Spooky Additions, Courtesy of the Database

I've been sitting on this trade for a while now, waiting to do a Halloween post.  Way back in the summer, or maybe even the spring, I completed a TCDB trade with user herkojerko.  This was my second trade with him, and in my dealings with him, I have found him not to be a jerko at all.  Sorry, that one was awful.

He hooked me up with some oddballs from a set that I have decided to collect, one that has fascinated me for almost 25 years.

These oddballs come from 1994--The Coca-Cola Monsters of the Gridiron.  I remembered these coming one per 12-pack of Coke products when I was a kid.  I thought they were kind of cool, and I actually collected quite a few of them back then.  I'm not entirely sure how; my mom is most decidedly a Pepsi gal and I don't recall ever having much Coke in the house.  Maybe it was Sprite we bought?  I don't know.

But the cards came out around Halloween-time for a couple of years.  Each team was represented by one player who was put into a costume and given a photo shoot.  The player names were sometimes based on actual player nicknames (like John "Jumbo" Elliott) or was a player name base pun (Shane Conlan "The Barbarian").  Some made sense with the player's skillset (Randall "Rocket Man" Cunningham), and some I have no idea (why is Sean Jones "Ghost"?).

Some more of these cards came my way in a trade with jlcre, another TCDB user.  As 1994 was the first year for the expansion Panthers and Jaguars, they got a simple cartoon to represent them.  You can see from this scan that some photos are better than others.  Steve Atwater and Eric Swann look pretty good, but what is that thing on Hardy Nickerson's card?

I only need a few more cards for the set.
Emmitt Smith
Pat Swilling
Marshall Faulk
Reynaldo Turnbull
Junior Seau
Tom Rathman
Checklist

I saw that Kerry from Cards on Cards had a couple of those in his goodwill pickup trade stash.  Kerry, if you're reading this, expect an email shortly about some of the football goodies you have for trade.  That would leave me with really just the big names remaining.

Happy Halloween, everyone!  I'll end my post with my Halloween-winning costume today:

A proud papa moment happened when my son asked, "Is that a baseball card?  I thought it was just something you were putting on your head, but then I saw it said 'Topps.'"  Raising 'em up right!