2021 Card-vent Calendar: December 4

December 4, 2021:

1981 Perma-Graphics #125-029 Gorman Thomas

Mmmmm, this is a cool card.  A pensive Gorman Thomas really is the best version of the man.  He looks to be (appropriately enough for both 1981 and 2021) gazing longingly at a baseball field from behind a locked gate.  I'm imagining that he's humming the refrain from Hall & Oates's "One on One," but interpreting the lyrics from a literal perspective, not a romantic one.  For Gorman, "I want to play that game tonight" the baseball diamond is the milieu, not the bedroom.

Gorman aside, this card is outstanding for another reason.  The reinterpretation of the Brewers' name/logo is quite a thing to behold.  This particular font and stylization cannot be found anywhere else in Milwaukee Brewers canon, but part of the design does have a precedent in the local market.  When I was a kid, TV channel 6 was the CBS affiliate.  In the '90s there was a massive shift in the media landscape, with CBS moving to the UHF dial on channel 58, and newcomer FOX taking over channel 6.  Back in the three-network era, channel 6 had a logo that looked an awful lot like the "b" on this card.

I've never really known what the channel 6 logo was going for.  The positioning of the "TV" at the top of the 6 kind of sort of suggests a rabbit-ear antenna atop a television set, but even that's a stretch.  Looking at other cards in this credit card-sized set, all of the team names have been redesigned, which is kind of odd considering that Topps Chewing Gum shares a copyright with Perma-Graphics on this product.  It's an interesting item, to be sure.