Animaniacs Trading Cards

I loved Animaniacs. Sure, I was 18 when the show debuted in 1993, but that didn’t stop me from tuning in every afternoon to catch the adventures of the Warner siblings, Yakko, Wakko, and Dot. The show was famously targeted at kids, but with a lot of jokes that only adults would understand, so I didn’t feel weird about enjoying it.

Recently, I was looking around on Facebook Marketplace, and came across a box of Animaniacs trading cards for sale. The listing was about a week old, so I kind of figured they’d be gone by now, but I reached out to the seller anyway. Much to my surprise, they were still available!

Naturally this came with the collector’s dilemma – Do I open them? Or leave them sealed?

For once in my life, I chose the more fun option and decided to open (almost) all of the packs! I did leave one sealed pack just to kind of preserve the entire experience.

Anyway, after my son and I opened all of these packs and got them arranged, it turns out we had two full sets of the 72 base cards. Were it not for a handful of outlier cards where we only got two copies of the card, it would have been three complete sets of the cards.

By the way, I’m not sure why, but these cards did not scan very well. I’m not sure if it was the type of ink or paper, but they all turned out pretty grainy. In-person, they look pretty sharp for the most part. I don’t know. Just one of those weird things…

There are four distinct styles of cards in the set. I’ll break down what we got in each style so you can see the differences.

First up, are the common cards depicting screen shots from the show:

Then there are special foil cards in every pack that depict the Warner siblings in the 1930s, before they were captured and imprisoned in the Warner Bros water tower. All of these foil cards feature a mostly grayscale image with a bit of red that really pops (although it has an unexpected, somewhat violent appearance when the Warners “paint the town red” in that second-to-last card). The foil is only in the upper-left corner, but it’s still a nice touch. Here’s a close-up of the foil so you can get a better view (it’s Yakko behind a bit of film strip):

There are also 12 foil stickers. I couldn’t really capture the shininess of these stickers on my scanner, but basically the background on all of these looks like aluminum foil:

And, finally there are the “vinyl cell” stickers. These feel like they have a little bit of texture to them and aren’t as flimsy as the foil stickers. These are a bit more rare, being found in one out of every 18 packs. So, for 36 packs in the box, us getting two out of the four in the set checks out.

Just to complete the whole set, I wound up buying the other two vinyl cell stickers on eBay for less than $5 each, including shipping…

Now that we have a complete set of the cards, I’ve safely stored them in a three-ring binder in card protector pages, but I’m not quite sure what to do with the rest of the cards. Part of me says throw them up on eBay and get what I can for them. But another part of me says to just hold on to them since they already have a dedicated card box and they don’t take up all that much room. They might be a fun thing for my kids or grandkids to dig through someday. Honestly, they aren’t worth all that much, so there’s a good chance I’ll just hold on to them for now. I know there are still some TV tie-in cards out there today, but they’re few and far between, and not typically something you’d find at the corner drug store anymore. So, it’s kind of cool to have some relics from a bygone era when these were still a thing.