Information AboutO-pee-chee |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT O-PEE-CHEE | |
| ice hockey | |
| toy companies of canada | |
| food companies of canada | |
| baseball cards | |
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Like a number of candy companies in the U.S., O-Pee-Chee got into the business of selling Sports Card s with Bubblegum , producing cards of Ice Hockey players as early as 1933 . It continued making hockey cards into the early years of World War II and briefly tried a 40-card set of Baseball Card s in 1937 . After the war, O-Pee-Chee got back into the trading card industry by making arrangements with Topps , a leading U.S. maker of trading cards, for a license to print and distribute Topps products in Canada. This began in 1965 with baseball cards, with the O-Pee-Chee cards simply a rebranded version of the Topps design and marked "Printed in Canada" on the back. In 1968 , the license was extended to hockey, and O-Pee-Chee also began producing cards for Canadian Football , something Topps had been doing earlier. Similarly, O-Pee-Chee periodically distributed other Topps-originated products, usually Editorial Trading Card s such as Wacky Packages . Following the inception of the Montreal Expos franchise, in 1970 O-Pee-Chee began adding French-language text to the backs of its baseball cards. The practice of making bilingual cards had already been established for hockey. While O-Pee-Chee baseball sets were typically smaller than their Topps counterparts, its hockey sets for the Canadian market were larger. O-Pee-Chee also occasionally produced independent card sets of particular interest to Canadian collectors, such as one for the 1973 centennial of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police . The 1994 Baseball Strike and the accompanying damage to the baseball card industry hit O-Pee-Chee particularly hard. The company first announced that it would get out of the card business and refocus its efforts on candy. Then in 1996 , it was bought up by Nestlé . Topps obtained the rights to use the O-Pee-Chee company name and briefly kept it alive, shortened to OPC, as a subsidiary brand for sports cards. However, the departure of the Expos for Washington, D.C. and the 2004-05 NHL Lockout took away much of the motivation for a separate Canadian brand and caused Topps to give up its license to make hockey cards altogether. EXTERNAL LINKS
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