Italian Ferrero Premium Cards

Italian chocolatier Ferrero, best known in this country for those yummy balls of chocolate hazelnut goodness wrapped in gold foil, created a set of premium cards in the 1950s featuring LOTS of Disney characters.  Here we see three Alice characters:  Alice, the Mad Hatter, and the March Hare.

Given the numbers on the back, one can assume that there were at least 3 more Alice characters in the set, probably more.  I do know that number 38 is Flower from Bambi, so there probably aren't any more Alice characters earlier in the series, but the next number I know for sure is 48 (Bongo).

And, of course, there are variations.  Sigh.

Greek Chocolate Trading Cards

Knock me over with a feather, I recently acquired this partial set of trading cards from Greece.  Premiums from a chocolate company called Melo (or more properly Μὲλο) these remind me of Sugar Daddy trading cards, only larger.

These have been removed from an album, presumably an album of Disney cards as I doubt there would have been an album in the 1970s featuring 70+ cards of just Alice, but I could be wrong (geez, I'd hate to try and track down that full set).  I've seen Melo albums on other topics, and they are pretty cool, usually the cards fit flush to one another on the page to make a larger picture, it could be the case here as well, if you notice that the backgrounds could merge together to form a larger tableau.  Let's hope a full set in album surfaces one day.

There may have been a couple of different variations, as I have also seen this variant of the Dodo card

UPDATE: I love the Internet. Just two days after posting this I received an email from a reader who shared more images, and information. The set was Disney, many characters, and at least 150 cards. The different sizes came about when the company changed the size of the chocolate bars in the mid 1970s.

Alice #62

Tweedledee and Tweedledum #67

Mad Hatter #63

Queen of Hearts #66

So now we know the following list:

• 62 - Alice (probably the first card in the set)
• 63 - Mad Hatter
• 66 - Queen of Hearts
• 67 - Tweedles
• 68 - Dodo
• 69 - King of Hearts
• 71 - Carpenter

I would speculate at a minimum the following:

• 64 - March Hare
• 65 - White Rabbit
• 70 - Walrus