Complete Set Review - 1996 Bazooka

Back before Christmas I was able to pick up a few smaller sets and partial sets of cards from a seller on Sportlots.  The sets were all listed as auctions starting at a quarter.  I bid on probably two dozen sets and brought home 7 or 8 of them.  This 1996 Bazooka set is probably the set that fits least into my collection and collecting interests, I think I got caught up on the chase a little bit.

Regardless, I thought I would share some highlights of this unique set.  1996 Bazooka is a fairly small set, 132 cards.  Research shows it was released in both a factory set format and in 5-card packs costing 50 cents each with a stick of Bazooka gum.  The factory sets contained a reprint of Mickey Mantle's 1959 Bazooka card, I did not get that in the set I purchased.

The card fronts feature nice bright and colorful photos of the player with the Bazooka logo in the upper left corner and the players name and team overlaying a baseball bat near the bottom border.  Thumbing through the set I picked out 25 cards that caught my eye one way or another to share.

The back of each card contains one of five different Bazooka Joe characters (Ursula, Mort, Joe, Zena and Metal Dude), along with the Bazooka Ball flipping game, the player's biographical data and 1995 career statistics. Every card contains a Funny Fortune, which predicts the fate of each player on a particular date.  If I wasn't so lazy, I would consider researching the Fortunes and seeing if anything came close to being true.  Here are 5 sample card backs with each of the characters and examples of each of the 3 types of card types (Great Play, Bonus and Effect). 

 In addition to the 132-card set I received a header card that contains the rules on the back (the rules seem a little confusing to me).  Just in case you are interested in hearing how to play the game, here you go:

As I stated above, this doesn't really fit into my collecting lanes but there are some nice cards in the set.  I may not have been the only person to feel this way as Topps stopped producing Bazooka set until 2003.