TZ Spotlight: American Greetings Birthday Card (with sound!)

Exactly one year ago today, I spotlighted Hallmark's Twilight Zone greeting card. A few days ago, I stumbled across a new TZ card.... of sorts. This time it's an American Greetings offering, and I can't really say whether or not it's an officially-licensed card, but it does include the Marius Constant theme (yes, it has a sound feature), so they at least had to get permission to use that. It doesn't actually say "The Twilight Zone" anywhere on the card (well, except the copyright notice on the back for the Constant theme), but there's enough TZ here to plug it on my blog.

The lettering is done in gold foil, which looks pretty nice. Visually, the design seems intended to evoke the floating objects from the opening title sequence from seasons 4 and 5. It works well enough.

The middle is, to be blunt, kinda boring. The Hallmark card had a nice big season 3 spiral adorning the entire left half of the interior. I'm not really sure what we're seeing here. Clouds?

The back. Well, nothing interesting here, except the copyright notice for the Constant theme... and again, this is the only place on the card that "The Twilight Zone" name actually appears.

Here's a quick video clip so you can hear the recording. It's a Rod Serling impersonator over a cheap-sounding recording of the Constant theme. It gets the job done. It seems a bit silly to critique the sound quality of such a tiny sound chip, but it sounds pretty crappy. The Hallmark card sounded much clearer.

The fake Rod is a bit hard to understand (likely due to the low-quality sound chip), so here's the text:

"You are traveling into a place that's as wild as your imagination, a dimension where you, and people familiar to you, get down to the business of having some serious fun on your birthday. You've just crossed over into... The Party Zone."

Hmmmm.

American Greetings have produced what amounts to a pretty basic card. At $4.99, it's a fairly reasonable deal (pretty standard for a card with a sound chip), but I can't help but wish that a little more work had gone into it. However, anything that evokes The Twilight Zone, directly or indirectly, is pretty much a must-have for me, so naturally I bought it. Actually, I bought two: one for my collection, and one for my good friend Bill Huelbig, who celebrates his 56th birthday tomorrow. Happy birthday Bill!