Not too long ago I was written about the Frankford Wonder Ball Disney 100 Collectible Coins. They were hollow chocolate balls with some candy inside and a mystery coin featuring a Disney Character. As finished up that collection I found out that there were other versions and I set out to try and acquire the Mickey and Friends Wonder Mates.
I put quite a few miles on my car driving around to numerous Wal-marts, Targets and Five Belows trying to find as many as I could. Eventually I was able to pick up 16 and that seemed to exhaust the inventory of my local stores. Unfortunately I came to find out that this product had been discontinued meaning stores were no longer getting any more. I visited amazing and eBay trying to pick up any other unopened boxes but was sticking out. This was going to be a bit tougher than I had anticipated.
First let’s review the difference in product names. The other version was called Wonder Ball as the chocolate was a hollow ball. These were called Wonder Mates because the chocolate was formed to create a hollow Mickey. I did try this chocolate and….it’s still terrible so let’s just focus on the coins.
After you open the box, there is a plastic tray that slides out with the foil wrapped chocolate secured on one side, and the coin on the other. The coin is wrapped in a small plastic bag and includes a copy of the collection checklist just as we found with the other set. This set includes 15 standard coins, and 3 rare coins (technically one is super rare) for a total of 18 coins to complete the set.
The coins are very similar to the Disney 100 set. They are solid metal and have some weight to them, however I’m not sure of the metallic mixture they use. The image on the coin is just a colored sticker. As an experiment I did try to remove one and it was on there pretty good so I don’t feel like these will easily peel off over time but you never know.
On the reverse side of each coin is the Disney Mickey and Friends copyright information, and the boarder of the coin has some cute Mickey heads. After opening all the boxes I was missing quite a few of the standard coins, and still hadn’t found any of the rare ones. With a bunch of duplicates I wanted to try and avoid eBay for now and figured my best option for now was to try and trade with some other collectors.
When I was working on the Disney 100 set I had traded with other collectors through the Disney Coin Pressers Facebook group, but it became so popular that the admins decided to create a separate group just for the Frankford Candy Medallions. That’s where I posted a photo of the coins I had to trade, and the list of what I needed. After a few back and forth messages I was able to acquire quite a few that I was missing, and also got rid of all of my duplicates which was a plus.
After a few weeks the traded coins started to arrive and I went through each one to make sure the trades were correct. My set was almost complete but I was still missing one coin, and of course it was the Super Rare coin featuring Steamboat Willie. It seemed that this was truly a super rare coin as there were quite a few people in the Facebook group also looking for that one. With no other option at the moment I headed to eBay. There were a few available with crazy asking prices almost reaching $100. I did find one listing that for some reason wasn’t as high. I submitted a lower offer and to my surprise the seller accepted.
That was it, I had successfully acquired the entire set of this retired collection. You can see the standard coins are all that gold color, and the rare coins across the top are different colors Blue, Pink and the super rare Steamboat Willie was Silver.
I mentioned earlier the included checklist that you got with each coin. This also had a similar offer to the Disney 100 set where you could submit a photo with 6 box bar codes and six coins as proof of purchase to get a collector’s coin book. This being a retired product I wasn’t sure if this would still be honored. Since I really didn’t have anything to lose I went ahead and submitted the request online.
The insert did state it could take 6-8 weeks to arrive and when I thought I was just out of luck, around week 10 it finally arrived in my mail.
The booklet is a twi-fold design made of rigid cardboard. There are cutouts for each coin with a faded image of each design in the designated location. The booklet also comes with a strip of little sticky dots that you apply to each coin and stick into the booklet holding them in place. I tried to not use those but the coins just fall out anytime you try to move it around.
They do look really nice all secured into the booklet. I did contemplate just keeping these in my standard 2×2 cardboard flips but I found I just preferred them in this booklet. It is very heavy when all the coins are loaded inside so be careful moving them around.
Once again I had a lot of fun running around trying to find the chocolate mickey’s and tearing into each box to see what coin I received. It was a nice accomplishment to eventually get the entire set, however it seems like I only just barely was able to finish it. Frankford does have a few other similar sets featuring Jurassic World and Super Mario that I’ve thought about trying and just haven’t yet. Since both this Mickey & Friends and Disney 100 sets are now retired maybe they will release a new Disney set and I might just wait for that.
Keep on Collecting!
David's Coin Travels 