Cult-Stuff

Official Statement Link

I want to be happy and say I told you so but I really cant do it, this really isn’t something I am pleased about. Over the last few weeks since we broke the story about Ray Harryhausen and Strictly Ink a great deal of what I will call “unpleasant things” have been said. Throughout all of this we stood by the story because it was true, and now considering the statement released by the official Harryhausen site, I guess perhaps some of the doubters should reconsider some of the things that they are willing to believe, or at least consider the source.

The best defence is the truth, and that’s what we reported. It resulted in threads being closed, people refusing our ads, lies being told and a lot of unhappy folks, BUT it has also hopefully helped to stop a great creator from being robbed of his rights for nothing more than some sketch cards. Ray Harryhausen has a Charity Foundation and they have not seen a penny of the money from these cards. Some of the industries top artists have been working on these yet on many of the cards no copyright information appears at all.

In this day in age that really should have raised some red flags for anything that’s not already public domain, but then again Strictly Ink have been in business for a long time so I cant blame people for giving them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t know what the fallout from this will be, but hopefully Ray will not get ripped off any more and some of the less than polite things being said will stop. We should have no place in the Hobby for this sort of thing.

Quick run down: As has been covered in many places Upper Deck and Konami have settled, lots of money to change hands documents sealed first payment made.. case over. Crap talking starts… and quickly out of the gate is Richard McWiliam, King of his own world and not so eloquent owner of Upper Deck came at us with this.

“Though we are delighted that Konami was finally forced to see the light regarding its claims, there is, of course, a bittersweet side to the ending of this dispute,” McWilliam said. “During the six years we spent building the Yu-Gi-Oh! brand we formed strong ties to the playing community, and, in the end, they are the ones that suffered most because of this lawsuit. Instead of focusing on the merits of the case, Konami focused its efforts on pursuing exaggerated claims and damages which it could not establish in the courtroom.”

I mean wow I need some syrup to help wash all that waffle down…

This is what attorney Richard Howell, of Rutan & Tucker, who represented Upper Deck during the trial said:

“At this point, Upper Deck doesn’t have a lot of Life Points. We’re talking about behavior that, from a defence attorney’s standpoint, I can’t defend and I am not going to defend,”  ”I’m here defending a counterfeiter. And now I have to deal with that issue.”

This is the guy that was on Upper Decks side.. so you know that says a lot..  Still Konami said:

The cover-up included a meeting in the office of Upper Deck’s chairman, in which he and at least one other Upper Deck employee compared samples of authentic Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG cards against fakes made by Upper Deck, and shredded the samples in the chairman’s office, as well as an e-mail from an employee of Upper Deck to other employees asking to provide her information on how to obtain Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG security foils ‘in secrecy.’

And as you all ready know you can read a lot more about that here

NOW they are going to be sued by Major League Baseball Properties INC. (that’s the MLB to you and me) The papers were filed in New York on the 31st of Jan. and reference the recent Yu-Gi-Oh case extensively. The short and sweet aspect is this: Upper Deck lost the rights to make MLB cards, if they wanted to keep making Baseball cards they would have to stop using the logos associated with the MLB so airbrushing them out among other potential solutions had been talked about, their are ways around the situation in theory, and Upper Deck stated that they would still be making Baseball cards, so people assumed that they had a plan in mind. Apparently the plan was to just ignore the fact that they lost the license and make them anyway. Intellectual Property is clearly not something that Upper Deck have any concept of. I will read the papers as they come in and as with last time I will post a synopsis. It just seems like Upper Deck cant stay out of court.

A second New Moon set has been announced by NECA, now with randomly inserted autographs, (no insert ratios or names at this time). We have been sitting on some NECA information for about a month now waiting for more corroboration (two independent sources gave us very similar information) and this new announcement adds enough to make us bring it to the public.

By many collectors Twilight autographs are considered rare, and tend to sell for a fair amount, on card autographs are very very rare, or so you might think, now it would seem this is not the case. The information we have been given which should be treated as a reliable rumor and not Gospel, is that NECA have had at LEAST 10,000 twilight autographs. Most of them are the same and they paid the actors next to nothing per card….  (Like $1.00 man…)

Now I can already hear the clamor to tell me that’s not true and they have nothing LIKE that number but hey lets do the math and see what you think then:

Only 5,000

Lets start with the Amazon Exclusive Twilight card set (reprint of inkworks set) with a binder AND one of 5000 Peter “my hand hurts” Facinelli autograph cards… then came the Amazon Exclusive Cullen Crest Prop Replica WITH another 3000 autograph cards this time from Ashley Green, and now a bone of contention that can be put to rest once and for all: The Topps European New Moon Photo Cards came with a redemption token. I have talked to Topps, in fact I talked to the head or redemption’s for Topps UK (that’s the nice lady who send stuff out to you) and Steve Conner the important sounding “Sales Manager for Topps Europe Ltd.” (Still looking forward to that response Steve, and I hope you had a nice holiday) And it has been confirmed that the redemption cards are in fact 1,000 more Ashley Green cards,

Amazons 3,000 + Topps 1,000...

identical to the other Amazon cards BUT now with the added inclusion of a Topps Authentic sticker.. That’s just the way it is folks from the horses mouth.. so get over it. now we are at a total of…. hang on.. hold the 1… and umm oh yes that’s right 9,000 autographs that we already know about produced for NECA, and yet not one inserted into a pack or a box yet… That 10,000 number is not sounding so far fetched now is it…

But wait now we ave the New Moon 2 set which is… wait for it… THE SAME SET as new moon 1 only this time with some slightly differing chase cards, (if your lucky) 12 additional cards AND some autographs (I bet it’s Ashley Green to the tune of 1,000 cards)

Thus proving that old adage that you can take a slightly unhappy looking emo girl to hot topic AND make her buy the same thing twice…

Shiny Ones AKA Target Demographic

In all seriousness we don’t know what autograph cards will be included in this “new” (That’s new meaning reprint) set, it could be a bunch of exciting folks about to be unleashed on this set and the public (don’t count on it) and that would be great for some fans I guess, but keep this in mind, NECA had at least 9,000 autographs in hand before the first New Moon boxes came out, (the pre orders on Amazon Exclusive items pre-date the release of the New Moon boxes) and decided not to put any in the packs, because they new the sets would sell without them, now that are going to put some in packs and sell you the same thing again. To me that’s harsh, and a level of cynicism that not even twilight fans deserve.  But they will sell very well no doubt.

NECA have obviously not commented. This is mostly because they don’t respond to emails, and have no email, phone number, address, or ANY other contact details on the official NECA site. You have to submit a web form and they will get back to you (or not as it happens). Oh and don’t expect a lot of Hobby Support for these cards they are almost 100% set to be chain store exclusives.  (I bet on Hot Topic and Target at this point….)

If we know of 9,000+ autographs from 2 actors (more in all probability) what would that make the secondary market value long term? I would guess close to zero… In which case if your buying for investment then don’t buy NECA. If you just really love Twilight, or your a completest nut, then this is the stuff for you.

Unless you have been very badly out of the loop you will already be aware that AMC and ITV produced new reinterpretation of the classic Prisoner mini series, it aired in the US at the end of last year and is due for release in the UK very soon. Factory Entertainment hold the license to produce the cards for this and for the classic series, and although the ratings were not as high as some may have liked (it still did respectable numbers) in the US, they remained committed to releasing the set. We can now reveal one of the big reasons why, they have a top notch autograph card driving this set. None other than Sir Ian McKellen.

Ian's Signed Card (A2)

McKellen is as as I have no doubt most folks are aware is a big name, a classically trained actor with miles of credits to his name he has been given the cardboard treatment in the past as Gandalf (Lord of the Rings)and Magneto (X-Men etc.) Now he will be appearing as Number 2. This is a great signing for Factory Entertainment and for the new series Prisoner set in general. His signing will no doubt bring in some collectors who thought about skipping this set.

This image should start to get a little more interest moving in a set that looks like it’s going to have some very very nice inserts. At this point we don’t know the ratio or number of signed cards completed, in fact the only thing we know for sure is that Carolyn Edwards has completed sketch cards, and Ian McKellen has signed. Watch this space for more updates! I wonder who A1 will be….

A great card that should never have been made...

Another day another corrupt Non Sports manufacturer. Some of you may know that over the last few months I have been gathering information about Barrie Roness and his company Strictly Ink, the reason it has not been published is simple, every time I look into something another problem pops up. Over time a lot of negative things have been said about Strictly Ink and I cant think of one that hasn’t been true. No doubt I am going to get a lot of flak for this much of which will come from some unnamed dealers who have been taking kick backs incentives from Barrie for a long time now.

I want to be very clear on this, I have met Barrie, and I used to deal with him and his company extensively, that all came to an end some time ago when questions about his ethics started to surface. So many questions have been raised about his dealings that I couldn’t possible detail them all in this one article. Because of that we  will publish more in the weeks to come, highlighting problems including BBC licensing, questions about numbered and unnumbered limited sets, his Hammer Licensing problems, the fact that we have autograph cards that are signed and dated 3 years AFTER the sets initial release, the holding back of top end inserts to sell on eBay…. with so many to chose from it can be hard to find a place to start.

Today however we are going to talk about the acts of  deception committed by Barrie Roness in relation to one product. Every word of this can be and has been backed up by lawyers, they in fact are the ones who after some considerable time provided me with much of this information.

Stunning but unlicensed

In 2006-7 Barrie approached Rays then agent to talk about cards, including sketch cards, and these were provisionally authorised, if and ONLY IF Strictly Ink obtained appropriate copyright permissions from the film studios. (The copyright to these films are held with Sony Pictures (Columbia) along with others including Universal and Warner Bros.). As many have found obtaining a license to produce anything can be a time consuming and costly endeavour, and often dealing with large company’s like film studios can be difficult but these are the things that a legitimate company must deal with to make products work.

Rather than do this Strictly Ink simply produced sketch card blanks and promos and started having them filled in. Sony noticed this and in November of 2007 issued them with a Cease and Desist which bars them from reproduction, advertising, marketing, publicity, distribution, or any other form or use of their proprietary material. Strictly Ink were also required to recall and destroy all such materials INCLUDING all trading cards.

Yearset 2009 Advert Click for full size

Soon after this the set was pulled from it prominent position on the site. The sketch cards however were sold, and included in his “yearbox” products, in direct violation of the order from Sony. Not only did he fail to destroy the cards but he went on to knowingly commission MORE to be included in the 2009 yearbox product. He states that these are “unreleased” which I am sorry is a fairly naive attempt at a slight of hand. These cards are advertised as a core component of his product and he had commissioned artists to draw work  especially for this product.

Newly Printed "Gold Edge" cards

He has also had new cards printed for his “gold edged cards” Note that the card design is totally different to the other sketch cards pictured.  He has attempted to say they are unreleased and yet he keeps releasing them onto the market. He has advertised them and commissioned more 2 years AFTER being told to stop. He is still commissioning new work to sell as “unreleased”. This is simple: The very fact that he is advertising, and selling these cards individually or as part of a larger package means that they are de facto “released”. Yet he has the audacity to have a tag line under his new logo which reads “Officially Licensed Trading Cads since 1999″

According to a partner at Turcan Connell the solicitors who represent Ray Harryhausen and the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation (a registered charity)

“There is no agreement in place by which Strictly Ink is authorised on behalf of Ray Harryhausen or the Foundation to produce any new sketch material”

Their is no justification for what he has done and is still doing, he is aware that he holds no rights to the subject matter nor is he paying anything to use them, but he is profiting from other peoples hard work. (I would like to point out that none of the artists involved would have known about this, they are freelance and would have had no reason to think anything was amiss).  That said if your thinking of buying any of these cards, my advice would be not to. I don’t care how great they look. I guess each person will make there own choice though.

These cards that Strictly Ink produced and continue to commission are unlicensed and unofficial. I understand that Turcan Connell would like Roness and Strictly Ink to cease and desist with any use of Ray Harryhausen’s name and he can expect that to be confirmed in writing shortly. These cards are exploiting one of the best and most well respected stop motion animators the world has ever seen, I wonder when the card industry fell so low as to exploit an elderly man just to make a little cash….

The information regarding the status of the licensing agreements and or the lack thereof has been provided to us by TURCAN CONNELL solicitors for Ray Harryhausen.

Dick

We have been swimming in legal documents for a few days now reading and disseminated as much as possible so we can bring you the facts, in an easy to follow format. So we bring you the Konami Vs. Upper Deck  crimeline. (you see what we did with the jok… you know what never mind)

To say this is a quagmire is an understatement, literally hundreds of pages of claims and counter claims, and an 84 page undisputed fact statement. We have taken information from many of these sources and put it together in a more user friendly way so that the general public can see what really happened and when. Everything published in this article has been taken from legal documents unless otherwise stated, and all of it has been found to be true and or undisputed by both parties.

Konami entered into an agreement with Upper Deck in 2002 which would allow Upper Deck to become the exclusive worldwide distributor for the popular Card Game Yu Gi Oh!. Upper Deck’s role was that of marketing and distribution along with game support and customer service, at no point were they manufacturing or legitimately printing Yu-Gi-Oh cards that would be sold. Konami had the cards printed and packed and maintained strict control over this aspect of the card game, and it’s production. Konami at all times owned and continue to own the Yu Gi Oh brand.

In August 2008 Konami became aware of counterfeit cards being sold in blister packs with real cards in Toys R Us shops in the Los Angeles area. Subsequently in October of the same year they filed suit against a company called Vintage who said that these cards were in fact from Upper Deck. 20 shipping boxes (thousands of cards) were recovered from Vintage. It is at this point that Konami contacted Upper Deck for information and also at this point that things started to take a turn for the worse. You see it was Upper Deck who had made these counterfeit cards. They didn’t admit that at the time but the subsequent chain of events would Upper Deck’s guilt to the forefront of card news.

In 2006 Upper Decks chairman Richard McWilliam (or DICK as many will now know him) asked the Brand Manger Stephanie Mascott to provide him with a list of the ten of the more sought after and valuable Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. She backhanded this request to a man named Leighton Kurashima because as she says in her deposition

“I don’t know the cards”

(not much of a brand manager Ed).  Kurashima on the other hand decided to plead the Fifth Amendment which prevents a party from giving testimony that would incriminate themselves. It should be noted that in a civil trial pleading the fifth amendment CAN be considered an admission of guilt and taken into account by the presiding judge.

On the 4th of June 2007 Kurashima sent Stephanie Mascott  an email called “Card Project” which contained a list of 9 rare cards which we will detail more about later. McWilliam (DICK) asked for Stephanie Mascott to have disk prepared for him which would contain the 9 card images and the back of the cards (the backs of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards are all the same so this was the reported “10 image disk” that has been talked about on other sites) The disk was created and given to Horst Riechers, the Vice President of Global Operations at Upper Deck, at McWilliam’s (DICK) request. . Horst plead the fifth when questioned.

(After reading a lot of this stuff Horst comes across as a bit of a bumbler definitely not someone I would want involved in MY multi million dollar counterfeit scam, DICK came to this conclusion to late)

Upper Deck employees Nancy Modaffari (graphic arts specialist and R&D) and Stacy Zuniga (lithographic Printer) then employed a company called Inner Workings Inc (run by Stephen and Genji Leclair), who set up the production and printing of the 9 cards in China, the cards were printed by “Goldhawk Package and Production Co.” In fact Nancy flew over to China to oversee the fake cards in production. It’s then that we get code names for the project.. Upper Deck went with  Wiz Kids and or Wizards in Training (WIT). Nancy provided additional details to Goldhawk regarding things like card finish stickers and varnish..  This is undisputed though Nancy (who we will see later is not very good at this stuff) did plead the fifth to several questions. She sent an email to Horst and Stacy Zuniga entitled “security foil HELP” which was asking for aid in obtaining the security holographic foil used in Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. She wanted this,  as she so subtly put it:

“to send to China for the secret project”

(Nancy is not the brightest bulb is she?)

On July 18th 2007 Upper Deck purchased silver Yu-Gi-Oh! foil from API Foils Inc. for it’s “WI Special Project” and asked that it be shipped directly to Goldhawk in China. The order forms were signed by Stacy Zuniga and Horst Riechers.

Nancy as we said before flew over to see that the printing was done correctly, she gave the OK on these cards and they were shipped to the US in 76 boxes.

(We can only assume that Nancy Modaffari is very very bad at her job, and that’s being nice about it, the cards she said were OK were in fact far from it as will be detailed shortly. How this woman got a job is a mystery much less what sort of mastermind allowed her into a criminal enterprise like this… I guess we are all very lucky that the folks who run Upper Deck are this incompetent. I mean the stickers were the wrong colour, (silver rather than gold) a frikin 9 year old could spot these cards as fake..  ed).

Once in the US most of the cards were sent to Vintage, they received the following:

60,000 Elemental Hero Flame Wing Man,
`
50,000 Destiny Hero Dreadmaster,

60,000 Elemental Hero Aqua Neos,

50,000 Water Dragon,

60,000 Elemental Hero Electrum,

50,000Elemental Hero Mudballman,

50,000 The Flute Of Summoning Kuriboh,

55,000 Mist Body, and

60,000 White Horned Dragon

Interestingly in the cases of Flame Wing Man and Aqua Neos more of the fake cards were produced than the original Konami cards

495,000 were provided to Vantage at “No Cost” The head of Vintage Cards Chris Lawrence stated the cards were from Upper Deck and came in boxes labeled “UD Card Test” and “made in China” They then received another 36,240 cards in May 2008.

In late 2007 Vintage repackaged the counterfeit cards with packs of older poor selling Yu-Gi-Oh products and sold them to Toys R Us, as well as other retailers. It’s at this point that Upper Deck become implicated and soon after Konami terminated Upper Deck as it’s authorized distributor of Yu-Gi-Oh and ordered them to stop all transactions.

Upper Deck instead issued a number of statements which held that they would be

“maintaining business as usual and fulfilling orders and shipping product”

They said they remained the authorized distributor, and attempted to blame Konami for all the problems. They put out statements that claimed Konami had breached there contractual obligations by failing to ship new products to them for distribution.

Upper deck were ordered by the courts to stop claiming (falsely) that they were authorised Yu-Gi-Oh! distributors, and to halt all sales of Yu-Gi-Oh! merchandise they may have had in stock while the matters were settled. Upper Deck did not do this they continued to sell the items and continued to state the Yu-Gi-Oh! was an Upper Deck brand, they also continued to advertise themselves as the official supplier of Yu-Gi-Oh using Konami owned logos and marks in over 100 locations on there website.

It gets worse:  Stephanie Mascott has given us an insight into the whole affair in her deposition regarding details of a meeting in Richard (DICK) McWilliams office.  They discussed the counterfeit cards saying that they:

“didn’t look authentic enough” [Due to discrepancy's in] “the security foil hologram” [and problems with] “the finish, the varnish,the UV coating”

Then:

“Richard proceed to yell profanity’s at Horst blaming him for how the cards looked. Horst said he would have to talk to Nancy”.

(Nancy as we established seems to have no idea what a YuGiOh card should look like)

“Richard then yelled at him for sending the cards through Chyanne (Chyanne is the Upper Deck facility in Nevada) Horst replied and said the cards were shipped from Goldhawk to the customer not through Chyanne.”.

[Note: They were shipped to Chyanne first] During the same meeting McWilliams made a phone call and said to the person on the other end (believed to be Vintage)

“Remember you don’t know where you got the cards from okay?”

He then shredded sample of the counterfeit cards in his office. (McWilliam admits to shredding both the genuine and counterfeit cards during this meeting in his deposition).. This meeting took place in April 2008, as we have shown above in May 2008 Vintage received an additional 36,240 cards.

Once Konami became aware of the situation with Vintage Rick Dean stated in his deposition that Richard McWilliam told him he should say that he does

“not know the source in a lot of instances [of].. the product we purchase on the secondary market”

(for those that missed the point it is this: McWilliam was telling Dean (the head of Vintage) to tell Konami that the cards came from the secondary market so they didn’t know they were fake and it was nothing to do with upper deck)

Dean was not keen on that idea and did nothing of the sort.

All the while Konami was trying to stop Upper Deck from harming the Yu-Gi-Oh brand, and Upper Deck were trying by any means possible to blame someone else for the problems they created. They issued statements (as detailed above) trying to blame Konami, they changed URL’s so that when customers clicked links for information on Yu-Gi-Oh they would be taken to games that actively competed for the same market share, they lied and they took orders for products they had been told they would not get.  Richard McWilliam made a calculated attempt to alter the secondary for personal gain while directly harming Konami’s reputation and profitability.

In January 2009 Upper Deck issued a press release stating that any suggestion that they were involved in counterfeiting was “absurd”

On December 1st 2009 Richard McWilliam gave a deposition in which he admitted producing more than 600,000 unauthorized (counterfeit) Yu-Gi-Oh Cards.

360 degrees in 12 months.

This may not shut Upper Deck down but at the very least it should slow them a little, it shows what sort of company they are, and perhaps open a few eyes to the sort of practices that go on in the card industry.  The damages are assessed on the 26th of Jan 2010 and you can be sure we will bring you the details as soon as we have them.  Richard McWilliam deserves all the scorn and mockery he may get.  Personally I hope he is out of a job soon. The near comical screw ups that took place all the way through this would make it almost laughable. Almost, but it’s not because it’s another black eye to an already hurting industry.

You can find all of our source material and more by following these links:

Note than several of them are PDF Files.

Link Link2

Link3 Link4

Link5 NSU Thread Link

The Saturdays Album Cover

Factory Entertainment and Bravado have teamed up to bring out a range of new merchandise baised around the chart topping girl band The Saturdays. The Saturdays formed in 2007 and have had some great UK chart hits peeking at number 2. The new two year deal will see a variety of merchandise released including stickers, tins, photocards and yes indeed trading cards, now the fans can have their favourite girl immortalised in cardboard. No word yet on set composition and content but its a safe bet for the retail market place (though a hobby product with autographs and sweaty costumes would no doubt sell well). CEO of Factory Entertainment Darren Epstein has said “We hope to have product on shelves in time for Spring and their forthcoming tour”. Along with these products he has stated there will be a lot of upcoming promotions and interestingly “prizes courtesy of the girls” which no doubt will be of interest a number of collectors and fans alike.

It looks like another solid license for Factory and should do well in the UK mas market if the price point is right. We will as ever keep you updated on all the info as we get it. In the meantime you can watch them on YouTube

Upper deck have been found Guilty on all counts of producing counterfeit Yu Gi Oh cards to sell on the secondary market, they have also LOST on all counts thier counter suit against Konami which included breach of contract and slander. So all those times that Konami said Upper Deck produced FAKE cards well they were telling the truth.  The California court ruled just days ago and the damages will be assessed and adjudicated on the 26th of Jan 2010, for now however it is safe to say that Upper Deck have behaved in a wholly unethical, and criminal manner and to the detriment of the collecting public. It could mean the end for Upper Deck depending on the level of damages. The question is would that be a bad thing for the hobby?

The implications are clear Upper Deck lied and cheated people out of money, they undermined the secondary market to benefit themselves and some specific other chosen companies. This sort of behaviour has a way of coming back and biting you. Perhaps this is the type of behaviour that has cost them so many of there lucrative sports licenses? I think we will all wait and see what the cost for this will be with some interest. I cant think of to many people who would be sorry to see Richard McWilliams leaving the card business however. Not when his company behaves in such detrimental and criminal ways.