A Year of Topps Designs: 1982

Ringing in '22 by looking back at '82. Forty years ago, this is what Topps designed for baseball and football:

The baseball design often gets derided as a "hockey stick" but I always thought them as pretty cool looking racing stripes. The football design is a rather simple but effective look that uses a pennant similar to the classic '65 baseball design.

The hockey design is remarkably similar to the football set, except instead of '65 baseball, they took the team name from '67 baseball almost exactly, just tilting it a bit.

Topps didn't always put out a basketball set, but when they did it usually got a great design, like the comic-book style explosion here.

'82 wasn't a big year for non-sports at Topps, with the exception of the big hit movie ET. The design was very similar to other Topps movie cards of the era, with the white-on-blue hand-drawn starfield very reminiscent of the original Star Wars design.

Topps was able to capitalize on another 1982 fad, The Smurfs. The design was the old Topps Plaks, now called SuperCards. These cards had more kid-friendly, snark-free slogans than the old Plaks.

Other than the perennial Wacky Packages, the only other set put out by Topps forty years ago was a Donkey Kong sticker set. Other than the black background there was no consistent design on these.