A year of Topps Designs: 1965

Topps produced a simple but classic design for their 1965 baseball set. The team name in the pennant remains popular with collectors to this day.

They got a little lazy elsewhere, however. The football set was an unusual, smaller shape with a very bland design, with no background and a minimal design.

Topps liked this look so much they went with it for hockey as well.

There were plenty of nonsport sets for Topps in 1965. By far the most effort went into Battle: The Story of World War Two, which had minimal design features, but did have full-color, sensationalistic paintings from the war, which had ended 20 years prior.

Another unusual set was the mixed sport/non-sport set Push/Pull, where you could push or pull a tab to reveal one of two subjects of the card.

For the rest of their entertainment sets, Topps apparently decided color ink was too expensive, and tried to see if kids would buy black-and-white cards of their favorite TV shows.

Other than being in black-and-white, Gilligan's Island had a familiar design, with an island-and-palm-trees logo that probably would have looked good in color.

The Man from UNCLE went with the color autograph on black-and-white photo look that Topps used a few times on various non-sport and sports sets . . .

. . . and they did the same for the short-lived Soupy Sales set.

Daniel Boone got a horizontal look, with minimal design.

A similar design was used for a test issue of a Flash Gordon set. At least Topps attempted a logo on this one.

One other set produced in 1965 was one of Topps's typical humor sets, Monster Greeting Cards. The front seems like a standard greeting card . . .

. . . but the back has some adolescent dark humor.