These Should Exist: the Young Guns II Edition

A couple months ago my buddy Paxton and I shared a set of digital vintage-style trading cards we created for the woefully under-merchandised film Young Guns (here’s the half I shared, and here’s the half that Pax shared.). We’re both huge fans of the flicks, which if you give our Cult Film Club podcast double feature episodes a listen – part 1 & part 2,you can plainly hear. Of course, like most fans of the Young Guns movies (as well as Billy the Kid on film fans that dig these 80s interpretations), it’s hard to consider the one flick without the other. Though it’s considered a sequel, the continuing story of Billy the Kid and the Regulators of Lincoln County New Mexico in Young Guns II really is just the second half of a larger single story. So when we set out to make these cards for the 1988 film it was a given that we’d also have to create a Series 2 set.

Like before we’ve split up the set between our respective sites, so collect them all by heading over to the very aptly named Cavalcade of Awesome and check out the rest of the cards (and some really awesome variants!)

Again, we wanted to set the tone with some awesome wax wrappers, this time featuring three different variations. Billy’s hero wrapper, Pat Garrett’s “villain”, and newcomer Arkansas Dave Rudabaugh (played exquisitely by Christian Slater.) A keen eye will notice that we chose to go backwards in terms of the Topps logo (this was the logo they used in the late 70s/early 80s and by 1990 when this flick came out Topps had moved onto a more spindly art deco font. I’ve never been a fan of that late 80s early 90s logo personally (you can see it on this Who Framed Roger Rabbit wax wrapper.) So we thought it would be fun to throw back to the 70s, early 80s version of the logo…

Working on this project with Pax was the first time I’ve done a series two of a digital card set so we had to think about some minor aesthetic design elements that we wanted to work with. One of them was the idea of carrying over the numbering from the first set, picking up where that one left off. So instead of starting the number over at “1”, we chose “21”. This was common for Topps in the 80s with sets ranging from Garbage Pail Kids (which had consecutive numbering from sets 1-15) to the various Star Wars sets (that first movie had five separate series, each picking up the numbering where the last left off.)

We also felt it would connect the sets by keeping the card backs relatively the same, just shifting the coloring scheme to fit the sequel a bit better. In keeping with the natural realistic border motif, we made sure to work in the purple and black tribal blanket pattern that was used in the Young Guns II marketing. I like that both sets have a textural boarder (the first with the wood grain, and now the blanket.) I was really happy with how both sets came out and how they compliment and contrast each other…

All in all making these cards with Paxton was a hell of a lot of fun, and to beat this dead horse a bit more, I really am surprised that there was never any sort of marketing push for these films. Sure, westerns in the 80s weren’t as popular as they were in the 50s and 60s, but with the cast and the amped up action, these movies were ripe for cool products like this. Hell, Robocop and Robocop 2 had a combined card set, why not Young Guns?

Once again, if you dig these digital trading cards, please head on over to the Cavalcade of Awesome and complete your set! For those taking a close look at the numbering, you might see that there are some chase cards for these sets that we’ve be shared elsewhere as well!

As a special bonus to these sets Pax and I created a couple more fun “These Should Exist” style pieces for the two Young Guns films. Not only are we huge trading card fans, but both Pax and I have a great love of movie novelizations and these two films were also snubbed when it came to that particular marketing push as well. So we took it upon ourselves to create novelization covers that we thought looked accurate and vintage, as well as being something we’d love to see on our bookshelves…