those magazine fold-out posters. I must have had one or two at some point of my childhood. (That is, if I managed to extricate the poster without ripping it.)

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  6. I picked up a few packs of these out of a dime box of cards at a local flea market this past summer. Suprisingly enough, at least for me, I have not opened them yet.

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    1. I'd say open some, keep others sealed. (I hadn't even thought about how they were distributed -- loose or in sealed packs.)

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  7. I remember looking through poster racks just like that at Spencer Gifts in the mall! Hell, I still have music (concert posters, framed) posters on the wall in my office today!

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    1. Nice going, shoebox! Spencer Gifts was one of my first retail job experiences back in my teenage days. So many lava lamps...

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    2. Oh boy, so I also have a huge lava lamp on my home office desk, not sure what this says about me hahaha

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    3. Hah! It says that you spent some time hanging out at Spencer Gifts, I guess? (Ain't nothin' wrong with a lava lamp, by the way.)

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  8. I had my walls covered in posters as a kid, and kind of still do now. No sports posters though, although I did have a couple of Junior when I was a wee lad.

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    1. Man, Griffey was everywhere back then, wasn't he? Cards, posters, TV commercials, video games, cereal boxes...

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  9. Oh wow, neat set, I never knew that existed.

    I had a Mattingly poster which looked very similar to that on my bedroom wall, brings back memories!

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    1. Glad they bring back good memories, Sean! I'd guess a lot of kids had a Mattingly poster like the one featured in this post.

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  10. The main poster I remember was the Farrah Fawcett poster that my brother had hanging up in his room. I would buy posters of cars and stuff when I was in elementary school from the book fairs. Later on... I started focusing on posters of Jordan (Wheaties posters and his Wings). Then in college I transitioned to Ansel Adams prints.

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    1. Bonus point to Fuji for the book fair reference!

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