Dallas Cowboys 1981 roster poster from McDonald’s

Way back in another era, McDonald’s used to give away epic promotional items when you visited their stores.

Case in point – this Dallas Cowboys full-size roster poster from 1981.

The front…

Dallas Cowboys 1981 Poster Front 300dpi FlickrFormat
..and the back.

Dallas Cowboys 1981 Poster Back 300dpi FlickrFormat
 

Tom Landry was still the coach, Danny White #11, Gary Hogeboom #14 and Glenn Carano #18 were the quarterbacks / alternates, and Tony Dorsett #33 was still on the team. Wikipedia has a summary of the season, and I do remember watching the final game against the 49ers with my dad in our living room on the old TV set they had. Funny how a simple thing like this can bring back memories so easily.

The back of the poster had “autographs” of the whole team around their iconic helmet.

I don’t remember the exact details of how I originally got the poster, but I do remember that as soon as I got home, it went up on my wall right above my bed and stayed there even after I went off to college.

The poster did surprisingly well rolled up in a cardboard tube sitting sideways in one of my Seward Trunks all these years, but it took awhile for it to flatten out so I could scan it. I got lucky the tape I used to hang it up back then came right off and left very little residue.

After guiding it very slowly through a poster scanner at max resolution, and a little straightening in Photoshop, here we are.

Flickr only allows 300mb uploads, so this is a highly down-scaled version of the original 900mb TIFF scan.

If you like this one, just wait until you see the Dallas Cowboys roster poster I have from 1979.