Saturday Morning: A Pointless, Fake Custom “Collectible Card Game”

It wasn’t even called “Saturday Morning” in my head, not at first.

Somewhere along the line I got the silly idea of creating custom cards from a fake “Collectible Card Game”, only instead of featuring Pokemon or pro athletes it would feature cartoon characters I’ve enjoyed in my 50+ years of watching too much TV… and while it would look playable, the various elements would be nonsensical.

Here’s the first one I did, and at the time I figured it would be a one-and-done proposition.  Get it out of my system and move on.  BTW, If you don’t remember Magilla Gorilla, ask your parents… or their parents. :-/

Bits and pieces of the design and fake gameplay came from sports games like MLB Showdown and the various Topps Attax sets, as well as Pokemon and Magic The Gathering cards I found images of.  There are also ideas that came from Japanese menko – I’d originally intended to work a rock-paper-scissors icon into it, but I couldn’t pull it off to my satisfaction.

It might look like a game card, but the information in its various forms is largely randomly-generated.  It’s not completely clear from this one custom, but the bottom left corner contains a playing card value (7 of clubs, of course) and one side of a 6-sided die.

Something that probably factored into my doing more than one of these is that I’ve been creating new game cards for my vintage Statis Pro Baseball game, something to “keep me off of the streets” during lockdown.

Statis Pro Baseball came with basic instructions on how to create your own cards, plus there are additional ideas out on the web.  When I started these I had plenty of time, a bunch of coding skills that get unused in my current IT job, and a general need to have a semi-constructive way to keep myself busy during scattered moments of my day.

…So basically I had game cards on my mind, and the cartoon CCG idea didn’t go away.  I continued with the cartoons I watched as a kid, getting most of the images from screen-grabs of cartoons I found online.

I did get into more current cartoons…

…well, maybe “less vintage” is a better way of putting it since Dexter’s Laboratory goes back 20+ years.

I did everybody from “Scooby Doo” except for… um…  Scooby Doo…

A few bad guys also got created (note the smiley face is replaced by a frowny face… advanced gameplay at it’s finest!)

I also made an attempt to branch out from animated subjects while staying within the Saturday Morning theme, and I created this featuring a bad guy from “Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp”, a popular show of the early 1970s.  That show was created by dubbing dialogue over film of trained chimpanzees with props and costomes.  One downside of this is that chimpanzees, even trained ones, are in near-constant motion so getting a screen shot without blurring is a challenge.

By the way, if Baron von Butcher sounds a lot like Siegfried from “Get Smart”, that’s because they’re both played by Bernie Kopell… Yes, Doc from “The Love Boat”

I’d originally intended to include animated characters which weren’t from Saturday Morning TV shows, and because of the Saturday Morning groove I found myself in I started thinking of these as my “Saturday Morning” set before too long (the individual image files are all labeled as “2022 Cartoon CCG”).

I haven’t created a new one of these in a few months, but I’m sure “Series 2” will come along before too long… as well as my sharing more from “Series 1” if there’s any interest.

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