Thursday, August 27, 2020

Retro Toy Chest: Remember LJN SportsTalk? (1989)

Topps partnered with LJN to produce an experimental product, SportsTalk, in 1989.

Over 150 Topps cards from the 1989 set were expanded in size to have a disc placed on the back of the card. LJN produced a special player on which to play the cards (it won't work on a normal CD player, friends).

Unfortunately, the experiment was an epic fail. There were complaints about the player breaking, probably because of being cheaply made, and it was in cutout bins before the end of the year.

To be honest, I didn't know about this until receiving three of the cards in a trade last week. Here's a commercial:



Topps & LJN had planned on expanding and doing the same for basketball & football, but with poor response to the baseball set, the project was scrapped.

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