Guanlangaoshou / Slam Dunk playing cards
Basketball-themed manga animated playing cards from Japan.
Slam Dunk (Guàn lán gāoshǒu) was a manga (comic or graphic novel) aimed at teenage boys by Takehiko Inoue that was serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump, a magazine published by Shueisha from 1990 to 1996. The series, which depicts the personal growth of several high school basketball players, sold more than 120 million copies in Japan and inspired many boys and girls to get into basketball. An animated (anime) series (that ran from October 1993 to March 1996), several video games, and other media, including this pack of playing cards, based on the manga were also produced in this period. The cards depict colourful cartoons of basketball players, presumably from the anime series. See the box
References
Wikipedia: Weekly Shōnen Jump►
Wikipedia: Slam Dunk (manga)►
By Peter Burnett
Member since July 27, 2022
I graduated in Russian and East European Studies from Birmingham University in 1969. It was as an undergraduate in Moscow in 1968 that I stumbled upon my first 3 packs of “unusual” playing cards which fired my curiosity and thence my life-long interest. I began researching and collecting cards in the early 1970s, since when I’ve acquired over 3,330 packs of non-standard cards, mainly from North America, UK and Western Europe, and of course from Russia and the former communist countries.
Following my retirement from the Bodleian Library in Dec. 2007 I took up a new role as Head of Library Development at the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to support library development in low-income countries. This work necessitated regular training visits to many sub-Saharan African countries and also further afield, to Vietnam, Nepal and Bangladesh – all of which provided rich opportunities to further expand my playing card collection.
Since 2019 I’ve been working part-time in the Bodleian Library where I’ve been cataloguing the bequest of the late Donald Welsh, founder of the English Playing Card Society.
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