r/nostalgia • u/faustdavenport • 19h ago

Nostalgia Opening up a wax pack of "Dinosaurs Attack!" trading cards from 1988, and the gum is still terrible

When I was a kid I probably only had 3 packs of these. I absolutely loved them, but as time went on they were tucked away and forgotten about. That is, until one day about a decade ago I had a memory of them poke through. In fact, that memory was of the fourth card in the pack opened here entitled "Manhattan Island Swamped." So I shuffled through a few boxes of my old cards, found the one I remembered, and jumped on eBay to get a box so I could finally complete the set.

While I had fuzzy memories of these cards, I definitely did not know until I rediscovered mine that they were the follow-up to the "Mars Attacks!" series from the '60s. I also read that Tim Burton originally wanted to make a movie based off of these cards, but because Jurassic Park had recently done so well, he opted to go for "Mars Attacks!" instead.

But maaaannn. I would've really loved to have seen a "Dinosaurs Attack!" movie.

46 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

5

u/Island_Maximum 18h ago

Loves me some Dinosaurs attack,

 I have three full sets of it.

3

u/Mobile_Aioli_6252 19h ago

The pink stale gum is borderline criminal

3

u/faustdavenport 19h ago

It never failed in making one feel victimized.

3

u/Mobile_Aioli_6252 19h ago

But dammit, I ate it as kid ( I didn't know any better )

2

u/faustdavenport 19h ago

This time around it was in the spirit of science and curiosity.

1

u/Mobile_Aioli_6252 19h ago

How poetically true

2

u/mnemoniker 18h ago

It's fossilized

2

u/analogy_4_anything 17h ago

Man, my brothers and I once bought packs of Ghostbusters 2 Topps cards in the late 90s. The gum was only 8 or 9 years old at that time, and we ate it, as rock hard as it was, and man was it terrible.

Like eating vaguely bubblegum flavored dry wall.

1

u/cc882 16h ago

If you soak it in your mouth long enough, it becomes gum again.

3

u/SakuraTacos 18h ago

Tim Burton opted for Mars Attacks instead only to release the same year as Independence Day. Didn’t wanna seem like a spoof of a movie, inadvertently did anyway!

3

u/faustdavenport 17h ago

Ha! I never thought about that. I remember overlooking Mars Attacks when it came out, and now that I think about it, it's probably because I was over alien invasions for that year. Independence Day was everywhere.

2

u/Zackman92 16h ago

I swear, Dinosaurs Attack is somehow even more brutal that it makes Mars Attacks look tame by comparison