Carl Weathers custom cards, la partie trois

I didn't get any response to my posting of the other day looking for French Canadian help in translating the back copy for the third of my Carl Weathers football cards.

So I got out there on the internet and hit the English-French translation sites. The resulting back copy is therefore more French-French than Canadian-French, but it was the best I could do at the time, since I wanted to finish this card and move on to other projects.

But just to give you an idea of the vagaries of working with internet translation sites, here are the translations I got for the cartoon caption: Carl studies acting (I've omitted the diacritical marks on the vowels).

• Action d'etudes de Karl
• Carl etudie agir
• Carl etudie l'acte
• Carl etudes agissant
• Carl etudie cinema

This was my first attempt to replicate an O-Pee-Chee card. Weathers played for the British Columbia Lions in 1971-1973. I decided to work with a 1972 OPC style because he joined the Canadian team in mid-season 1971, and because OPC did not issue 1973 CFL cards.

I bought a '72 OPC Lions card on eBay and was surprised to find upon its arrival that (besides the card having been rather crudely trimmed) the stock used for the original 132-card set was much thinner than contemporary Topps cardboard. I've decided to embrace that, and when I print my cards I will print the front on a glossy postcard stock that I found at Staples. I'll print the backs as I usually do, on gummed label paper, and when I put the two together, I believe I'll have a pretty good replication.

In looking over '72 OPC Lions card on the internet, I saw the most of the photos have the same empty-stands stadium background.

The color photo of Carl Weathers that I had in a Lions uniform originated on an apparently postcard-size issue of B.C. Lions players of the week put put by Royal Bank. This the one of only two, so I've been told, "real" football cards issued of Weathers in his playing days. I've not seen the other, but was told it was similar in format, perhaps issued by a gas station.

I excised the image from the bank card and put it into the stadium scene to achieve the result you see here. The cartoon on back, the same one I used on my 1971 Topps-style custom, came from a 1970 O.J. Simspon card. 

I'm going to hold off actually printing my OPC cards for a couple of days, in case anybody writes to improve on my back translation. After that, I'll "go to press." I'll have a couple of extra cards available at $7.50 each, you can email me at scbcguy@yahoo.com for details.