“I
think I drew roughs of maybe 90% of the Bathroom Buddies that were released. I
did the roughs–and John Pound, Tom Bunk, Xno and others did the paintings from
the roughs. The first 2 cards, Clean Dean and the Mummy one I had to draw pretty
detailed, to show to the owners of the company to get the series approved. John
Pound then painted them…and the owners okayed that. then I just did quick roughs
and John, Xno, Tom Bunk and the other artists figured out the drawings of the
rest. Mostly I just do roughs and others do the finished art.” —
Jay Lynch, per email correspondence, circa December 1999

Four
years after the parody attempt of the Trash Can Trolls, in 1996, Topps tried once
again to re-live the popular format of the Garbage Pail Kids with an original,
non-parody spin-off called the Bathroom Buddies with original content. A
44 card test set was followed by a longer 66 (the original 44 + 22 new images)
card set with twins were produced and mainly distributed outside of the U.S. to
Canada and Australia, but also released regionally within the New York area (similar
to the OS1 GPK test run). Several artists, including John Pound, Tom Bunk,
Jay Lynch, XnO (aka Chet Darmstaedter) and Den Beauvais were responsible
for these gross bathroom humor cards art directed by Ingar Westburg. The
trading cards come packaged with either 4 or 5 per plastic or foil pack,
depending on the print run. The final artwork for a Series 2 set was fully completed
by the same aforementioned commissioned artists by Topps but it was never released
at-that-time; several of these image can be found below with the Card History
section and images released within the Yearly sets. Per Jay Lynch, who submitted
most of the gag roughs for both sets, the card backs for the Series 2 were never
written, the project was cancelled by Topps before the backs were worked on.

—
The Artwork Scale on
the box of both print runs is different; The image on the 2nd print run box is
slightly decreased where you can see all of the artwork, whereas the image is
cropped at the bottom of the 1st print run box—cutting off the lower bathroom
characters found on the ‘Walls of Wizdom’ card backs.

—
The set has only one Puzzle;
found in both the test set and regular set releases.

—
Unlike most sets, card Numbers
can be found on the front side and reverse back of each card.

—
Besides ‘GREENDAY‘, artist
Tom Bunk inserted several Shout-Outs into his bathrom
humor artwork by writing on the walls for cards #3. The name ‘Ira’ can be seen
in red at the bottom of the wall for Ira Friedman at Topps, the name Anna can
be seen on the right-hand side which is Bunk’s daughter and the artist’s name
can be identified in two different locations, ‘TOM‘ written
in large letters off to the right and ‘BUNCH OF BUNK‘ found
in the lower left-hand corner. Bunk’s son’s name, ‘BEN‘,
can be found on the artwork Tom painted for card #24.

—
The regular set has two cards with the Same
Forename; cards 14B Desperate DAN and 31B DAN Lather.

—
The Checklists in both
sets are quite different; the test set checklist is horizantal with the toilet
bowl character and the card stating ‘Series 1’ and the regular release having
the typical Topps checklist that is vertical with no images.

—
The Wrappers for both
print runs are different; he first test set wrapper does not have the Topps
logo on it and the plastic packs contain 5 stickers, whereas the second release
wrapper has the Topps logo, Bathroom Buddies is written in metallic because
of the foil wrapper and the packs contain only 4 stickers now.

CLICK
TO VIEW TRADING CARD IMAGES

& ANNOTATED NOMENCLATURE
Decipherings,
Explanatory Notations & Definitions

CLICK
TO VIEW 2ND SERIES ARTWORK

CLICK
TO VIEW 2ND SERIES ARTWORK

NOTE: Topps
has released all fourteen images (twenty-eight cards) of Tom Bunk’s previously
unpublished Bathroom Buddies 2nd
Series material, all three images (six cards) of John Pound’s pieces, three
images (six cards) by Xno, plus two images (four cards) by Denis Beauvais within
Value boxes, exclusive to Target, as bonus cards within their Apple Pie (In Your
Face!), Prime Slime Trashy TV, ADAM-Geddon, Battle of the Bands, We Hate the 80’s,
Oh, the Horror-ible, and We Hate the 90’s setes from 2016 to early 2019. The toilet
paper roll nameplate has been replaced by a black and white Garbage Pail Kids
nameplate and the ™ (trademark) is missing from the header.

—
Topps artist John Pound
completed fourteen images for the 1st Series Bathroom Buddies set and three paintings
for the unpublished 2nd Series Bathroom Buddies set. In 2005, John Pound
provided images for all three original artwork paintings that he finished for
the Topps Company. The second piece contains Pound’s Woo-woo eyeball character
(not Eyewiz). ‘JP WAS HERE‘ can be seen under the paper
towel dispenser in the third piece pictured below, John Pound’s self- tagged initials.

—
The third main contributor to the Bathroom Buddies
sets, XnO (aka Chet
Darmstaedter), completed five paintings for the 1st Series set and it is
still yet unknown as to how many and exactly what he might have finished for the
unpublished 2nd Series set but several have started to appear for the 2018S1 and
2018S2 Yearly sets. XnO is most notable for his Dinosaurs Attack! artwork that
was released in 1988 by the Topps company where he completed a majority of the
work for the set. Darmstaedter is known for his ‘lowbrow art’ or pop surrealism.

—
The fourth and potentially last artist to contribute
to the Bathroom Buddies set(s) is Denis “DEN”
Beauvais who completed one painting for the 1st Series
set and it is unknown whether any paintings were completed for the unpublished
2nd Series set. Two pieces of artwork were located on his website for sale under
a ‘Misc.’ artwork tab that included the ‘Bathroom Buddies’ title for the image
to cards 6A Constipa-TED and 6B Dead FRED.

Beauvais is known for his monster artwork;
but it is unknown if the two additional artwork images below are directly tied
to the Bathroom Buddies sets as either 1st Series rejected pieces, 2nd Series
unpublished pieces, or not associated with the Bathroom Buddies property, but
they would both fit in nicely with the bathroom humor. The dracula image has been
printed within the 2018S2 Yearly set and the werewolf within the 2019S1 Yearly
set/. Thanks to collector Esteban de Jesús Valencia Castillo for bringing
this artist to my attention.

NOTE:
THE ‘AB’+ BLOOD TYPE (UNIVERSAL RECIPIENT) ON THE TUB HANDLE AND THE ‘DEN.’ SIGNATURE
ON BOTH PAINTINGS

—
Artist and writer Jay Lynch
completed the concept artwork for the set and wrote the ‘Walls of Wizdom’ (= words
of wisdom) reverse card backs. Several images were slightly changed by the artists
for the final artwork; below is the artwork for card images #1 and #17 and two
concepts that did not reach fruition for the 1st Series, although the gelatin
mold concept did make it to the 2nd Series. Per Jay Lynch, “Topps had me
compose a letter to the Boston Board of Education, suggesting that they use the
series as a teaching tool in classrooms; this was done to get the [cards] banned
in Boston as a publicity stunt for that release.”

—
The Topps company had artist John
Cebollero try his hand at painting a Bathroom Buddies image based off of
a Jay Lynch concept but it was never printed; Cebollero posted the image to social
media in October of 2017.

—
Bathroom Buddies Toilet
Bowl Candy & Gum Dispensers were released
in Canada in 1996 with gum filled toilet bowls and a tank holding a sticker with
bathroom humor on it, no images from the set were used on the stickers, only on
the display box. Bathroom Buddies toilet bowl candy dispensers were also released
in the United Kingdom, but the stickers within the tank portion of the toilet
bowl had images from the Bathroom Buddies set. The total number of stickers within
the set is unkown since the stickers are unnumbered. Pictures provided by collector
Robert Griffin.

PRODUCT #785 — UPC: 0-41116-10785-6

TOILET UPC: 0-41116-00785-9
NOTE: STICKER IMAGES FOR CARDS #16 AND #19