Weird title for a post, huh? Crazy enough, it is a true statement.....what???!!!!! In the 1970s and into the early 1980s, anything and almost everything was slapped onto Japanese mini cards and pumped out to the child consumer. The great Yamakatsu company captured the frilled-necked lizard (えりまきとかげ）of Australia as the subject of one of its sets. Crazy. Oddly enough, all the packaging shows these lizards in bowties trying to give them a human-like quality. The cards themselves are just pictures of the lizards, though, so no strangeness there, but is there? However, why frilled-necked lizards for a subject? Well the answer turns out to be a Japanese game show called WakuWaku Dobutsu Land（わくわく動物ランドLand）....or roughly Thrilling Animal Land aired by the Japanese TBS network. The premise behind the game show is a clip of an animal was shown then stopped. Celebrity contestants then guessed what was going to happen next and the clip resumed. Correct guesses were added up and the winnings went to an animal charity of choice. It turns out the Frilled-Neck Lizard episode was an early and popular episode so they used that as the basis for this mini card set to promote the game show. Sounds crazy, but the game show was so popular that it was adopted in the US by ABC with Alan Thicke as the show host and was aired under the name "Animal Crack Ups". I gathered most of my info from Wikipedia and by no means an expert, but it was definitely fun to research.
Here are three of the mini cards that were in the set along with the packaging. As with most mini card sets, there were random winner cards included in the packs. In this case, the lucky winner would win a box of 5-10 extra cards of the frilled-necked lizard.
Pure awesomeness! Love the Japanese and their fascination with animals and human clothing. These remind me of those cat cards where the guy/girl dressed them in human clothes. I wrote about them a few years ago:
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Thanks. I love the Japanese kitty cards as well!
DeleteOh wow, those are really awesome!
ReplyDeleteI have to say though that I think Yamakatsu made a mistake by putting all their eggs into one basket (or one lizard). My son has a book about lizards and he likes some of them and would really go for cards featuring lizards. But his favorite is the chameleon so if we bought a box of cards that just had frilled necked lizards he would definitely be disappointed (and hence I won't be buying these!) If they had done a set with a bunch of different lizards (or better still dinosaurs) on them though I would be all over Yahoo Auctions right now trying to track some down after reading this :)
I believe there is a dinasuar set out there too. I’ll have to look.
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