Review of 'Original Topps Trading Card Series' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This book really triggers my personal sense of nostalgia. In an era before home video and the internet, these Topps trading cards were pretty much the only visual reference to the movie available outside of the theater. At 15 cents a pack, I could actually afford to buy at least one or two packs every time I went to the store with my parents, so I amassed quite a few of these cards as a kid (although I only completed one of the five sets).
The book goes out of its way to remind people like me of those cards. The dust jacket is the image used on the packs of the first series of cards, and uses the same wax-backed paper those cards came wrapped in. Under the jacket is an image of the stick of "gum" included in each pack: whole on the front, and shattered on the …
This book really triggers my personal sense of nostalgia. In an era before home video and the internet, these Topps trading cards were pretty much the only visual reference to the movie available outside of the theater. At 15 cents a pack, I could actually afford to buy at least one or two packs every time I went to the store with my parents, so I amassed quite a few of these cards as a kid (although I only completed one of the five sets).
The book goes out of its way to remind people like me of those cards. The dust jacket is the image used on the packs of the first series of cards, and uses the same wax-backed paper those cards came wrapped in. Under the jacket is an image of the stick of "gum" included in each pack: whole on the front, and shattered on the back, just like it was often found in the actual packs.
The interior includes the fronts and backs of every card in the series, although it doesn't indicate which back belongs to which front. Doing so isn't really necessary to enjoying the reprints, but would have been nice.
The commentary by Gary Gerani, who was one of the Topps employees involved in making the cards, is interesting. I was mildly surprised to find that the people making the cards had seen the movie before doing the cards, because the many minor errors made me assume they were working from a pre-production script. It turns out that the project simply happened so early in the history of Star Wars licensing that many things about the canon had either not been established yet, or were overlooked by the Star Wars Corporation set up by Lucas to administer licensing.
The images are accurate to my memories of the cards themselves, and some of the oddities in the images are explained in the commentary as production choices or errors. Gerani points out many of the errors while doubling down on one of them. An image from the first series is supposed to be an explosion caused by blaster fire in the detention center, but is actually an image of a turbolaser blowing up in the final Death Star attack scene. Somehow Gerani continues to misidentify the image close to forty years later, but it's the only error I noticed in the commentary, which was otherwise quite interesting.
I don't know if I'd recommend this to every Star Wars fan, but it's definitely a good choice for anyone who collected these cards as a kid.