A Gotham shipping box from 1964 with 3-D hockey players.

Electric Football ephemera is something we have a special passion for. We love finding old shipping boxes, or dated invoice forms with Electric Football items checked and tallied. A special thrill came this year at Toy Fair when Tudor President Doug Strohm showed us a folder that contained 1967 Tudor price lists with Norman Sas’ handwriting on them. There’s just not much of that stuff left around anymore.

Which leads to the piece of ephemera we’re featuring on the blog today. It isn’t Electric Football related…but it’s close. It’s a Gotham Pressed Steel shipping box. If you ordered Electric Football spare parts from Gotham — their instructions and Rule Books always included a Price List — this is the type of box that you would have received.

Gotham’s 3-D hockey players, molded in the same red and white plastic as Gotham’s Electric Football players.

The postmark is from the Bronx on January 30, 1964. Inside were Gotham 3-D hockey players — our best guess is that they were replacement players for a Gotham hockey game that was received on Christmas in 1963. Since Gotham 3-D hockey players were only sold in 1963 and 1964, they are pretty rare. And it seems that they are pretty fragile. Only one of seven players here is intact. This adds another layer of “rare” to the players.

1964 Gotham Super Deluxe hockey game with 3-D players

But we still think the box is the rarest part of this find. Gotham’s football players, at least the 3-D versions, were almost unbreakable. And Gotham’s standard hockey players were made of metal. So how many replacement orders did Gotham ever actually receive…at least compared to all the orders Tudor received through the years for NFL teams?

Postmark on the back of the box.

For us, this box is something we never thought we’d see. It’s another “lost” piece from the puzzle we’ve spent two decades putting together. But does it have much value beyond the couple of bucks we paid for it? Probably not. As we all know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Earl & Roddy