ABBA – Take A Chance On Me / I'm A Marionette

I have an S EPC 5950 version dated 1977 not 1978. Anyone know why it's different to those listed here?

This is a Norwegian release to be precise. The Scandinavian releases were not all the same.

Throughout the 70's Epic and other record companies were looking to cut costs and follow the lead of Polydor with injection moulded record labels.
Polydor during the 70's were cutting their production costs and yet asking more for the price of a single.
In the UK during the 70's, solid centre singles were selling between 45p and 55p whereas cheaper manufactured Polydor singles were selling between 60p and 85p.
CBS/Epic wanted a part of this. Cheaper to produce singles but a stronger selling price.

After the failure of the test pressing of "Take A Chance On Me," subsiquent test pressings were ordered in small quantities, no more that 25, and included "Chiquitita" which was of the same Injection Moulding printed format with text that wasn't centred and
in the same format as the previous "Take A Chance On Me" but this time the only difference being there was a square box around the Epic Logo though STILL in an unacceptable South Easterly position and not prominent at the top.

This test was also dumped by CBS/Epic.
Only 25 copies were pressed. Many did indeed end up in the waste.

There followed other tests into orange Epic Injection moulding with "Voulez Vous" and "Gimme Gimme Gimme." With these there was a better resemblance to the orange solid centre pressing though "without" the white line circles. These pressings best resembled the Orange Solid Centre prints.
The Epic Logo was at the top of the record label and in it's square box.
This time it was the Abba Logo (font and style) that was deemed unsuitable and unusable for general release.

It makes one wonder what the hell they were doing at Epic and who was coming up with these unacceptable pressings?

Epic never got a finished copy of an orange injection moulded single that was up to standard and out in the public domain through general release.
All their Orange Injection Moulded Abba test pressings were dumped.

By the time they felt they had succeeded in producing a standard suitable for general release, Epic had introduced a new Logo and a blue solid centre.
Their design team were wasted.
They just couldn't get it right and neither could the CBS pressing plant either.

They finally ittted defeat in not being able to emulate the already perfected injection mouldings as used by Polydor for many years.
They were also never able to perfect the Abba logo with backward B on their injection mouldings in font and style as Polydor had done for many years prior.

All future Epic blue injection prints looked cheap and nasty and many singles were reverted back to the solid centre type with typeset and printing in which Epic could have creative control input, thus finally (on "Under Attack" and "Thank You For The Music" Solid Centre pressings) were they able to finally perfect the Abba logo with the backward B

1. Take A Chance On Me / I'm A Marionette Epic S EPC 5950

Rejected test pressing using injection moulded centre. 1978

Epic used this single as an 'example template' as it had already been released, hit No. 1 and left the charts...

This was CBS/Epic's very first forray into injection moulded single centres, looking for a way to cut production costs.

Manufactured at the CBS pressing plant in Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire, UK.

Thier intitial concept was to copy Polydor's releases in ... 'but not too copied...'
Placing title at the top, artist at the bottom meant there was no prominent place for the square company logo itself.

1. Parent company CBS, were unhappy with the Epic Logo not having a box around it (they'd have to this logo as a new one), and that the white circles were missing as from their orange solid centre designs.

2. CBS were also unhappy in that they could NOT get the Epic logo at the top of the single itself as were normal with previous solid centre releases.
With the singles information being North and South, there was no preferred and prominent place, (north, south, east or west), for the Epic company Logo.
Having the Epic logo offset at a south easterly position on this test pressing was deemed to be totally unacceptable.

3. Epic liked to add as much information to their singles as possible, (eg: Taken from the album... etc).
This test copy of an Injection Moulded centre meant they could not do this to their satisfaction. They deemed the text as 'not prominent enough'.
Therefore free advertising for the album the song was taken from was out.

The whole concept of this test pressing was unacceptable to CBS.

This 'test' was therefore 'dumped' in favour of the regular Orange Paper solid centres.

A shame as they perfected the backward B Abba Logo to perfection on this test pressing and were never able to reproduce it correctly on any other future injection moulded releases in the early 80's.

Only 25 copies were pressed. Many ended up in the waste bin.

CBS/Epic were never able to perfect any of their injection mouldings to any satisfactory standard.

I know. I worked for CBS Marketing from 1974 to 1979