This is the famous 1st series that came out in Spring (most likely March) of 1973.
Although this series is known as "the 1st series", all 30 titles had already been released as die-cuts in 1967/8. The 1967/8 die-cut series was not greatly successful however, while the re-release in 1973 was phenomenally successful, so consequently most people think Wackys were born in 1973, however they were already 5 or 6 years old at the time. Perhaps the peel-and-stick format made the difference (die-cuts were punch-and-lick), or perhaps it was just more in the air come 1973. Whatever the reason, this is the series that put Wacky Packages on the map.
Mainly due to cease-and-desist warnings, fourteen of the original 1967/8 die-cuts did not make it to this series.
Art Spiegelman conceived the jokes and drew the roughs for this series, Norm Saunders (primarily) did the final paintings.
Packs came with
two stickers,
a checklist,
a piece of gum.
There are nine different checklist backs which come together to form a Gadzooka puzzle.
There is a typo on the checklist, "Jail-O Desert" should be "Jail-O Dessert".
The box was purple and held 48 packs. See the box:
Closed
Open and full
All sides
This series is notable among Topps regular series in how some of the stickers appeared only once on the sheet while others appeared as many as six times.
There were four "one-per-sheet" stickers which were notoriously hard to come by in 1973: Lavirus, Mutt's, Paul Maul, and Bandache.
See the number per sheet for every title.
Most people thought the existence of the four shortprints was an evil marketing a tactic of Topps to get kids to buy more packs, but in fact it was entirely unintentional, read this history of how the short-prints really came to be.
sticker copyright:
The Backs: Due to their immense popularity, Topps went into a printing frenzy, and soon they had run out of white back sticker stock. They proceeded to use anything else they could find, and as a result there are four different 1st series backs. All but the white backs were printed near the end of the run and so are rare.
White (common for the 1st series)
Tan (rare for the 1st series)
Black ludlow (with black camels) (very rare)
Red ludlow (with red camels) (extremely rare for the 1st series)
Some of the 1st series titles were re-released in other series and are difficult to distinguish from the originals, sometimes only the die-cut can distinguish them, for example with Lavirus and Tied. In some other instances there is no apparent way to tell the difference for example the tan back Gadzooka Wonder Bread premium is indistinguishable from the orignial, as far as anyone can tell.
