Trapper Keepers are something I’m confident we’re all pretty passionate about here in Nostalgia country. I’ve written about them before, and oddly enough, lately I’ve been getting a ton of traffic from people searching for “no trapper keepers”.

A quick search made me realize that something horrible is happening to our nation’s children. They’re being told that they can’t have Trapper Keepers at school! Apparently a lot of schools do not want kids using them for orginization. Check your local Wal-mart’s depressingly early back-to-school section and see for yourself. If they have your local elementary school’s supply list, it might say no Trapper Keepers.

Frankly, I don’t buy their reasoning. They say it’s because Trapper Keepers are poor oginizational tools and do not have enough space. With most elementary aged kids probably using laptops already, does that seem like a big deal? Do you want to know why I think they’re really not allowing them?

They’re too Awesome

I think the main reason they’re banned is because they are so awesome. This leads to kids constantly talking in class because they can’t help but compliment their friend’s Iguana-playing-volleyball Trapper Keeper. This sounds like a good, healthy, high-fiving environment for kids, but it has it’s downside.

With all the awesome geometric designs, animals playing extreme sports, and Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers around, kids (and teachers?) who don’t have one are probably tempted to steal them from those that do.

Anyway, thats me being stupid, but seriously schools, no Trapper Keepers? I’ll admit, the new ones are near as cool as the classics, but still. What next, no Pogs?

Find Trapper Keepers on eBay

Nothing says nostalgia like school supplies, especially awesome, totally unnecessary school supplies. Everyone remembers that time in late summer when Wal-Mart would start putting up the Back to School signs and you would just pretend like you didn’t see them. You could avoid them for a while, but come late August you had to take the trip. I remember walking the aisles with my Mom and gawking at all the awesome folders. You could get your favorite sports star, cartoon character, animal, or (insert trend of the month) on folders. My mom would only let me get one cool folder though, the rest had to be boring plain colored ones.

Oh well, I had a Trapper Keeper. Any folder would look like it was made of solid gold when it was nestled snugly inside a genuine Mead Trapper Keeper. That’s not an image of the actual TP I had (like many other things, it met its fate via a price tag at a garage sale) but I think it’s pretty close. I know I had a designer series clad with epic geometric shapes (Geomepic©?). The graphic designer in me really hopes that someday the state of design de-evolves back to about 1994, because frankly, I loved folders depicting animals playing extreme sports.

For some reason I had a Harley Davidson folder too, as well as one of those save-the-whales type paintings showing a bunch of animals looking all beautiful and perfect. As far as what the girls were repping, I think Lisa Frank says it all.

Somehow I remember this Trapper Keeper. Once again, 90’s graphic design at it’s finest. It’s really amazing that there’s such a lack of TP content on the web. If you Google them, you get a lot of references, but hardly any photos. There’s usually a good 5-7 TP’s on ebay at any given time, and they actually go pretty high. Nothing prepared me for what came up on the first page of results, however. Mead is releasing brand new old-school-style Trapper Keepers in the Fall of 2007?? Pinch me!

Seriously, if they were taking pre-orders, I would sign up. I’ll think of something to use a new Trapper Keeper for. I might even be a huge dork and start taking one to my college classes next year. Or! I start using one to hold my mailing list sign-up papers at my music gigs. Hmm, the possibilities are endless! There will be six new designs. Three retro designs and three more conservative (but still old-school) solid color designs. Personally, I think the solid color TP’s are the most old-school. Remember the simple red ones with the white line? Try finding one of those now. We can only hope that they also resurrect the designer series and let some cracked-out designers go wild.

It’s funny that the official site offers schools a chance to win $500 by sticking Trapper Keeper’s on their official school supply list. When you Google them, about half of the results are school’s websites listing supplies, and about all of them say NO TRAPPER KEEPERS. My guess is that too many kids were getting their heads bashed in by jealous people who didn’t own sweet Trapper Keepers.

I think collecting vintage TP’s would be very cool, but without an official list of what was made, I’d feel like I was just wondering around aimlessly. How many designs did they come out with? Was there officially licensed Trapper Keepers? I guess we’ll never know. Unless you work for Mead and would like to tell me.