When we look back at something that happened 25 years ago, we all interpret the timeline differently.
If you are a veteran collector who has been around for the roller coaster ride of the hobby from the 1980s to the present, 25 years does seem like a long time. If you are a newer collector, jumping into the hobby in the last decade or even sooner, it’s an ancient era.
To collectors, junk wax defines the 1990s the way that disco defines the 1970s. We lived through the era and enjoyed it, but the world could only take so much of it.
But when you look beyond the overproduction and proliferation that overshadowed some incredible products and the companies that made them, you find some forgotten stories that to novice collectors are hard to believe.
To illustrate our point, let’s consider the unimaginable event that happened in the winter of 1996-97. Marvel Entertainment filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware.
That, today, is hard enough to imagine. Where it gets interesting for collectors is that Marvel was the parent company of both Fleer/SkyBox International and Panini.
Marvel Entertainment Group explained at the time that the filing for Chapter 11 was voluntary. The move, it said, was to allow shareholder Ronald Perelman and Chase Manhattan Bank to inject a combined $525 million into the company.
AOL reported at the time that the move was necessitated by failure of holders of bonds issued by Marvel’s holding companies to reach agreement regarding any alternative plans to the company’s future.
Clearly, despite the success of Batman movies and animated programs throughout the decade, there were some people at the table that did not realize that maybe Spider-Man and maybe Iron Man and the Hulk and, well, the entire Avengers might make great movie characters.
Then-Marvel CEO and Chairman Scott Sassa outlined the situation in the AOL report.
“We would have preferred to recapitalize Marvel without having to seek the aid of the court, but the actions taken by the bondholders prevented that approach,” Sassa said. “The key to putting Marvel on track for a dynamic and profitable future is a quick resolution to this situation, and we want to get on with it.”
Sassa said that the company was taking steps that were “not typical in this situation.” They intended to pay all their bills and continue doing business as usual. They also owned Toy Biz, and Marvel was excited about the market for making toys featuring their characters.
Marvel officials emphasized that the bankruptcy protection was not a “Pro Set type of scare,” referring to the Dallas-based sports card manufacturer that had disappeared from the hobby landscape just a few years earlier.
Interestingly, Panini was not included in the bankruptcy. Marvel Entertainment had acquired the Italian company then known for its European soccer stickers and sticker albums in 1994, when the United States was hosting the FIFA World Cup.
Marvel And The Hobby
The relationship between the sports collecting hobby and the comic book world was a peculiar one in the 1980s and 1990s. Many sports card shows, large or small, had a comic book crossover. Many sports card shops had sections of their retail space devoted to comic books. Many comic book shops carried unopened wax box boxes of sports cards, had a display case or two with some vintage, insert and rookie cards, and card supplies.
The reason for the marriage was that the two lines of products had the same distribution pipelines. However, there was not a lot of crossover among collectors. Some sports collectors dabbled in collecting comics, but comic collectors were usually not sports collectors.
Marvel tried to cross that line and bring the two universes together.
In 1992, Marvel purchased Fleer, the Philadelphia-based purveyor of Double Bubble, which was America’s first successfully produced and marketed brand of bubble gum in 1928. Fleer also produced sports cards, beginning with a baseball card set in 1923. They entered the football card market in 1960, and as we all know, they produced basketball cards starting in 1986. The Fleer Michael Jordan rookie card from that year remains the hobby’s most coveted basketball card. Marvel spent $540 million for Fleer.
As Marvel tried to diverse and open up new divisions, an entry into the red hot sports card market was inevitable. However, the 1994 Major League Baseball strike and the loss of the World Series crippled sports card manufacturers. Baseball card sales plummeted, and the market never rebounded to where it was in the early 1990s.
The same year as the baseball strike happened, the NHL had a lockout that caused half a season to be lost. The NBA was also going through its various work stoppages. Sports card sales were down, but the high royalty fees established earlier in the decade prevented the manufacturers from being successful.
While manufacturers were still paying the leagues and players’ associations sky-high royalties that were negotiated when sports card sales were much higher than they were by the mid-1990s, the corporate shake up was beginning. In 1995, Fleer acquired SkyBox International for $150 million, meaning Marvel now owned a larger company called Fleer/SkyBox International. However, while card sales were low, the comic book market was also on a steep downturn.
Panini, meanwhile, was doing well with its sticker books. Marvel had acquired licenses for Panini to produce Disney sticker books. However, two factors were working against Panini. Although the soccer stickers and albums continued to do well in Europe, a combination of Disney’s characters being at a low point, and the failure of the American market to embrace sticker books, worked against Panini and Marvel.
Marvel had shut down the Fleer plant after acquiring SkyBox. In 1998, Double Bubble was sold to Concordia Confections, a Canadian company. Six years later, Tootsie Roll of Chicago bought the brand.
The Grass Is Not Always Greener
In 1998, Marvel put Fleer up for sale for the price of $30 million. Alex and Roger Grass, a father-son team, bought Fleer and based the company out of the Philadelphia area. Alex Grass was the founder of the Rite Aid drug store chain.
With Roger Grass running the company, Fleer had a six-year run that included the acquisition of a WWE license.
Upper Deck reportedly offered to buy the company for $25 million in 2004. The deal was turned down. A year later, the company ceased producing trading cards and filed an assignment for the benefit of creditors, which is similar to Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Upper Deck swooped in and bought the Fleer and SkyBox brands for $6.1 million.
The scenario that no one could imagine in 1997 is that within a decade, Panini turned into one of the strongest sports card companies in the industry. The company had acquired 
Donruss, which included the Playoff, Pinnacle and Action Packed families of brands. With several former Playoff and Pinnacle employees, as well as several former Beckett employees, Panini took over the NBA market and has remained strong through the 21st Century.
Today, the thought of Marvel going bankrupt is inconceivable. After all, Iron Man is an Avenger, and look at all the money Tony Stark has.
And if Marvel wants back in the card game, Stark Industries may be the only company on the planet that could outbid Fanatics for the sports card licenses it just acquired.
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