1986 Sportflics Highlights

By Patrick Mondout

Sportflics produced their inaugural set of 200 3D action cards in 1986. Like the Slurpee coins of the era, the thick and heavy cards could be tilted to show one of three pictures. Unlike any previous set, the cards featured a pair of pictures from the same action sequence, giving the appearance of motion which made them quite cool to us kids. The third picture was usually a head photo of the player. The cards on the checklist below that feature more than one player feature one picture of each in the tilting sequence.

As Topps had an army of lawyers primed to pounce on anyone who distributed packs of cards with gum or with nothing at all, Sportflics (sometimes misspelled Sportsflics) included small 3D trivia cards with their packs. The packs themselves only contained three cards plus two useless trivia cards. The packs came in a 36-count box that had an actual card glued to the stand-up part. That was cool and effective advertising, but it sucked when it was a semi-valuable card like a Dwight Gooden. Factory sets in cool black boxes were also produced.

These cards were radically different than anything that came before them and there was an initial rush to buy them. But this soon died down and the set came back down in price and can be found at a fraction of its late 1986 price now and probably at a fraction of what they cost to produce.

Veteran collectors were wary of high-tech cards, and it is not easy to tell at a distance what card you are looking at. That was never a problem with the old Kellogg's cards.

I suspect Amurol - the company that produced the high-tech cards - also made the 7-Eleven Slurpee coins. Indeed, the prototypes floating around out there have a pair 7-Eleven logos on the back.

Sportflics cards were produced yearly until 1990 with each set receiving less attention in the increasingly crowded marketplace (which in retrospect looks downright deserted by later standards). Pinnacle resurrected the brand with a much improved technology in 1994.

This set is also mentioned here. Here is a complete checklist: