The Marvel Hero Used to Score Super Bowl XXV Tickets
Also: What 25 Pizza Points Get You in TMNT Swag
Super Bowl Weekend has arrived. And we here* at Power Action! thought it would be a great time to look at one strange piece of history between the National Football League and Marvel Comics. That piece is named NFL SuperPro, and his short life began in 1991.
All Phil Grayfield wanted to be was a world-famous pro football player. But his career was halted by a knee injury. (He was saving a child's life, mind you. This lets you know he’s a good guy.) A bizarre accident involving an indestructible uniform, a massive fire caused by experimental chemicals, and NFL souvenirs (?) evolves Grayfield into the superhero NFL SuperPro.
Yes, that was the concept, and the first few issues were penned by none other than Fabian Nicieza, co-creator of Deadpool. He’s said in recent years that he took the gig to score some NFL tickets. In terms of Super Bowl XXV, that ploy didn’t work out for him, but it did for another comic book pro.
In a Facebook post two years ago, Bill Schanes, former VP at Diamond Comic Distributors, recounts how he gamed a Marvel contest intended for comic distributors to encourage sales. The prize was Bowl tickets—all expenses paid, along with many other event perks. "Without going into a lot of the drill down details,” he writes, “I was able to get the winning answer from someone inside of Marvel, and when it came time for Marvel to announce the winning distributor, I already knew we had won, which we did." Hat-tip to CBR for relating the chatter surrounding Schanes’ recollection here.
However, that’s not the most exploitative thing to happen regarding NFL SuperPro. That would happen after Fabian left the book. In NFL SuperPro #6, the Hopi Native American tribe and its spiritual Kachina beings were used as villain fodder. After the tribe publicly denounced the book and protested by shutting down its tourist operations, the book was recalled.
Shocking: They ceased telling the NFL SuperPro story after the 12th issue, and he hasn't been heard from since. A few years back, the Chicago Sports Review referred to the series as "perhaps the worst comic book ever created." But that wasn’t nearly the worst shoehorned comic branding I’ve seen.
Someone on eBay Is Selling 25 Ninja Turtle Pizza Points
Remember those? Toy packaging’s proofs of purchase could be saved and redeemed for TMNT swag, if you shipped them off to Schamburg, Ill., via a self-addressed stamped envelope. The seller says they were taken from toys released between 1988 and 1997; so, unfortunately, they're unusable today.
Fifteen bucks. I won’t be making that purchase, but I was curious: What would 25 points have gotten me three decades ago? Quite a lot, per this catalog I found (even with all of the sold-out items):
Extra fees aside, I would have grabbed a Cowa-bunga! T-shirt (8 points), a film poster (8 points), the comic collection (6 points), and the holiday garland (2 points). That leaves one to save for next time, even though it would have taken me 25 purchases to get here in the first place.
TMNT wasn’t the only franchise to have this kind of points system. Another big one was the Flag Points program from G.I. Joe. You can get those on eBay, too.
OK: I found a couple catalogs for that one, too.
One last nugget on that: The average price I’ve found for a TMNT figure in 1992 is $3.75. So it took almost $100 of 1992 money (or just under $200 today) to get those 25 Pizza Points.
EarthBound is SwitchBound
A (kind-of-but-not-really) big announcement from this week’s Nintendo Direct presentation: EarthBound and EarthBound Beginnings are headed to Nintendo Switch Online’s SNES and NES platforms, respectively. The biggest question for me isn’t whether they will eventually release that third game in the Mother series; it’s whether they’ll fix all of the glitches everyone knows and loves in the speedrun community for that SNES game. If you’re interested, CWillyHD does a beautiful job of diving into those here.
*: By “we here at Power Action” I mean “me here at Power Action”