Wacky Packages were a series of stickers released by Topps Chewing Gum Company during the '70s and '80s. Each pack contained three or more stickers of hilarious parodies of consumer products, a puzzle piece, and a wafer of stale gum. At the height of the Wacky craze in the mid-'70s, the stickers were collected and traded feverishly by kids across the country, and found their way to be stuck on everything from school binders to bedroom doors (much to the chagrin of mothers everywhere).
I collected the stickers for what I perceived to be their humor and artistic value. Many of the original stickers were painted by Norm Saunders, a famous pulp illustrator who was working for Topps at the time, and was also responsible for the artwork on the famous Mars Attacks cards issued a decade before. His realistic painting style, of funny and frequently grotesque characters and situations, had a huge influence on my ten-year-old, aspiring-artist brain.
I was encouraged to invent my own titles, but it wasn't until some thirty years later, and computer graphic programs like PhotoShop, that I actually began to make my own.
What follows are my attempts to recreate the magic and novelty of that bygone era. Most of these were created in PhotoShop, with some parts rendered in a 3D program called 3DS Max. None of them exist as actual stickers, but just digital representations. They are not for sale, and are freely downloadable by anyone. I hope you enjoy them:
1. Lisp Cereal
4. Anvil
5. Palmawful
8. Dinky Moron