It’s an 80s set of 55 cards that most people who collect cars have never seen or touched, and most people who like books have never heard of it or played with it. Gothic fiction, French auto history, and the kind of gross-out art made by teens that defined a certain decade in American pop culture are all influenced by it. And for some reason, against all odds, it’s really brilliant.
Topps Chewing Gum makes the show, which is called Weird Wheels. This is the same company that makes baseball cards and, a few years later, the amazingly gross Garbage Pail Kids. When the time was right, Topps liked to stray into stranger creative territory, and Weird Wheels was one of those times. The series came out in 1980 and was a lot like the hot rod art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which is where Big Daddy Roth got his start. It was weird, energetic, and very skilled. It was teenybopper in the best way: it wasn’t afraid of being ugly or weird.
A lot of the cards were painted by Norm Saunders, who is best known for his work on the 1962 Mars Attacks series. That series became a cult classic and, much later, a Tim Burton movie that was just as weird as you’d expect. Around the time he worked on Weird Wheels, Saunders was well into his seventies and had emphysema. His son once asked him why he always worked so hard. It was said that Saunders’ answer was something like, “It’s fun, what else would he do?” Still, there’s something admirable about that. It was his choice, but the man in his 70s was painting hot rods.
Things really go in a strange direction on the first card in the Weird Wheels series. It is called “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and has a Citroën 2CV in it. This is a small, simple, air-cooled French city car that most Americans wouldn’t have known in 1980, and many still don’t today. That choice is reason enough to stop and think. When putting a small foreign car into hot rod art, the Volkswagen Beetle was almost always the first choice. Giving this treatment to the 2CV felt like a real act of creative stubbornness, and it still does.
The car on the card, which is called “Li’l Ding Dong” because Quasimodo is Notre Dame’s bell ringer, looks like a late-1950s or early-1960s 2CV because the front door opens from the back and the grille is an older style. The artist took out the car’s engine or blower and opened the rippled hood to see a small copy of Notre-Dame’s bell tower sticking out of it. If you thought the tower on this small card would have less detail, you’d be wrong. Someone did their work or looked at a picture for a moment.
The way the car is set up mechanically suggests that the engine was moved to the back to make room for all that Gothic architecture up front. The big dragster wheels in the back and the small pizza-cutter wheels in front are classic hot rod proportions applied to one of the least hot rod-shaped cars ever made. There are flame-belching exhausts that go forward and then loop back. It needs to look silly. Most of the time, it does. But it works in some way too.
This card sticks in your mind for more than just the ridiculous combination on it. It’s the promise. The people who worked on this series, including Saunders, weren’t mailing it in. They took a really strange premise—French horror themes from literature applied to a strange European economy car in the form of a children’s trading card—and did a great job with it. Things like that don’t just happen. It happens when someone cared somewhere along the creative chain.
The Hunchback of Notre Drag is still one of the most interesting and quiet works of automotive pop art from that time, even after all these years. It didn’t change anything. But because you can’t find anything else quite like it.
