The Set, One of the Largest: 1991-92 Skybox is one of the largest basketball sets ever produced, at 659 cards! Skybox made its premiere the previous year, and that ’90-91 set was already a large 490 cards. Why so many more cards? The number of subsets was overwhelming. On one hand, it was fun because it meant us young collectors always had a surprise. On the other hand, many of us ended up swimming in these cards and still not having a complete set! Subsets included Skybox Salutes, Sky Masters, Shooting Stars, Magic of Skybox, Small School Sensations, Game Frame, Teamwork and USA Basketball, just to name a few. And how frustrated were we when we realized that, after trying to complete 659 cards, we overlooked an unnumbered Barcelona ’92 card and a Clyde Drexler mail-in offer (sadly, the Drexler meant very complete sets were limited to only 10,000).
Design: For ’91-92, Skybox continued using the computer-generated backgrounds. This year, however, the backgrounds focused more on geometric shapes that were distinct and discrete than before. If you looked closely, there were strong connections between these shapes and the motion in the photo on the card. Although the computerized backgrounds and glowing basketball were kept, the gold border, black background, and rectangular box for the player name and team logo disappeared and the bulk of the card became plain white. The backs were still used in a similar manner with a more casual photo, but the statistics on the reverse were quite condensed.
Finding the Cards: The ’91-92 skybox cards could be found in both foil packs and blister packs. The blister packs were huge at 62 cards (two of these cards were from a special insert set just for the blister packs). There was even a period of time (December ’91-January ’92) when you could find four of these cards in boxes of Cheerios!
Individual Cards:
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