Grease is the word

Casablanca, Maltese Falcon, Thin Man, Jurassic Park are movies that I will park my ass down to watch, even if they were on part way through. 

And there is one more....Grease. Yes, Grease and all its hokey, cheesy goodness. I saw it twice the summer of 1978 and probably once every year since. 

Of course I had to have the soundtrack. 

The summer of '78 pack buying took every bit of loose change I could muster. Chasing one of my favorite O-Pee-Chee baseball sets and these,

The cards I had then are long gone. But I have picked up a couple of lots over the past couple of years. It was finally time to sort and binder them and take a deeper look at this set. 

At night's end I had 61 of the 66 cards that make up the set. And 4 enroute. Number 18 was not to be had.

This set is notorious for the OPC rough cutting and centering issues as you can see from the sampling above. These flaws, and the low production run, have kept the POP report numbers very low. 

BGS has graded 5 Topps and 0 OPC.

SGC has graded 89 Topps Series 1 with three 9's, and 0 OPC.

PSA has graded 1290 Topps Series 1 with 141 10's, and 7 OPC with one 8.

These numbers surprised me. With an assumed print run of 10% the submission numbers should have been higher. Could it be that clean smooth copies are harder to find than would be expected. 

Each pack came with one of 11 stickers. The stickers have their own little twist. 

Courtesy of non-sports.com

Each sticker's copyright line has either one asterisk or two asterisks making a for a Master set of 22. 

But are these really O-Pee-Chee stickers...

TCDB, Beckett, and Todd Riley's non-sport.com list the 11 stickers as OPC inserts. Todd has a notation "The stickers are nearly identical to the US issue." However after examining images of dozens of stickers claiming to be Topps (Series1) or OPC I cannot see any differences. The fact that they have the asterisk variations, which is very common for Topps of this era, leads me to believe they are Topps stickers. 

OPC products have included Topps produced stickers in other sets, Charlie's Angels comes to mind and some sports sets. It made perfect sense as there is no text on them that would fall under the bilingual requirement passed into law in 1974. With a small print on this set sending a small shipment to London Ontario for Canadian distribution was a wise business move. 

At this writing I could not find any grading records for OPC stickers.

I do have some supposed OPC stickers enroute for close up physical examination and I'm missing a few, regardless of who printed them. I will update my findings.

Thanks for reading, and keep collecting!