Electric Football on the cover of the September 1995 issue of Toy Trader.
Our first Electric Football article was published in Collecting Toys magazine 20 years ago this fall. It was a pretty rudimentary piece — a book about Electric Football was yet to be part of the game plan. But it wasn’t long after “First and Goal” hit the newsstands that we began to consider a book on Electric Football. We had SO much to learn. As the process of piecing together Electric Football’s past got underway, we published an Electric Football article in the September 1995 issue of Toy Trader.
Electric Football in the September 1995 issue of Toy Trader.
The piece “Are You Ready For Some Football! Electric Football” focused on the Tudor No. 500 model. It contained a number of dates that eventually proved to be incorrect, but at the time, it was the best info we had. Just as archeologists find new bones and reset their timelines, we did the same thing while uncovering the many fragments of that make up Electric Football’s history.
Electric Football in Toy Shop, 1996.
It was rewarding to find the toy magazines of the time viewing Electric Football as a “fresh” topic — they were eager to get Electric Football pieces onto their editorial calendars. So it wasn’t long before our next article appeared in March of 1996. “Gotham’s Goal Line Stand” recounted Gotham Pressed Steel’s long Electric Football rivalry with Tudor. It was Toy Shop who published the article, which meant that all the major toy collecting magazines had now covered Electric Football. The Gotham article also appeared in Toy Shop’s sister publication, the Sports Collector’s Digest. SCD was a major voice in the collecting world in 1996. It was a very big deal to have them run a piece on Electric Football.
Electric Football in the November 1996 Beckett Football Monthly
But not as big a deal as the next Electric Football publisher. This time it was the Beckett Football Monthly. In November of 1996 they published our piece “Good Vibrations.” Future Hall of Famer John Elway was on the cover, and inside the magazine Electric Football was given an incredible full-color spread on pages 12 and 13. There were six pages in total, and even a large color Electric Football photo in the table of contents. Considering Beckett’s newsstand clout and enormous pool of subscription readers, it was Electric Football’s most “visible” moment to date.
Coming next week: Part II our Early Electric Football articles. It was a time when eBay began to change the toy collecting world and decimate all the toy publications.
Earl & Roddy