It’s the middle of the week, so it’s time for another edition of CollectingCandy.com’s Wacky Wednesdays! For today’s post, we’re going to look at one of my favorite Wacky Package stickers. It’s from 1974’s Wacky Packages series 6: Mold Rush.
Mold Rush is based on one of Topps’ own products, Gold Rush bubble gum. Topps made it a regular occurrence to parody their own products and those parodies were always the ones chosen as the subject of the puzzles that you could build from the checklist backs.
I suspect parodying their own products was an effort to show that Wackys were never meant to harm the original brand’s image, so much as it was to have fun with it.
Here’s a look at the original sticker:
Wacky Packages Series 6 – Mold Rush – 1974
And here’s a scan of the exact style of Gold Rush pack that was parodied:
Topps – Gold Rush fruit flavor bag package with tag – 1970’s
As you can see, the original package was adorned with line-art illustrations. I’ve always thought that line-art presented a challenge for the Wacky artists, as they did so much cool stuff with rendered mascots, but they still came up with a nice approach to their parody. I love the look of the beaten down and trodden Mold Rush mascots, especially when compared to the happy, fresh-faced originals.
I should mention that Gold Rush gum has a pretty rich history on its own, and is a topic I look forward to exploring in a future CollectingCandy.com post.
For today however, this wraps up our Wacky Wednesdays look at Mold Rush.
See you next time!
One of my favorites!
I always suspected the reason that Topps went with its own parodies for the puzzle pieces was legal cover — they only had to defend using an image in a sticker that was randomly inserted, rather than instead of every single pack, as the puzzle pieces were.