Monday, January 13, 2014

1950 Bowman #84 Richie Ashburn image swiped by Ballpark Gum

Last week we featured Richie Ashburn's 1950 Bowman Card. Today we are taking a look at a bubble gum tin.

Ballpark Gum

Ballpark Gum is a novelty gum featuring ballgame related flavors Hot Dogs, Peanuts, and Beer.  That sounds a bit odd to me, if it's your thing check in at Perpetual Kid. I am not a gum guy and have never had Ballpark Gum and the taste of the stuff is not really why we are here today. 

I am concerned about the artwork. At first I thought it was lifted from 1959 Topps packaging.  
 
1959 Topps Wrapper (image swiped from Cardboard Connection)

It's close but I will let you decide that, as I examined the picture a bit more I realized why it looked familiar:



Ballpark Gum artwork (reversed) with 1950 Bowman #48 Richie Ashburn
 
I took the image on the tin and reversed it, Eureka! - The Ballpark Gum Tin artwork doesn't look very original at all. Look at the uniform number on the back the position of Ashburn's hands, The shadows on his face. The tin may be elongated a tad, but unless Ballpark Gum paid Bowman/Topps, I am thinking that image is plagiarized.


Sources 
Cardboard Connection
 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice detective work. I certainly hope that they actually worked with the Ashburn estate to get the right to use his image, but given the way the image was flipped and the way it was cropped, I'm willing to bet they were hoping to get away with just stealing the image in the hopes that no one would notice.

Jason T. Carter said...

Hot dog flavored? Um...just no.

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