Review: 1991 Fleer

"Well the way I used to love you baby; baby, that's the way I hate you now." - B.B. King

Well, before I start this trip down Memory Lane, I'd just like you to take a good, close look at that pack of cards up there. 53 cards for a buck ninety-nine. Holy fucking fuck. Today, $1.99 gets you six cards of something shitty. Back in 1991, it got you FIFTY THREE CARDS... Of something shitty.

In 1991, much like 1990, the first new cards of the season that we came into contact with were the new Fleer set. And riding high on fumes from the previous year's set, I decided before I even opened the pack that this would by MY set for the year. I'd buy it, and buy it, and buy it, until I had the full set, inserts and all. The problem was, the things were horrid. The colors were dull, the design was boring, (is that Times New Roman?) and what the Christ was up with with all the green? Topps had put out an all-green set in 1986, and I don't care if there was a zillion-dollar Jerry Rice or semi-rookies of all those USFL guys, that set was ugly as hell, too. But at least in '86, it looked like they were at least trying. This was just... Green box, white box, blah.

The card backs were almost decent, with a nice-sized headshot and graphics beyond colored boxes, but the dull green just ruined it again. But as far as boring card design goes, these might have been the ugliest cards I ever saw. Of course, as far as overall ugliness goes, the title would probably go to one of those nine thousand "let's see how much gimmicky bullshit we can cram onto a card" sets Pacific put out every year that eventually put them out of business, but that's a tale for another day. But yeah, the base card set sucked.

There were also some other subsets, like one for League Leaders and a nearly-identical one for "Hitters," which as you could have guessed, were some of the top defensive players. Buy yeah, those sucked ass, too. Rookies? Did Fleer possibly learn the lesson from 1990 and include more than four? Well, yeah. Ten of the fuckers. Yes, just ten. But surely, they'd be good right? Well, it's the 1991 draft class, so obviously no, but they'd at least have players people thought would be good, like first-rounders and stuff, right? Well... Russell Maryland was the first overall pick, and eventually made a Pro Bowl or two, so that'll do. Kenny Walker never amounted to much in the NFL, but he was deaf, and a big story as a result, so everyone wanted his cards. Derrick Walker was a sixth-round tight end, making his inclusion somewhat inexplicable, but he had a relatively productive career, starting most of the time. Nick Bell was an actual hot rookie card for a while, before fizzling out like all the other non-Favres of 1991. Eric Bienemy was a superstar at Colorado, and had a decent little NFL career. Okay, those will do, but then, it gets bad. Mike Dumas was a career journeyman who had a staggering seven interceptions in eight years. Derek Russell, a fourth round pick, had a decent year in 1993, but might as well have not existed otherwise. Okay, those two weren't horrible, but after the bad, it goes straight down to ugly, though. Michael Stonebreaker, a ninth round pick, only played in 18 games in four years, and wasn't in the NFL for two of those. But he did a helluva lot better than eighth round pick Patrick Tyrance and Motherfucking Eleventh round pick Chris Smith, neither of whom ever playing a single down in the NFL. Holy Christmas Jew, what the fuck were they thinking when they decided on those guys? "Okay, we got Maryland, Bell, and Bienemy... Should we put in Eric Turner, Herman Moore, or maybe that Favre guy? Eh, screw the first two rounds! PAT FUCKING TYRANCE! YEEEEAAAAAAHHHH!" Seriously, what the hell.


After the base set, things get a little better, though. The Fleer All Pro insert set returned, with us still being too ignorant of the way things were to understand that they were almost worthless, so they were still awesome. And making things way more awesome for me was that with four guys represented, (Neal Anderson, Mike Singletary, Mark Carrier, and Mark Bortz) my Bears had more players in the set than any other team, edging the three that the Bills and 49ers contributed. Hells yeah. A new addition, though, was the Pro Visions insert set, borrowing a design from '91 Fleer baseball, and featuring crazy-ass paintings of nine of the top dudes in the NFL. They were harder to find than All Pros, so we had way bigger boners for these than anything else in the '91 Fleer set, but it turns out that they were usually like thirty cents apiece, just like the All Pros. But hey, the Singletary looked like he was burning in hell, so there was at least a surrealism bonus there.


1991 Fleer fucked me, man, and it fucked me hard. I spent so much money on pack after pack of those things, trying to complete the set, and despite the coolness of the All Pros and Pro Visions, it was all a big, steaming pile of dog crap. And dog crap from a dog I didn't like, even. Nowadays, the full 432-card set runs you about eight bucks, at an average of about two cents a card. In 1991, that same eight bucks would get you four jumbo packs, totaling 212 cards. That's roughly four cents a card. So even with the price of a pack being insanely cheap compared to today, in the sixteen years that have passed, not only did these not skyrocket in value, but they're worth half the original retail price. Nice job, guys, seriously.

Review: 1991 Bowman

"You ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright." - Bruce Springsteen

The year was 1991. Operation: Desert Storm was the big news item of the year, the last thing even slightly resembling a good Metallica album was released, and The Undertaker began his Wrestlemania undefeated streak that still stands. Meanwhile, the football trading card industry was about to explode. After brands like Pro Set, Score, Fleer, and Action Packed proved that the hobby could support multiple brands, more and more wanted in on the action. And along with new entries like Upper Deck, Pacific, Pro Line, and Wild Card, the existing companies all decided that maybe they could put out more than one set themselves. (More on that at a later date, probably) So after resurrecting the Bowman brand for baseball in 1989, the Topps company decided to do the same for football in 1991. But what did the new Bowman brand of cards have to offer that the regular Topps set didn't? I dunno, but I do know one thing: Our Wal-Mart had apparently ordered a metric fuckload of these things, so within a few months, they got as low as 20 cents a pack, so we all bought the living crap out of them.

Design-wise, they were really nothing special. While all the newer entries into the business had seemed to leave Topps in the dust as far as physical quality went, these were even a step down from the regular Topps set. The design was boring, the photo printing was dull and grainy, the cards were the same old-school Topps thick card stock that was all lumpy on the front and could get rounded off at the corners with even slight abuse, and the card backs were done in a two-color process that left most of the card area in an unprinted raw cardboard gray. It's a shame, too, because with better print quality, the fronts really would have looked okay, in a simple, stripped-down sort of way.


As far as player selection goes, I guess they did as much as they could with what they had to work with. Like I mentioned in the '90 Fleer review, overproduction had sucked all the potential value out of any standard-issue set of the time anyway, and most of the hot rookies of 1990 and 1991 really didn't pan out whatsoever. And like just about everyone else, they neglected to make a card of an unheralded rookie out of Southern Miss named Brett Favor, or something like that, so there went the one guy that could have saved the day, as far as book value is concerned. Still, this was a HUGE set with a lot of draft picks included, and they put a few guys in there that weren't in other sets, and were one of the very few to make a 1991 card of Shannon Sharpe. It's like a fifty-cent card, but hey, it's something, right?


Also included were special gold-foil stamped cards at a rate of one per pack. This was kind of a big deal, as foil on cards wasn't a very common thing back in those days, and these served as a precursor to the foil cards that were really hot in the 1992 set and to a lesser extent in 1993. These inclided subsets for star rookies, playoff game highlights, and league leaders. Sadly, these were viewed as a subset with less value than the player's standard-issue card, so they didn't generate a whole lot of interest among collectors. They looked kind of nice, though.


Overall, I shouldn't like this set, but I still do. 1991 Was kind of the last gasp for cards coming as a base set and nothing else, and as one of those sets, Bowman did everything it needed to. Sure, there was no Favre rookie, but at the time no one cared, as we all chased after the $1.25 (and that was big money at the time) cards of Todd Marinovich and Dan McGwire. The sad part is that we may be looking back with the same "boy, how stupid were we?" hindsight when Matt Leinart and Jay Cutler's careers go on horrible death-spirals and Brodie Croyle ends up being the new Football Jesus someday. Hey, it could happen.