The pair of "Happy Days" sets from the 70's featured only the Cunningham family, plus Fonzie and Richie's friend Potsie Weber.

That's right, no Ralph Malph!
(I know, I know, why'd they even bother?)

How about all 4 of those "Big Bang Theory" sets from Crypto. They were strange because the base cards only showed photos of the main cast, while the autograph checklists had a pretty good selection of the stars, recurring character cast members and one-off guest stars.

The base sets were very boring when all you had was photos of the same people talking to each other. Why didn't they include some pictures with the recurring characters or guest cast from each year? Probably because they didn't own the rights to reproduce those photos, while autograph contracts could be negotiated individually with the signers.

BBT was a good series for quite a while, fell off near the end, but it would have had another season if Parsons didn't want to quit. The cards ended with Season 6 - 7 product. The show played for 5 more years. That RA never picked this one up was a missed opportunity to me, but who knows, maybe they tried.

Alien (1979) from Topps have barely any images of the actually Alien in the set.

Must have been too ‘scary’ for the kiddos buying bubble gum cards back in the day!

quote:

Originally posted by X:
Alien (1979) from Topps have barely any images of the actually Alien in the set.

Must have been too ‘scary’ for the kiddos buying bubble gum cards back in the day!

To be fair, the Alien made very few full appearances in the film. One of the reasons it worked so well was that for the majority of the film your imagination was telling you what it looked like Maybe Topps simply decided to continue with this idea, although I expect it was to do with getting people to buy more packs so they could finally find a card with a photo of the creature on it