Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner is leading a group attempting to purchase Topps, the baseball card company, for $385.4 million.

That's a lot of bubble gum!

(Did I mention that Topps also makes Bazooka Bubble Gum?)

Eisner, who dragged Disney out of the doldrums it was in when he took over in 1984, is supposed to be a pretty sharp guy. Gotta wonder why he's interested in Topps. Who collects baseball cards these days?

Well, Topps is best known for cards and gum, but they also were behind the original and surprisingly visceral Mars Attacks cards (later a silly movie directed by Tim Burton, with an all-star cast), as well as Wacky Packages, which parodied familiar advertising icons (as Weakies, Scrapple, Jail-O, etc.). In fact they even made fun of their own Bazooka gum, which became Gadzooka. Originally introduced in 1967, Wacky Packages reappeared in 1973 (with 16 series issued through 1976) and again in 2004. The vivid packages were drawn and painted by pulp artist Norman Saunders, a pre-Pulitzer-prize winning Art Spiegelman, and others. Topps was also behind the infamous Garbage Pail Kids, an irreverent poke at the Cabbage Patch Kids collectible dolls.

It's possible, then, that in addition to Topp's relative lack of competition and low operating costs, it's also attractive as a repository of properties suitable for licensing and other exploitation. In this content-hungry world, maybe acquiring Topps isn't such a dopey idea.

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