A Smorgasbord! 1989 Topps Cap'n Crunch

From the 1970s through the 1990s, it seemed like you could find your favorite baseball stars on food product packaging everywhere you looked: supermarkets, corner stores, restaurants, and beyond. This past year, in an effort to capture a little more nostalgia, I set a goal to expand my own collection of these "food-issue" cards. In this series I'll show the specific examples I've acquired, and share a little bit of history about the food or beverage sponsor as well. 

Previous entries can be found here.

 

 

A few times a year, mom would treat me and my sister to a "junky" cereal. Many times, this was our go-to:

 

 

Man, after so many weeks of Cheerios, Wheaties, and Shredded Wheat (not the frosted kind), we would scarf down those little golden, sugary squares with gusto.

 

And as you can see on the front of that box, in 1989 the Cap'n brought even more to the table.

 

 

 

Baseball cards! (Note how there's even a one-card trade at the end of the commercial.)

 

In each specially marked box of Cap'n Crunch cereal you'd find a cellophane wrapper containing two cards from the 22-card set, plus a piece of gum. If I'm counting the checklist correctly, 12 of the cards feature National League players, while 10 feature those from the American League. I'm not exactly sure what rhyme or reason went into that split, or how the specific players were selected. But you will see that some of the top teams of the era were represented well. For example, the Dodgers have three cards in the set, including Kirk Gibson, who had recently hit that legendary home run in the 1988 World Series.

 

Since our mom didn't buy us junky cereals very often, I only have two of the 22 cards in my current collection. Here they are. 

 

 

The design catches the eye, for sure. I like the strong red and blue colors, and the big baseball at the top, which contains the player's uniform number. On the negative side, all of the images in this set are headshots, and the team logos have been airbrushed from the players' caps.

 

Now here are the card backs.

 

It's a fairly standard Topps layout, with the Cap'n Crunch logo at top left and the Topps logo at top right mirroring the positioning from the front of the card. Eric Davis was only a few years into his career, so you've got room on the bottom of the card for some of his personal highlights. He sure belted a lot of home runs.

As for the cereal itself, it was developed way back in 1963 by the Quaker Oats Company. The Captain, known fully as Horatio Magellan Crunch, has quite a history and storyline. Did you know that the ship he commands is called the Guppy? Or that he and his crew of fun kids (and first mate dog) often do battle with a pirate named Jean LaFoote, whose goal is to steal the ship's cargo of delicious cereal? The crew also needs to frequently fend off a group of little monster-like things called "The Soggies", who are always trying to make Cap'n Crunch cereal—you guessed it—soggy.

Perhaps even more impressive is that the Captain was created by a man named Alan Burns. You might be familiar with some of the other works he's helped create, such as The Munsters and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

You might also be impressed to know that at the time of this writing, the Cap'n Crunch line consists of 11 products: 7 cereal varieties, 2 instant oatmeal flavors, and 2 kinds of snack pouches.

I don't know how the Captain gets any sailing done with all those products to endorse.

But let's get back to the cards. Although the set is only 22 cards deep, I'm not sure that I'm going to seek out the rest of it. The player images are just a little plain, and I think two cards is enough to bring back the nostalgia for me. If I can find a sealed cellophane wrapper with another two cards and the stick of gum, maybe I'll pick one of those up.

How about you? Any childhood memories of Cap'n Crunch, or that one year they teamed up with Topps? Did you pull any cards from boxes back then? Let me know if the comment section.

Thanks for reading!