Spoiler Alert! If you’ve been “collecting” your free daily collector’s card from Daps Magic, you are about to see the final card in the series. Forty days, forty cards, starting with the opening of Disneyland in 1955 and ending with The Lion King Celebration in 1994.
That card was released on March 1, 1995. And at the time, everyone heaved an enormous sigh of relief that the promotion was finally over. All that was left were some last rounds of furious trading as guests attempted to finish off complete sets. But Disneyland still had a surprise in store.
On March 2, with no fanfare, card FORTY-ONE appeared! This unexpected arrival celebrated the imminent premiere of the Indiana Jones Adventure. This card was gold, with an embossed gold seal and a piece of art created for the attraction. There was something of a scramble as everyone who had been participating made their way back to the park (not again!) to secure the final(???) card in the series.
As mentioned in January, there was by this time a brisk market for the cards, with guests trading duplicates to fill in any early cards they may have missed. In the midst of all this, some dealers, knowledgeable about how card series worked, had noted an interesting detail.
Each card really was individually numbered. And the edition size was 90,000. Disneyland’s absolute maximum capacity was around 80,000 in 1995, a number that was achieved on only the busiest days in summer or the holidays. This meant the regular series cards had been produced in numbers far beyond what had been distributed. There was also the matter of the edition size of “surprise” card forty-one.
The Indiana Jones Adventure card had an edition size of 210,000! This was far beyond any possible single day distribution. Some dealers, suspecting what was going to happen to all those additional cards, sold their complete sets for as high a price as the early market would bear. For their part, Disney was uncommitted about all the extra cards, with some cast members claiming that any left over at the end of each day were destroyed. This, however, was not the case. How do we know?
Disneyland began selling complete sets. Sealed in a box, the sets were offered to anybody who was willing to make the purchase, regardless of whether they had made a daily pilgrimage over the course of the last 41 days. And there was more!
Disneyland also produced a themed binder in which guests could store their sets in protective plastic sleeves. These binders were offered for sale separately from the complete card sets. As some collectors had ascertained, the appearance of these items effectively ended the demand for complete sets. Later, the unsold sets would be offered at deep discount.
This did not, however, deter Disneyland from attempting to kick-start the whole frenzy all over again the next year. This time, however, the collector card would be sold rather than given away. The first in the series was presented in a souvenir envelope, mounted on a larger display card. In an addition size of just 50,000, card number 1 in the new series celebrated the Farewell Season of the Main Street Electrical Parade.
But this is a story for next year’s edition of Thirty Years Ago at Disneyland.
