You’ll Die Laughing With These Glorious Bubble Gum Cards
By now, most of you readers know I am a 1970s Monster Kid. While Monster Mania was to end by the end of that decade, the early 70s was still a wonderland of phantasmagoric merchandise. By 1973, I was 7 years old, well on my way to Monster Kid-dom, and one of my favorite places in the world was the local Get-n-Go convenience store. The comic book spinner rack was a treasure trove of excitement, the latest issue of Famous Monsters was usually on the magazine stand and then there were the bubble gum cards!
From Wacky Stickers, to Planet of the Apes and eventually to Star Wars, bubble gum cards held me in rapture for a decade, and in many ways they still do. The height of that rapture was Topps Creature Feature cards. It was like Famous Monsters with bubble gum! Each package a mystery with cards featuring pun-filled jokes and marvelous movie still from movies I had yet to see!
Released in 1973, Topps Creature Feature cards featured licensed black and white movie stills from the classic Universal Studios and American International Studios.
Series 1 included cards 1-64:
Card #34: 
Series 2 includes cards #65-128
Card #66: 
Back:
Card #78:
The back of the cards used the same “You’ll Die Laughing” headline and purple illustrated border as the original 1959 Funny Monsters cards and included a marginally funny monster joke.
Because of this, all three Topps card sets, from 1959 to 1980, are often referred to as You’ll Die Laughing cards. That title most appropriately refers to the 1959 Topps Funny Monsters cards which featured illustrations of monsters rather than licensed movie stills. Not only did Topps use the same headline and border in all three series, they used the same corny jokes in both 1973 and 1980 series as had originally run in 1959!
We’ll cover those wonderful Funny Monsters 1959 cards in a future article.
Topps Reissued Creature Feature in 1980
Largely a reissue of the 1973 Topps You’ll Die Laughing set with many of the same images and captions, about 33% of the 1980 cards were new images, but the primary difference is the wrapping:
As well as the addition of color borders to the 88-card set, which is helpful determine the set these cards belong to:
1980 Topps Creature Feature sets included one of 22 stickers in each package Labeled “The Monster Hall of Fame,” these stickers are quite inexpensive and easy to track down.
Base sets are affordable as well. For collectors on a budget, the 1980 cards are a less expensive place to start collecting.
Collecting Monster Trading Cards
Creature Feature cards from 1973 and 1980 series are quite easy to find both as single cards and in lots. It may take a bit if effort to piece together the entire series as lots often are incomplete. But with time and diligence, assembling a full series is very doable.
Single cards usually range from $1 -$2 and sets are usually in the same per-card price range times the number of cards included in the lot. It is common to find complete display boxes for the 1980 series, though much less common to find 1973 sealed display boxes.
Interestingly, many of the original 1973 proofs are currently listed on eBay for fixed price of $320 each. It’s a really unique collectible, but it would obviously be quite an investment to piece together a large collection of these
Here’s an example:
Worth taking a look, and a really unique monster collectible for the right collector! Click here to see all the Topps Creature Feature cards currently listed on eBay
Monster Card Collecting Resources
More more in-depth information about Topp’s Creature Feature Trading Cards and collecting trading cards in general, I highly recommend these resources:
Did you collect these cards in your Monster youth? Do you still? Share your memories – and your collections – with us!
