Kaboom! (or bust)

 

One last item to show off from the NC trip.  We found a card shop in Kannapolis and decided to check it out.  If you've never been there, it has that small town feel where you can walk around and check out antiques, grab an ice cream cone and shop for cards.

Kannapolis is also the birth place of Dale Earnhardt.  You racing fans probably already knew that.  However I'm not big into racing so coming across this little park dedicated to him was a surprise.

The card shop we found was roomy and had plenty of sports collectibles.  As for vintage, I struck out here.  Everything was shiny and new, which was fine for my brother.  He found a box or two to open and then while checking out, we saw this at the counter.

Having never seen this before we were intrigued.  This is a count down calendar in the fashion of those little countdown Christmas (Advent) calendars.  Those things were kind of fun when I was a kid because it just built up that anticipation for Christmas day when us kids could tear into the presents.  And maybe that's what Panini was going for here.

Here's a look at the back of the cover.  It says "on average, non-base cards are included approximately 3 in every pack".  Yeah right.  If that is true, then each 3-card pack included in this should have been a "non-base" card.

The cover slides off to reveal one of the quarterbacks from the cover.

Here's the backside, nice and shiny.

This folds open into a pretty cool display.  There are 24 pockets, each with a 3-card pack of Absolute football cards.  Obviously the chase here is to get one of the ever popular Kaboom! cards.  Unfortunately for my brother things just didn't work out.

If you couldn't tell in the prior photo, the fold out is actually a pedestal.  Panini encourage collectors to fold this out and show off your top 3 cards.  So here they are.

Yep this was a total bust.  Penix could still turn out to be star, but until he proves it this was a waste.  

I selected Brock Purdy as one of the top three because Purdy was on the cover and there just wasn't any better stars or rookies to display.

This thing cost over $100 (but I have since seen them cheaper) and was a complete bust.  Disgusted, my brother bagged up the cards and display and gave it to me.  I have about 1/3 of the 200 card base set so I may as well complete it.  I'm really not sure what to do with the display.  Should I toss it?  Keep it?  Try to sell? (do people really collect these?)  Let me know in the comments.

And in case you want to see how this bust unfolded, we made a video of this for his Backseat Breaks YT channel (my daughter did the recording).  Enjoy!