you're almost super, super 70's

as a child of the 1970's and a fan of baseball starting from the latter part of the 1977 season, i was excited to see the topps x super 70's set show up on my "garvey" ebay saved search in november. 

a new steve garvey card produced by topps is very welcome news, and when i saw the design of the card was to feature a mashup of the 1976 (border), 1977 (position pennant), 1978 (team name font), and 1979 (player name ribbon) sets, i was sold. i ultimately decided to pick up just the dodger team set (and an extra garvey for the pc) rather than the entire set for a couple of reasons which i will expand on later.

the only dodger to be featured in any of the insert sets is manager tommy lasorda

topps added some 1975 flair to the design for the 'memorable managers' inserts, which brings a more 70's feel to the card, even though the photo is from the 1990's. that was one of my reasons for not going after the full set - too many photographs don't properly reflect the 70's, which i understand to be the whole point of the super 70's twitter feed that inspired/curated the set with topps. as others have noted - starting nine, snorting bull, cards on cards and those that have commented on their posts - this is not as 70's of a set as the fantastic 2001 upper deck decade 1970's set (which i happily collected and completed 19 years ago).

i do appreciate new and era-correct photos on cards, like the garvey above and dusty baker's card

i don't recall seeing either of those images on cardboard before.

the backs offer more recollections of 1977 and 1979

with topps not learning the lesson that black text on dark green is not the easiest to read.

here's the rest of the non-autograph dodger team set (minus cody bellinger who i did not scan for some reason).

i commented on snorting bull's post that my understanding of the licensing agreement topps has with mlb dictates that no set can contain only retired players. i recall reading this maybe 10 years ago or so when upper deck lost its license and topps became exclusive, but i could certainly be mistaken. still, i believe this is true and is why there are current players in the set who were not around for any part of the 1970's.

as for the other retired players, don sutton belongs, although a photo of him with his perm would have been more 70's than the recycled image used here. sandy koufax and jackie robinson have no business being in the set, however, and this was the other reason i decided not to put the full set together. there are too many retired players who don't belong, even if they are the likes of ted williams, rickey henderson, mike piazza, etc. 

i think that burt hooton and reggie smith would have been great options to replace koufax and jackie in the base set. reggie could have even made an appearance in the 'happening hairdos' insert set (which tragically does not include oscar gamble). similarly, either bill buckner or davey lopes could have been included in the 'magnificent mustaches' insert set. steve yeager is the only bespectacled dodger that immediately came to mind (see my blog header above), but his glasses aren't remarkable enough to warrant inclusion in the 'spectacular spectacles' insert set, and the dodger uniform is just too classy to fit in the 'ultimate uniforms' insert set.

overall, i'm not too disappointed because there are some great cards in the set despite its shortcomings, and besides, we will always have the upper deck decades set for our 70's fix.  we also have this photo:

that is some true super 70's stuff!