1972 TOPPS ED KRANEPOOL IN ACTION ACETATE

Welcome to a special feature here on Card of the Week: How the 1972 Topps Set Looks to a Dog.

No?

OK, how about this:

And now, as a tribute to the Academy Award winning film “The Artist,” we present a black-and-white, silent edition of Card of the Week.

Well, what we really have here is a clear acetate overlay of Ed Kranepool‘s 1972 Topps In Action card. The primary elements of the card-front photo have been printed in black on the acetate– Topps added the white cardboard backing for display purposes, and affixed a 3M authentication sticker to the reverse of the cardboard.

My dim understanding of this acetate version of the card is that Topps would attach color transparencies to an acetate sheet, and then photograph the results in order to create a basis for the initial cardboard proof run. Somewhere in that mix, the photo and the card design must have been transferred to the acetate in order to facilitate that first printing stage.

And let me state it here in black-and-white terms: I’m a flat-out sucker for this kind of Topps production ephemera, particularly if it involves a Mets’ player like our friend Loopenark here…

3 comments on “Mets Card of the Week: 1972 Ed Kranepool acetate

  • Brian Joura

    This image is unsettling to me. For some reason, my mind tries to convert it to the color image I know it should be. And in that process, the section around his name and “In Action” turns to yellow. I’m having bad, Donruss flashbacks. When was that ugly all-yellow Donruss set?

  • Charlie Hangley

    It looks like a photo (taken with an Instamatic) of the screen of a Zenith 13″ b/w job…

  • Doug

    Good call, Charlie. And that’s probably how I saw Eddie most of the time when I was a kid, so it feels right.

    Brian, I think you might actually be having a Fleer flashback, specifically the 1991 set. But Fleer flashbacks are very similar pharmacologically to Donruss flashbacks, so easy mistake…

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