1970 Kellogg's Baseball

By Patrick Mondout

Kellogg's released a cool new set of 3D baseball cards - based in part on a 1968 Topps test issue - in April of 1970. This would be the first of what eventually numbered 14 yearly sets (though the '73 set was not 3D) and was Kellogg's first baseball card set of any type since the Truman administration. These 3D cards are notorious for what I call the Kellogg's Curl - the curling of the cards top-to-bottom over time that leads to the plastic, transparent part of the card (the part that creates the 3D effect) to crack. 

Kellogg's cards (the Xograph Company of Irving, Texas produced the cards, though it was using technology from Visual Panographics of New York) have always remained popular, if not always valuable, among collectors. Through most of the Super70s, they were the only real competitors to Topps monopoly of the player card market, even if their sets were far smaller.

The 1970 cards were distributed in boxes of Corn Flakes, though in later years they would appear in other specially marked boxes of their cereals - usually the ones your dentist warned you about (Honeycomb was a personal favorite - they also gave away license plates during the off-season). But Kellogg's also sold these in the first year in hard to find 49¢ packs with 6 cards and 2 iron-on transfers of team logos (to get around the sticky problem of Topps exclusive deal with the player's association for distribution of cards by themselves, or with "confectionary product").

Still, with the number of different cards in the sets always topping 50, it would be just about impossible to collect the set without yearly stomach stapling surgery (though I would love to hear from you if you actually completed a set the hard way!). Kellogg's surprised collectors at the end of the 1970 season by dumping their remaining inventory on the few hobby dealers that existed. That dropped the value of the set considerably. It was expected that this would happen again in 1971, but it did not and that set remains the most valuable. Starting in 1973, the cards were mail-orderable at the beginning of each year.

So what's the magic behind these cool new cards that fascinated so many of us in our childhoods? It's really very simple. Take a cutout of a player and put a blurred (left to right) background behind him. Then add a transparent plastic layer with ridges over that photo. Voila! Instant 3D baseball card. Well, they were groovy back in the day.

Here's a checklist of 1970 Kellogg's 3D cards.

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