The 20 Most Twisted Mars Attacks Cards

Half a century ago, Topps unleashed a decadent series of trading cards called Mars Attacks onto the nation’s impressionable young minds. The parental outcry was so strong that the cards were yanked from store shelves only months later. But the legend lived on, no doubt due to what ’60s kids remembered about the cards’ graphic depiction of a brutal attack on Earth courtesy of the big-brained, masochistic denizens of our solar system’s reddest planet. Mars Attacks came back in a big way in 1996 with the moderately okay-received movie of the same name by Tim Burton (we still think it’s a brilliantly depraved piece of cinema, for the record). And Topps itself has re-released the cards a few times, most recently in 2012, to celebrate 50 years of Martian mayhem. What follows are the cards that most likely set off outrage in the parents of the Baby Boomer generation, as well as a good helping of cards that were EVEN WORSE, so much so that Topps didn’t even release them until the reprint sets came out decades later. (Sadly, the unpublished series of cards that account for some of the most twisted entries on this list were included in the 1994 edition of Mars Attacks but not the 2012 edition. Damn you, Topps!)

Continue reading “The 20 Most Twisted Mars Attacks Cards ” >