Awesome And Excessive, Rogue One Mission Briefing Trading Cards Split My Standards!

The Good: Good overview of the time period in the Star Wars universe, Some cool autograph signers, Cool Rogue One teases
The Bad: Ridiculous numbers of parallel cards, Insane rarities on a wide variety of cards, A weird card choices, Sticker autograph card style.
The Basics: Leading up to the cinematic release of Rogue One, Topps produced the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards which are interesting-enough, but absolutely impossible to collect.


Every now and then, I encounter a product that forces me to re-evaluate how I rate various products. Sometimes, there is a film where I find myself literally caught between a 2/10 and an 8/10, usually when something that is nauseatingly horrific, but I have to acknowledge that it is done well. With trading cards, I find myself occasionally trapped because "collectibility" is one of the standards by which I rate a trading card set. In recent times, many trading card sets have become prohibitive to even attempt to collect the set. Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards from Topps are one such set. Given that there are at least 184 unique - 1/1 cards - not counting the printing plates (!) the Rogue One Mission Briefing are impossible to collect. Literally, the moment any two collectors actually committed to trying to collect this set, it became absolutely impossible to make a true, complete master set of the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards.

That said, when I started opening packs, boxes and cases of Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards, I found there was actually quite a bit to like about the card set. Outside the weird volume of hard-to-assemble parallel sets, the content in the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading card set is actually pretty cool. The Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards blend key Star Wars prequel events with animated series moments with the highlights - usually concerned with the first and second Death Stars - of the original Star Wars Trilogy . . . with teases of Rogue One.

Basics/Set Composition

Topps has begun to be an active part of building hype for the new Star Wars movies by creating transitional trading card sets that connect the new works to the classic Star Wars films. Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards are one such set and it does its best to capitalize on the connections between classic Star Wars works and Rogue One.

The Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards are dominated by a retro cardboard cardstock for the bulk of the cards. Chase cards like the sticker cards, autograph cards, foil cards and printing plates have a different sheen and feel to their fronts, but most of the trading cards in the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards have a retro cardboard look and feel, which goes back to the original Topps Star Wars trading card releases from the late 1970s. While all of the common cards (and most of the chase) are formatted in one orientation (landscape), the text on the back of the cards is (unfortunately) oriented the same way as the text on the front. As a result, when one flips a page in the binder, they must rotate the binder around in order to read the backs. This is not very friendly to those who want to sit and read the cards.

The Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards could be compiled to make a single, true master set of 1583 trading cards. Most of the cards in the true master set would be chase parallel cards and the set is prohibitive to collect because of some of the odds of ever finding the rarest cards, which were truly unique 1/1 individually numbered parallel cards. Boxes of the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards contain only twenty-four packs of eight cards each. Topps, Inc. only guaranteed two “hits” per box. In my experience, that meant that each box had a patch card and then an autograph, sketch or printing plate card; there were three boxes in my case that had parallel cards that were part of the individually-numbered sets.

Common Cards

The Rogue One Mission Briefing common set is an interesting concept that loses a little bit of focus near its end. The 110 card set focuses in a general way on the elements that went into the creation and destruction of the Death Star. The first 68 of 110 cards transition from the Star Wars prequel films to events in A New Hope that focus on the Death Star. Cards 69 through 78 do a fast gloss-over of The Empire Strikes Back and the destruction of the second Death Star in Return Of The Jedi before going into character cards. The common set ends with ten cards focusing on events and characters from Rogue One.

The common card set is generally well-written, though some of the cards are weird stretches that seem designed entirely to sell the rest of the set. Chief among these are cards in the character portion of the common set like card 90 - John D. Branon (Red Four). Topps managed to track down the random actor who appeared for a few frames in A New Hope who played the Red Four X-Wing pilot. The actor is Jack Klaff, who actually was credited in A New Hope, which was his first film, who had perhaps thirty seconds of screentime (including where he was in the background). Card 90 fleshes out the briefly-seen character with a full backstory, arguably to build enthusiasm for an autograph card where one's first instinct upon seeing it would be to wonder "Who is this?!" The nine-card mural, with a final card showing what the mural is supposed to look like assembled, help infuse the Rogue One Mission Briefing common card set with actual material from Rogue One.

As for the images, the Rogue One Mission Briefing, most of the shots are from the films and the animated television shows, no promotional shots. Interestingly, astute fans of the Star Wars films will recognize the ten shots from the final cards in the common set all from the trailer from Rogue One. These are hardly ambitious images from Rogue One, but they are the shots that Topps had in advance of the film's release.

Chase Cards

The Rogue One Mission Briefing cards are loaded with bonus cards. The bonus cards range from various levels of parallel cards to basic chase cards like Death Star, Heroes, Villains, and Rogue One character cards, as well as higher level chase cards like patch, autograph, and printing plate cards. There are 1473 chase cards in the Rogue One Mission Briefing set, with only ten that are not found in the packs and boxes of the cards.

Most packs of Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards contain two parallel cards, though there are six different parallel sets. The six parallel sets replicate the common card set with different border colors. The common set has a retro look to it, with a red border around the big image of the card's subject. The parallel cards replace the red border with "Death Star Black," green, or blue borders. For the three rarer sets, the red border is replaced with a sickly blue-gray (the backs are individually numbered out of 100), gold - which actually looks orange and is individually numbered out of 50 - and orange, which are unique 1/1 parallel cards. There is nothing particularly special about these parallel cards, save their collectibility, though the black parallel cards actually look pretty awesome. It's funny that they are the most common of the parallel cards.

There are a number of fairly common bonus cards - whose sets take about three boxes to complete - in the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards. Found one in every eight packs are Rogue One foil cards, Heroes Of The Rebel Alliance, and Villains Of The Galactic Empire cards. A little more common are the Rogue One comic strip cards and Death Star cards; found two per box are Darth Vader Continuity cards and the sticker cards. Only the Death Star cards are in landscape format, like the common cards; the rest are all in portrait orientation. Rather wisely, the Heroes and Villains chase sets do not bother with real text on the back; fans already know who these characters are. The sticker cards feature mediocre artwork of characters in sepia tones on a blue background and decent artwork of the various ships from Rogue One. The Death Star cards are neat in that they include some weird, obscure shots of various interiors of the Death Star, while the character foils do a decent job of blending the promotional images of Rogue One characters with generic foil backgrounds. The only real issues I found with the basic chase cards are that some of the Darth Vader continuity cards and Darth Vader-themed character cards are virtually identical, with one having to look at the back of the card to determine which card they are looking at!

One per box of the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards is one of nine Rogue One Montage cards. The Montage cards are a truly nice replicated artwork card of the new characters from Rogue One. These include very cool artwork cards of Jyn Erso, Director Krennic and some of the distinctive Rebels from Rogue One.

Also one per box are manufactured patch cards, which make up a thirteen card set. The patches are cute and some feature really neat ideas, like the MP-5 of Krennic. Instead of the standard Imperial symbol (which is the subject of Krennic's MP-8 patch card), the patch in the MP-5 card features the Death Star with Darth Vader superimposed on it. It might look vaguely like a Dalek, but it is pretty cool. There are three different individually-numbered parallel patch cards and, mercifully, the most rare of these is x/10 (featuring a red stripe on the front). The patch cards are pretty neat, though the parallels of the patch cards do appear to be exceptionally rare (I did not pull a single one).

As is frequent in all modern movie-themed trading card sets, the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards include autograph cards. There are 74 autograph cards spread between the classic Star Wars Trilogy, the Star Wars Requel films, and the animated The Clone Wars television show and Star Wars Rebels. The autographs are the incredibly unpopular format of autograph “card” where the signer signed a pearlescent white sticker and Topps slapped that sticker on a trading card. The Mission Briefing set was sold on its inclusion of the Original Trilogy’s Big Three – Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill, in addition to significant supporting actors like Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker and Billy Dee Williams. There are a number of autographs that are poised to explode in value like Jason Isaacs (now that he has been cast in the new Star Trek television show), but the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards also have a bunch of filler autographs, like David Ankrum (Wedge Antilles's redubed vocal actor), Jack Klaff, Rusty Goffe (who played a Jawa), and Megan Udall - whose only IMDB credit is The Phantom Menace, whose role she arguably got as one of Anakin Skywalker's childhood friends was because she was being dragged around the Tunisia locations because her mother was the Unit nurse there!

There are four levels of autograph parallel cards that mimic the common parallel cards, though all are individually numbered. The borders on the autograph cards are bright green. The parallel cards feature the autographed stickers slapped on cards where the bright green borders are replaced with Death Star Black (and individually numbered out of 50 on the back), Blue (25), "Gold" (I swear, they look orange!, x/10) and orange (I can only imagine how these might be differentiated from the "gold" outside the number on the back - 1/1) borders. The death star black autograph cards all look amazing.

For insane collectors who want high-level chase cards, there are two dual autograph cards (each numbered our of 3), two triple autograph cards (also numbered out of 3) and one quad-autograph booklet, of which there are only two copies. Having only seen photos of the multiple autographs, they are far more rare than they are extraordinary. The quad autograph booklet is sold on its inclusion of Mark Hamill's signature alongside three other X-Wing pilots. Topps has found the formula of including killer signatures with unremarkable signers unsuccessful with some of their other products, like the Firefly: The Verse trading cards (reviewed here!) and Alien Anthology cards and one has to figure Star Wars trading card collectors have enough to chase without something quite this insane. I would argue that the best of these high-level multiple autographs is the Carrie Fisher and Caroline Blakiston (Mon Mothma from Return Of The Jedi) dual autograph card. It is the most sensible of the multi-autographs considering Topps could not release a Carrie Fisher/Ingvild Deila (Leia's body model in Rogue One, which was kept as a pretty well-guarded secret before the release of the film) for the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading card set.

The Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards include sketch cards from 33 different artists. In the case I cracked, I pulled only a single sketch card and Roy Cover's sketch was one of the nicest I've seen. Ingrid Hardy did some beautiful sketches for the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards, as did Chris Meeks. I was a little surprised by how little variation there were in some of Rob Teranishi's sketch cards, but most of the sketches for the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards were a decent chase card!

For the four people who want to chase everything but the 1/1 parallel common and autograph cards, there are 263 printing plate cards (four different colors - black, cyan, yellow and magenta) that were used to produce the cards in the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading card sets. The printing plates were used to make the common cards, sticker cards, character foil, comic strip, Darth Vader continuity, Heroes and Villains, Rogue One Montage cards and Death Star cards. The 74 autograph cards also have printing plates included in the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading card set and to the credit of Topps, they slapped an autographed sticker on each one, so one gets an autographed printing plate card, which is pretty cool.

Here is where the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards left me truly divided; were it not for the insane parallel numbers and the multi-autographs, the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards actually impressed me with the bonus cards. I liked the more common chase cards, especially for a set working to transition between the existing works and Rogue One with its limited available footage at the time the set was produced.

Non-Box/Pack Cards

Outside the boxes and packs, there was a set of ten promotional cards, which were originally made available at the New York City Comic Con. The set was, mercifully, made available to fans through Topps's website and is now available surprisingly commonly in the secondary market.

Overall

So. The Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards left me very divided in my opinion and I decided to make a split decision on the rating. When I consider the content of the set, I found myself liking the set a lot more than I expected - even with the weird biographies of pilots who were seen only for a few fractions of a second on-screen or some of the obscure signers. When I considered the collectibility of the set, I very much did not like the Rogue One Mission Briefing set. I found myself unable to reconcile myself to this set. So, I decided to give two ratings for the set, one for people who might like to collect, generally, one of each of the cards versus how the set would look to try to collect a master set (i.e. all of the parallels). For those who want a fun exploration of the elements that made Rogue One a viable standalone film, the Rogue One Mission Briefing trading cards are fun and cool. For those attempting to complete a trading card set, the Rogue One Mission Briefing are a dog to collect!

This set culls images exclusively from the Star Wars Saga, reviewed here, The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels and some early images and artwork from Rogue One (reviewed here)!

This is a set of trading cards I sell in my online store (new inventory being added daily!). Please visit and purchase from the current inventory of them at: Rogue One Mission Briefing Trading Card Inventory!

For other trading card collections based upon the films, please check out my reviews of:
2016 James Bond Classics
The Mortal Instruments Trading Cards
2014 Star Trek Movie cards

7/10 (Substance)
.5/10 (Factoring collectibility)

For other card reviews, please visit my Card Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2017 W.L .Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Absolute Mess: Star Wars Jedi Legacy Cards Sink!

The Good: Good concept/common set
The Bad: Insane numbers of parallel cards, Ridiculous rarities on incentive cards, Lackluster chase cards, Autograph card style.
The Basics: Topps, Inc. goes absolutely absurd on collectors with the Star Wars Jedi Legacy, a set that tries to convince one collector that parallels are the thing!


One of the consequences to being both a reviewer and a small business owner is one sometimes finds themselves in an awkward position of working at cross-purposes. I have a little small business selling collectibles – mostly trading and gaming cards – and for that side of my life, I rely entirely on my ability to sell the cards I get in. In that half of my life, I have relationships with some of the card manufacturers and, frankly, I’m not eager to mortgage those relationships by writing anything akin to “you have made a product that absolutely sucks.” But then there is this half (or more) of my life and I try very hard to maintain an impartiality and a set of high standards with my reviewing. Reviews, like this one, are only useful if there is some integrity to them and I can build a trust with readers as to my objectivity. Today, it is definitely the reviewer that is going to win out over any sense of salesmanship as I tackle the Star Wars Jedi Legacy trading cards.

Star Wars Jedi Legacy cards were produced by Topps, Inc. in 2012 and Star Wars is the company’s flagship entertainment product. Frankly, Topps is going to do whatever the hell they want and they don’t give a damn about this blog or the opinions of collectors. The latter assertion is easy enough to make: Topps has winnowed its collector base from thousands to hundreds to ten and now down to one (or two competing) collectors. Through the “magic” of parallel sets, there are only ten possible true, complete, master sets of Star Wars Jedi Legacy cards available. With the inclusion of Printing Plate cards for each of the common and main chase cards . . . there is only one possible complete, true, master set possible of these cards. There are over one hundred 1/1 unique cards (and, unlike sketch cards, they are not unique works of art where collectors might just collect one of each artist).

So, the first rail against the Star Wars Jedi Legacy cards is that they have no practical collectability. Topps has made the process of collecting cards an absolutely miserable one with the Star Wars Jedi Legacy cards because there can be no “die-hard” collectors of the set. No one can actually assemble a complete set, so one has to ask “Where is the fun in collecting these cards?!” [The businessperson in me says the exact same thing, by the way: “What possible pitch can I use to sell these cards when there is no way to complete a set – not even come close?!”]

The second huge strike against this set is the sheer volume of parallel cards. The common card set (which has silver foil lettering) is replicated by a blue set (almost one parallel card per pack), a magenta set (one card per six packs), a green set (one parallel card per box) and a gold set (one parallel card per case – only ten of each in existence) on top of the printers plate version of the card (only one of each card in existence). Why the hell does Topps think they’ve created such an incredible set of common cards that fans will truly want essentially the same thing four or five times over in increasingly expensive renditions?! Topps obsessively makes parallel sets and that is a distinctly unimaginative way to make a buck. The hyperbolic lengths of rarity in the Star Wars Jedi Legacy set for the parallel cards is ridiculous, not fun, and not truly collectible.

Basics/Set Composition

The concept behind the Jedi Legacy cards is interesting and a good one: the story of Anakin Skywalker is mirrored by the story of Luke Skywalker. Topps found forty-five plot points or aspects of the character arcs that were identical in the Prequel and Original Star Wars Trilogies and designed the set around pointing out those similarities. The set is fleshed out beyond the theme of the common card set with, apparently, whatever was laying around that Topps could get its hands on. While the three minor chase sets have ties to the concepts of the common set, the autographs, relic, and fur cards have no sense of thematic unity, so there is a scattershot sensibility to the set that makes it seem like a mess outside of its least-expensive elements.

Like almost all of Topps, Inc.' products, the cards come with a UV protective coating to protect the trading cards from fading over time and to give them a nice satin sheen. This does appear to work as I've not had any cards from Topps, Inc. fade. While all of the common cards (and most of the chase) are formatted in one orientation (landscape), the text on the back of the cards is (unfortunately) oriented the same way as the text on the front. As a result, when one flips a page in the binder, they must rotate the binder around in order to read the backs. This is not very friendly to those who want to sit and read the cards.

Usually, this is the point in the review where I try to define the number of cards in the set. Unfortunately, the Star Wars Jedi Legacy trading card set is such a craptastic mess that it is virtually impossible to nail down the exact number of cards in the set. According the checklist provided by Topps, there are 215 cards in the set. That checklist, though, is utterly useless to collectors or dealers as it includes none of the parallel cards, nor the promotional cards, and it fails to mention that several of the autograph cards are duplicated (i.e. there are at least two different autograph cards for Tim Rose in this set!). As near as I can determine, there are ten possible sets of 587 cards and one, true, master set that consists of 722 cards. Boxes contain only twenty-four packs of eight cards each. Topps, Inc. only guaranteed two “hits” per box. In my experience, that meant that each box had some form of film cel card and then an autograph, fur, Jabba’s sail barge or gold parallel card.

Common Cards

The Star Wars Jedi Legacy common set is the peak of the product. The 90 card set focuses on the character journeys of Anakin and Luke Skywalker. Inventively numbered from 1 to 45 with an A or L (Anakin or Luke) suffix on each card, the common card set almost demands one track down a different style of card page in order to truly appreciate how the cards (and stories) mirror one another. The common card set is well-written, surprisingly well-researched and well-executed. The photography encompasses the entire Sextet as well as a few comic book panels (to fill in implied parts of Luke’s storyline).

Topps did not use promotional images for the shots, but managed to make each card clear and there is some decent color variation in the set (the cards are not homogenously dark). The set is biased in favor of characters over space battles or equipment, but that makes sense given the concept of the set.

This is a neat concept for a set and Topps gets it right!

Chase Cards

Outside the insane number of parallel cards which simply replicate the common cards with minor variations in foil color (if you, for example, have a blue-green colorblindness, you’re pretty much screwed on figuring out the two parallel sets! – and the “Gold” parallel I pulled in my case was almost indistinguishable in normal light from the common version of the same card!), the Jedi Legacy cards are chock full of bonus cards. The bonus sets include: Connections, Influencers, The Circle Is Now Complete, Ewok Fur, Jabba’s Sail Barge, Chewbacca Fur, Autographs and three styles of film cell relic cards.

The first level of chase cards, found one in every other pack are the Connections and Influencers cards (if a pack has Connections, it tends not to have an Influencers card). The 15 card Connections and 18 card Influencers subsets point out more parallels between Anakin and Luke Skywalker by pointing out common places and characters that appeared in both stories or influenced each character. Like the common cards, these cards have minor foil accents for the lettering. There is nothing that makes them truly special, though they look good and are easy-enough to assemble as far as bonus sets go. That Topps made a 15 card bonus set seems odd; the standard card sheets hold nine cards, so usually they aim for multiples of 9 for the chase sets.

The next bonus set up is an utterly ludicrous The Circle Is Now Complete chase set. These cards, found one in every twelve packs, are designed to create a circle that plays Luke and Anakin/Darth Vader off one another. Neat concept, poor execution. The twelve cards in this set are pie-piece shaped and there is no practical way to assemble the set in one’s binder.

Among the high-level “hits” cards are Ewok Fur, Chewbacca Fur and Jabba’s Sail Barge fur/fabric cards. Apparently, Star Wars Jedi Legacy was the first time Topps had access to set-used materials and they really blew them out. There were eight Ewok Fur cards, which are essentially costume cards that are very thick and feature Ewok fur bursting out of them. The Ewok Fur cards range from the few recognizable Ewoks from Return Of The Jedi (Wicket, Logray, etc.) to the generic – four of the cards are simply “Ewok.” The Jabba’s Sail Barge cards are pretty standard costume cards, save that they all seem to have pieces of set-used sail material from Jabba’s Sail Barge. This is a somewhat baffling five-card subset in that the sail pieces seem to be virtually identical to one another and not at all indicative of any sort of interaction the characters upon the cards had with the actual Sail Barge. So, the Leia Organa and R2-D2 cards have the same type of material. Topps seemed to recognize that fans would not shell out big bucks for a card that pictured the Sail Barge and were far more common than five cards with the same material that had recognizable characters on them. That seems especially, well, duplicitous, to me. In other words, while Leia is pictured on a card, the fabric is not from any set-work material Carrie Fisher wore on the Sail Barge, it’s still a fabric swatch of the sail barge . . . just like the fabric swatch on the Nysad and Boba Fett cards from the same subset. The Chewbacca’s Fur cards are a shadowbox style extra-thick card that features more hair than fur in my personal experience. The sealed card has individual hairs and a picture of Chewbacca and that is cool, but the sheer expense of the hair is impressive (to be fair the four cards in this subset seem to have retained their value and the only high-end card I pulled in the case I opened was one and it was the only significant “hit” card I was able to sell!).

Then there are the autographs. The autographs are the incredibly unpopular format of autograph “card” where the signer signed a holographic sticker and Topps slapped that sticker on a trading card. While the checklist claims there are seventeen autograph cards, the hologram stickers that were signed were slapped on multiple cards. I easily found two different Tim Rose cards for the same set. My assumption in my numbering was that there were others that were duplicated and I just could not find them easily now (two years later). The Jedi Legacy set was sold on its inclusion of the Original Trilogy’s Big Three – Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill, in addition to significant supporting actors like James Earl Jones, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker and Billy Dee Williams. Now, the Kenneth Colley autograph has grown in value since his death, but the signers like Amy Allen (from the Prequel Trilogy), Garrick Hagon (from A New Hope’s deleted scenes and restored scenes in the Special Edition), Bonnie Piesse (young Beru from the Prequels), and Anthony Forrest (yea, a Sandtrooper!) make a “hit” seem like a real miss . . . especially when a case has an average of three autographs and they are only the filler ones!

The last level of chase cards are the three Film Cell cards – 30 single cell, 6 Double Cell, and 10 Triple cell (that being the number of film frames embedded in each card) – sets. While virtually every box had a single cell card, some had a second hit that was a double or triple cell card. These are much like the Star Trek: Animated Series trading cards (reviewed here!), which featured embedded clips of the film of each episode. These cards have film cells from the projector-used print of the three original Trilogy movies. That is, to be honest, pretty cool and these are neat cards that seem to be fairly attainable to collect.

Non-Box/Pack Cards

Outside the boxes, there were seven different promotional cards.

Overall

That leads us to a final analysis. The sycophants at Non-Sport Update (reviewed here!) will never write an editorial on how un-collector friendly The Industry has become (they absolutely depend upon the trading card manufacturers for promotional cards, advertising dollars and access to materials) and I’m sure their review of this set in issue #4 of Volume 24 was glowing and enthusiastic. Dealers are going to be desperate to try to recoup their losses on this set (I bought a single case four months ago and have sold, to date: 1 common card set, 1 Chewbacca fur card, 1 film cell card and 2 parallel – one green, one magenta – cards) because unless they are blowing out the cards well below book or pulled one of the two or three virtually impossible to find autographs, they have not made their investment back. Between the terrible autograph/sticker style, the sheer volume of parallel cards, the checklist that doesn’t actually tell collectors what all is in the set, and the bonus cards that cannot actually be put into card pages in any reasonable way, this set is a lemon.

This set culls images exclusively from the Star Wars Saga, reviewed here!

This is a set of trading cards I sell in my online store (new inventory being added daily!). Please visit and purchase from the current inventory of them at: Star Wars Jedi Legacy Trading Card Inventory!

For other trading card collections based upon the films, please check out my reviews of:
Batman Returns Stadium Club Premium Cards
The Hunger Games Collector’s Cards
Star Trek (2009 Movie) cards

1/10

For other card reviews, please visit my Card Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2015 W.L .Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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An Argument Against Topps Making Trading Cards Begins With Star Trek: The Motion Picture Cards!

The Good: A few interesting images of aliens.
The Bad: Card quality, Image orientation, Backs!, Order.
The Basics: An abysmal collection of cards from the lame Star Trek: The Motion Picture confounds collectors and composts on investors.


There is a long, fallow period in Star Trek collecting for virtually every collectible from the cancellation of the series up until 1991, Star Trek's 25th anniversary (reviewed here!). In that time, there were books, a few collector's plates and the sporadic action figure line. There were also trading card releases, usually focused on the films. The last major release from Topps cards before they stopped producing Star Trek cards was a series of cards released focusing on Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

As it turns out, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was very successful in its day, was not only a mediocre film, but an absolutely terrible trading card release!

Star Trek: The Motion Picture trading cards were originally released in boxes with thirty-six packs, packs containing ten cards, a sticker and a stick of bubble gum in each. The main series consists of 88 cards with 22 stickers. The stickers are essentially the chase cards of this release. Chase cards, for those not up on card collecting lingo, are bonus cards that appear in packs with an infrequency that makes them hard to find and therefore must be chased after. They are considered bonus cards and are numbered outside the numbering of the regular (common) cards in the set. The set is most commonly found these days in complete sets as opposed to unopened packs. Unopened packs are usually disproportionately more expensive than the sets.

The Star Trek: The Motion Picture trading cards were also made more complicated by the fact that there were at least three releases (differentiated only by card numbers and the checklists) which (simplified) were: the standard 88 card/22 sticker release, a 60 card release, and a 30 card release. The last two releases had cards edited out of the series, numbers changed and a new checklist cut. Otherwise they are identical. Therefore, the prime release is actually the best, giving the most value for the money one is likely to spend finding these.

This set of trading cards very well may have been assembled by orangutans. There is no sense of order to this set other than having a general flow following the plot of the film. Unfortunately, the cards are broken up with cast and ship shots that break up even the chronological order cards. The order problem is made more problematic by the sloppy way this set is assembled. Images are oriented both landscape and portrait style with no rhyme or reason to the direction of the image other than what fits. When assembled, this means one has to constantly turn the binder to read cards or see the image from the proper orientation. The only redeeming aspect of the orientation changes is that the backs that have writing on them are all in portrait style. Unfortunately, not all the backs have writing and as a result, the collector is liable to have to continue turning the binder at weird angles to see what the images are of!

This haphazard quality to the cards is continued with the general order of the set. The set is kind of cool in that it has some rare shots of aliens from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. These shots are more extensive than those that appeared in the film and if one has not seen the film, they might be led to believe that the Andorians and other races had a significant role in the film. These alien shots come randomly amid starship shots and plot cards. In other words, the order of the cards is irregular and poorly organized.

Similarly, the order of the stickers follows no rhyme or reason. The sticker of Scotty is #1, the sticker of Rand is #2, then the unshaven Spock . . . this follows no order pertaining to either the film, character names or actor names. The only really decent thing about this set of cards is the images. The image quality is good, given the limitations of the day when these were produced. Unfortunately, the decent and possibly unique images on some cards are mixed in with publicity shots.

Flipping over the cards reveals a new definition for the word "disorder!" The backs are a random mix of actor biographies, quotes from the celebrities, plot summaries (five cards), and puzzle piece murals. Mural cards were very popular in the 1970s and fans would collect cards and flip them over and make a giant image out of the images on the backs. That is a fine idea, except that in this particular set, there are at least three different murals, one made up of 16 and two made of 24 cards each (depending on the mural). This makes for a few problems, not the least of which is that the murals cannot be assembled while in the binder! Usually (these days at least) murals come in sets of nine because that is how many cards fit into a standard card page. Lacking that, there is no way to both protect the cards in card pages and have the murals revealed to a fan.

This is a moot point, though, because every indication points to the idea that these cards are not standardized, that the fronts and backs are completely random. Outside the checklist, none of the backs correlate with the image on the front of the card and I have found instances of two cards with the same number (numbers in this set are on the front, so front images and numbers of cards are the standards) that have different backs! This becomes comical in some instances, like the card #6 in my set, which features the new Klingon make-up and the pretty hideous Klingons on the bridge of their ship and the back of the card is a biography of Persis Khambatta, Lt. Ilia in the film and a former Miss India!

The writing on the backs of the cards is pretty bland as well. The cards that have text are not terribly informative or interesting.

The chase cards are stickers and there are twenty-two of them in the complete set. That may be the best organized part of the set as it starts with stickers of the cast, then goes into aliens (for some reason Decker is considered an alien in this set!), and it concludes with starships. The stickers are one per pack and the average box tended to have decent collation on them. The problems with them are that they tend to have machine tracks on them and the backs (which tell the collector how to use the sticker) are often stained from the bubblegum.

The bubblegum, by the way, is absolutely foul and should not be consumed if you happen to find packs of these cards!

A box of these trading cards, unopened, is often obtainable for $50 - $100. Complete sets of all 100 cards and stickers tend to run anywhere from $30 - $50 and one complete set is usually obtainable in a box. If one must buy this set, it's probably a better idea to find it preassembled as finding people to trade with to complete a set of these is a bear. This set predates promotional cards for Star Trek releases, so everything in the set was found in packs.

The cardstock is thick, crappy grade cardboard and there is no UV coating, so the cards get damaged and discolored fairly easily when not properly cared for. This set is often found in less than mint condition. Purists and absolute completists will want this set, but it has little appeal for general fans or most Star Trek fans. Unlike some of the other early sets, I have no sentimental attachment to this terrible card release so I am happy to advise interested hobby enthusiasts to avoid it.

Investors will find this set is a generally poor investment, especially with the advent of Ebay.

This set culls from source material found in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, reviewed here!

For other mixed series Star Trek trading card sets reviewed by me, please check out:
Star Trek 25th Anniversary Series 2
Star Trek Master Series
Star Trek 1994 Edition Master Series
Star Trek Cinema 2000
Star Trek (2009 movie) cards

.5/10

For other card reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2012, 2008, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Cheap Cardboard Trading Cards Mar The First Batman Returns Trading Card Set!

The Good: Some interesting images
The Bad: Damaged cards in packs, No real chase, Poor overall quality
The Basics: Batman Returns Movie Photo Cards are the lesser of the two trading card sets from Batman Returns, despite a chase set that presages the better set!


It is a rare thing that a single movie will inspire multiple trading card releases, especially nowadays. With films that have a single week - or two, if they are lucky - to dominate the box office, merchandising for any number of franchises has become a lot more scarce. Gone are the days when a movie like Star Wars (A New Hope) would dominate the screens across the country to such an extent that it would foster not only one or two but four whole trading card sets! Today, it would be unheard of. In the 1990s, it was a bit more common. And back in those days, there were movies like Batman Returns which were able to successfully pull two trading card releases.

The first trading card release from Batman Returns was a series called Batman Returns Movie Photo Cards and the set was produced by Topps. Topps would later produce a second set, a vastly superior "Super Premium Stadium Club" set and it is almost a shock that they bothered with the first set. Topps' Batman Returns Movie Photo Cards hail back to an earlier age of trading card collecting; the common set is cheap, the bonus set is easy to assemble and there were no real perks. No wonder the boxes of these cards are virtually worthless now.

Basics/Set Composition

The Batman Returns Movie Photo Card trading cards were originally released in boxes with thirty-six packs, packs containing nine cards - eight Movie Photo Cards and one bonus card within a plastic wrapper. The set consisted of ninety-eight trading cards and that was all. This set predates the obsession trading card collectors had with bonus cards and harkens to the times when it was fun to collect common card sets. Still, the boxes of these cards have plummeted in value and can be found collecting dust on stores that do not care about such things as space. As well, this set did make an effort at least to have bonus cards, even if they were unremarkable. The set is most commonly found these days in complete sets or unopened boxes as opposed to random unopened packs. Unopened packs are usually disproportionately more expensive than the sets.

Batman Returns Movie Photo cards are a standard trading card size and they look and feel like other trading cards. They utilize pretty primitive photo transfer technology and the thicker cardboard stock makes one think of the trading cards of the 70s and 80s. In the 1990s, right around the time the Batman Returns Movie Photo Cards were being released, trading card companies were pioneering better cardboard and UV-resistant coatings, none of which were employed by the common cards in this set, though ironically, they were used by the bonus cards.

Common Cards

The Batman Returns Movie Photo trading cards were a ridiculously simple set. There were ninety-eight trading cards in the set, broken down into an eighty-eight card common set and a single ten card bonus set. The common set is made of thicker, more obvious cardboard stock and in addition to the crappy card stock, they were all oriented different ways. Some of the cards are portrait oriented, some are landscape oriented and when one puts the set in a binder, that sort of irregularity is just annoying. At least the backs of all of the cards are portrait oriented. What unifies the set is a baffling and ugly orange border which bears no resemblance to anything in the film.

This set of trading cards is one of the better assembled sets. While the front of each card starts with some nice character portraits, the backs talk about the film, the characters and then finally the plot. This is the set for those who want an in-depth, minute-by-minute accounting of Batman Returns. The set is written with a precision that clearly details all of the characters and every action in the movie on the backs of the cards.

The pictures on the front are hampered by the ugly border which takes up about a quarter inch on each side. The fronts feature images that are pretty much the most common ones from the film, including every press release shot. The color contrasts are fair and given that this film was very dark, a lot of the images lose detail on these trading cards because the blacks do not contrast well on this cardboard. The backs, in addition to all having the same orientation, feature a shadowy image of the Gotham City skyline and the writing in black over a red portion. The cards are easy to read and are generally well-written.

It is worth noting that this set of cards suffered from a pretty serious manufacturing defect. Usually, one card per pack (at least in the boxes I opened) was damaged. The damage takes the form of scraping on the front where the colored, printed portion is more or less torn from the back. This defect is in the same position on every card, suggesting that it was a machining defect. To lose one card per pack from this is troubling and lowers the overall value of a box. Moreover, because the collation is so regular, it often robs the collector of a complete set. It was not uncommon for me to open a box and be unable to assemble a master set.

Chase Cards

There were only ten bonus cards in this set and in a single box, it was entirely possible to get three complete sets of the bonus cards! The bonus cards were simply preview cards for the Batman Returns Stadium Club Card set. The ten cards were identical to cards that would pop up in that later set, save that they were numbered with letters (A - J) as opposed to numbers. This prepared collectors for a vastly superior set and the full bleed, UV-resistant cards put this set to shame.

Non-Pack/Box Cards

There were no cards for this set not found in these packs or boxes.

Overall

A box of these trading cards, unopened, is often obtainable for $10 - $20. Complete sets of all 98 cards - common and chase - tend to run anywhere from $15 - $25. Investors will find this set is a generally poor investment, especially given the quality issues from the manufacturing defect. If one needs a Batman Returns trading card set, this is not the one to pick up.

This set culls from source material found in: Batman Returns reviewed here!

This is a set of trading cards I sell in my online store! For current inventory of these, click here!

For other trading card sets, please check out m reviews of:
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Cinema Collection set
Star Trek 40th Anniversary Series 1 trading cards
Twilight trading cards

3.5/10

For other trading card reviews, please visit my index page here!

© 2010, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.




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