BASF - Headwear, and a pig called Napoleon...

Same tape, different covers.  A symphony in green, right down to the box.  The left hand cover is slightly earlier, with the LH symbol left over from the previous design.  I'd imagine the C30/60/120s would have had different colours, can anyone verify this?

The replacement was rather less colourful...

By the late '70s things had gone rather black... the SM system finally made it to the bottom rung of the quality ladder (see Chromdioxid below)

A slight re-design around 1980.  I didn't know all the others before were Mono tapes...  there's also a handy figure on the front so you know the length of roadside hedge you can transform when you lob it out of the car window, as people seem to do quite often.

Ferro Super LH was previously known as LH Super - higher quality ferric tape that was very popular in it's day.

Into the late '70s with this one.  Only the Ferrochrome was more expensive, the Chromdioxid being good enough for most 1970s hifi gear.  Nice oval shaped centre window, you'll note.  The SM (Special Mechanism) was BASF's answer to tape jamming, and consisted of two little guide levers inside the cassette shell to ensure that the tape wound smoothly onto the reels. It was fitted to LH-Super quality and above tapes, cheapskates who bought bog-standard LHs (until the late '70s anyway) had to suffer.  Agfa-Gevaert used the system on their higher quality tapes as well.  Do you think I should get out more?

Not really a blank tape, it's a demo tape which came with a sadly lost BASF catalogue, but I thought I'd include it here anyway.  I sent off for it in 1979, using a free coupon from a 1975 HiFi Sound...   and it arrived!