1972 Cardinals...Was Someone at Topps on LSD??
 

In the Lou Brock thread, his 1972 card came up and I remarked how it's always bugged me that his picture is on such a drastic and distracting angle. So I decided to look at a bunch of Cardinals cards from that same set and holy cow!! A whole bunch of them have pictures with this same tilt, every one of them listing to port! (It's most obvious if you simply look at the backgrounds.) And there are probably others, too. Since this was a decade of hippies, free love and wild drug use, I've come to the conclusion that someone in the Topps layout department was tripping pretty hard!

Attachment 122100

And here are these same cards corrected for reality. Granted, I didn't do a perfect job at realigning them, but you get the point.

Attachment 122101

I absolutely love the psychedelic design of the 72s. My favorite of the seventies. Dave.:) ps plus the "monster" size of the set and the multiple variations are cool too!

This might give you your answer...and for the record, the 72s are also my favorite set from the 70s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vUhSYLRw14




.

Wouldn't have been the layout people; the bad angles on Brock, Simmons and Maxvill were the photographer's fault. The layout artists just tried to fit the crooked photos into the very vertical frames of the design. Now, whether the design department should have selected a different image...

Not necessarily true at all. It could have been either's fault. We wouldn't know unless we had the original photographs to examine.

I am a Cardinals team set collector and I never noticed that! Interesting.

I never noticed that either...now it is making me sea sick looking at them! Great eye!

Cardboard junkie..yes, it is a MONSTER set and quite annoying to finish. Taking me forever, too many cards!

Being somewhat of an amateur photographer and studying both Photography and Art History in college, I can tell you that the 1970's are known as the "heyday" of conceptual photography. Just as with other aspects of society at that time, photographers were experimenting with breaking the "rules" of conventionalism. I think that movement influenced the Topps photographers of the early to mid 1970's. The '72 and '73 sets are filled with images that play with perspective and depth-of-field. I happen to really appreciate that era of Topps cards.

70s
 

Good post Jason

It was the acid!

Well, the only thing we know for certain is this: Each of these Cardinals players have been adjusted so that they appear on a vertical straight path. For my money, the photographs were snapped in the normal fashion (i.e. horizontally accurate), but the fine folks at Topps wanted the players to be 'straight' on the cards, so they tilted the photos to make them line up 'properly,' giving all of them stellar posture that their grandmothers would be proud of.

Sort of like watching the Batman TV show from the late 60's. :eek: