California Total Recall Playing Cards
California Total Recall Playing Cards / Hasta La Vista, Davis!, USA, 2003.
In 2003 the craziest election in California’s history took place. California residents were dissatisfied with their sitting governor Grey Davis. The special vote to recall (i.e. unseat and replace) Davis occasioned the election of his replacement. Some 50 to 60 candidates ran for the position but were defeated by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a former body-builder turned Hollywood star. Schwarzenegger won the election, but the enterprising company JDK Products Inc. took the opportunity to parody the candidates by placing many of them on the face of this deck of playing cards. Each card shows a photograph of a candidate, with name, political affiliation or job, and a sentence explaining their candidacy. The 2 jokers are male figures – one with a donkey (Democrat) head, the second with an elephant (Republican) head. See the box►
Above: California Total Recall Playing Cards (Hasta La Vista, Davis), published by JDK Products Inc, USA, 2003.
This event was widely covered at the time by the national media and a CNN documentary is available►
By Peter Burnett
United Kingdom • Member since July 27, 2022
I graduated in Russian and East European Studies from Birmingham University in 1969. It was as an undergraduate in Moscow in 1968 that I stumbled upon my first 3 packs of “unusual” playing cards which fired my curiosity and thence my life-long interest. I began researching and collecting cards in the early 1970s, since when I’ve acquired over 3,330 packs of non-standard cards, mainly from North America, UK and Western Europe, and of course from Russia and the former communist countries.
Following my retirement from the Bodleian Library in Dec. 2007 I took up a new role as Head of Library Development at the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to support library development in low-income countries. This work necessitated regular training visits to many sub-Saharan African countries and also further afield, to Vietnam, Nepal and Bangladesh – all of which provided rich opportunities to further expand my playing card collection.
Since 2019 I’ve been working part-time in the Bodleian Library where I’ve been cataloguing the bequest of the late Donald Welsh, founder of the English Playing Card Society.
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