1977 Topps Star Wars Cards GALLERY

[jdandns]

Due to a recent thread discussing the ever increasing value of what is technically the 1st Star Wars card, 1977 Topps Star Wars #1 Luke Skywalker in high grade, I was reminded that I have a set of these cards that are pretty much as close as one can get to their original condition, coming straight from a sealed wax pack.

Here's how I got the cards in the pictures below. In the early 90's, when the Star Wars property was at its lowest ebb, certainly in terms of collectible-value, someone brought in a pallet of then 13 year old Topps Star Wars wax box cases to a local comic shop and sold them to the store on the cheap. The seller didn't have many options at that time as the Star Wars story seemed totally over, the cards weren't yet vintage, and there was no internet yet to sell them on. The shop owner must've paid very little for the cards as he had multiples of each of the five sets and was selling each series (66 cards + 11 stickers) for only $10 apiece. Obviously, as time passed, I wish I'd bought more than one of each set.

There was no discussion of which version of the so-called "goldenrod" C-3PO card in the Series 4 green set I was buying. I don't think that error was very widely known about in 1990. As it turned out, the set I bought did have the error version.

So, anyway, here's an accurate view of what the average 1977 Star Wars card looked like coming straight out of a sealed pack in 1991 (after being then kept stored by an official clector type like me for 35 more years).

The centering looks generally pretty good, although a lot of these cards also can be off-center on the non-puzzle card reverse sides. Other production flaws that bring down the grades are surface issues, gum and wax stains, rough cuts, and printer registration errors, which sports cards collectors of this era know to be relatively common.

[jdandns]

There's Series 1 (Blue).
Take a look at the back of the stickers, which already by 1991, had the indelible outlines of the gum pieces on them.



My favorite single card in this series is #31 (Sighting The Death Star) and it's certainly an iconic image, and the vintage Star Wars card Topps chose to reprint in the Topps 75th Anniversary retrospective set. #53 (Battle In Outer Space!) is also a knockout. Topps doubled up on it, using the same image as sticker #11.

[DynaEtch]

Awesome story and wow those are some beautiful vintage SW cards. Such a cool set. The centering does look good, cards look sharp. Not sure if you ever considered grading, but grading that Luke #1 with PSA could be lucrative. Thousands of dollars for an 8 or 9. The price of a house for a 10 although this one L/R may bar from a 10. Not a bad gamble for the price of grading one card though.

Grading and value aside….simply beautiful nonsports nostalgia. I’m amazed the cards remained even that pristine since 1990ish when you got them. Mine would probably have more damage from handling and sitting in binders long term etc.

[jdandns]

The nice thing is that my scanner can't really capture how blue these cards are, as they have a richer hue in person. On the downside, while the surfaces should be fairly clean (being "pack fresh" after a fashion), the only way to really see those kinds of flaws is by looking at the card in person at an angle, under a nice light, which is something I'd have to do before submitting any for grading. There's absolutely a reason why PSA10s are so rare, even with so many cards already graded.

Here's Series 2 (Red) which is probably the exact set that made me a lifelong trading card collector. What happened was, my older brothers had purchased plenty of packs of series 1 and we had a complete set plus plenty of doubles. Those, along with the Wonder Bread Star Wars cards, made the little kid I was think, well, that's it on Star Wars cards forever (haha)...until I was playing at a friend's house and found in the bottom of his toybox a RED BORDERED(!) Star Wars card that was numbered higher than 66, which meant there was a whole 'nother set of Star Wars cards to be had! And these had the same vivid color borders as the 1976 Topps King Kong set which had fried my 5 year old brain the year before, becoming the first set I ever collected by the numbers. Those were 10 cents a pack, and I found I could trade an empty pop bottle for a pack at the liquor store. (Just one year later, the Star Wars packs would cost 15 cents each. Dang 'ol 70's inflation, man.)

Anyway, I can't remember for sure if I ran home to tell my brothers there was another set and that WE MUST GET THEM NOW, but I feel like that's what happened. I still remember like yesterday finding that card (#81 Weapons Of The Death Star,) a different copy of which is shown below.

To me, the Blue & Red Star Wars sets are 1 and 1A on my list list of absolute favorite Star Wars cards, and there sure have been a whole lot of sets since then.

[jdandns]

As the last picture shows, the sticker backs are much nicer on these, nearly white with only an occasional bit of "gum shadow".

My favorite cards here are #131 (Spectacular Battle) and #108 (Princess Leia Observes The Battle).
#111 (Han Solo and Chewie) is also terrific and I loved the deleted scene image on #85 (Luke on the Sand Planet).

Next up, Series 3, and it's all yellow...

[DynaEtch]

Threepio and R2 seem to have gotten a lot representation in the red cards. I like #118 of them…has that iconic sort of SW image of them both together. Also #99 Ben with the Light Saber is a cool looking card.

[Jaysabz]

I know card # 1 - "Luke Skywalker" - is the seminal card from the set, but I've always been partial to # 57 - "Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker" myself.

Amazing how much less expensive card # 57 is in a high grade than card # 1 ... thus why I have highly graded # 57 in my PC and not a highly graded # 1! : )

[DynaEtch]

Also “Harrison Ford as Han Solo” is kinda nice and is vertical, contrasted to the first Han Solo (Space Pirate) which is horizontal. Not knowing much about this set, I assume that first Han Solo is the bigger dollar “RC” one people go for. It does have a great image used, that first Han.

[YayNJ]

the original set (blue) what's the difference between the OG and the 'scanlens' version?

is it just as simple as the 'scanlens' is the US version?

[jdandns]

That's right. I think Scanlens is the Australian version. New Zealand had cards from Allen's & Regina. In Mexico, they were produced by Lyausa, and Canada's version were from O-Pee-Chee.

[jdandns]

The middle series, out of five in all:



















And the backs of these stickers are nice and white.



Faves for me here are:
151 (Planning An Escape!) with an iconic image of the big three.
176 (Luke Skywalker's Dream) I can actually hear the music swelling when I look at this one
192 (Liberated Princess!) Leia with blaster. Love the shadow on this one.

Also:
162 (Han Solo Cornered By Greedo) but we have to take their word for it, as Topps still wasn't allowed to show the cantina aliens
196 (Lord Darth Vader) presumably the first Star Wars card with an illustrated front?

[DynaEtch]

Always liked the yellow border color on these cards, could be my fav. Great set jdandns, these originals are beautiful

[DynaEtch]

I like these in this series:

161 Preparing for the Raid - pre special edition but still cool…the anticipation before battle
174 Solo Aims for Trouble - classic pose
196 Lord Darth Vader

[jdandns]

OK, here's the one with the infamous C-3PO card. I can tell you the hubbub over that card (#207 below) wasn't a, uh, thing, back in 1991 when I got this pack-fresh set being displayed. I don't remember the comic shop owner mentioning what version was in the set, and I don't remember asking, so I don't think the error was widely known at that time. I certainly never knew of it back in '78 when I got my original green set. I think I probably found out about it a few years after acquiring this set, maybe 1994 with the proliferation of the non-sports card collecting magazines, during their brief Golden Age before the advent of the internet.

I was probably pretty happy when I took a closer look at the cards and found I had the error version. In the late 90's, I bought another set of Series 1-4 (cards only, no stickers), and that one had the corrected version, so I do have both. While I was mildly disappointed because the error is so much more interesting, it's actually belived that the corrected version is, ironically, harder to find than the error version.



















Sticker backs were also nice and white on these.



(The last couple of Series 4 stickers will be in the first picture of the final set, orange series 5, which at last featured the cantina aliens, a fact noted on the series 5 pack wrapper, so they knew people were clamoring for them.) At this point, Topps had used pretty much all of the movie still they had, so there are some publicity/costume shots and such here, as well as the trick of taking a card with two characters and creating two more cards by enlarging the characters to each fill their own card as with the Luke & Obi-Wan cards (#248-250), the single Han Solo which is just zoomed in from the trio card (#251-252), and the two consecutive Lukes (#258-259) which are the same image just zoomed out a little more from one card to the next. There are also 3 very similar images of Grand Moff Tarkin.

The green ink seems to have not blended as uniformly as the earlier colors which could be a reason why there are some Series 4 cards with very low Population numbers where the highest grades are concerned.

My faves here are:
#217 (Dark Lord of the Sith) An awesome Vader close up, although my example here is among the most off-center cards in this particular set.
Sticker #40 (Vader posing) is also pretty great.

[DynaEtch]

The scandal of scandals! Gotta be one of *the* most famous nonsports errors out there….or even nonsports cards period. The Billy Ripken FF of the hobby.

I did not know the corrected version may be more rare than the goldenrod….interesting. I also didn’t know it took that long to create a big buzz. That’s funny because in today’s internet world, if UD did something like that on a card (can you imagine…), it would immediately be a wild buzz and the stuff of online memes in a hot second.

[jdandns]

True. The only "internet" at that time was that lining on the inside of the way-too-short swim trunks we had back then.

I also remember a Dennis Rodman card in 1996 Upper Deck basketball which showed him leaping in the air that some were claiming exposed him in a similar way, but I think that just turned out to be his internet.

I'm not totally sure how that rumor spread back then, but I had actually visited the Upper Deck production plant right around that time so I was very skeptical from the start. They actually showed our tour group how they designed cards on their state-of-the-art computers, and because the images on the screen were so much larger than they ended being on the cards, my thought was that there was no way they could miss something like that.

[jdandns]

OK, here's the final set, Series 5, in glorious 1970's orange, which was the color of like, 50% of all things back then. While I lived in bustling Southern California until August 1978 before moving to a small city in New Mexico, there's a chance these cards were issued right around when we moved or maybe even after, because I certainly never saw them back then, believing Series 1-4 to be the complete set, possibly until I bought these in 1991.












These stickers also have mostly white backs, making the Series 1 stickers, for whatever reason, the only stickers from this find to have suffered gun-related damage over the 14 or so years they sat in unopened packs.

This set features not only the first look at the various cantina aliens on cards, my favorites in this series, but also the first appearance on multiple behind-the-scenes cards (and stickers) of George Lucas, along with some of the original ILM employees working on the pioneering special effects.

I often wonder what those original sets of series 1-4 I collected as a little kid would look like today, condition-wise, but alas, they were lost in our move back to Southern California in 1986, along with the original Empire and Jedi cards I was able to collect in New Mexico. (I've also since replaced those.) I mean, I took care of them the best I could, but I kept them in a shoebox and of course, had no protective materials on the cards themselves. I remember being bummed for a day or two upon discovering they were gone for good, but at age 15, I had a lot of other things to think about, and anyway, Star Wars was totally over for good, by then. Hopefully, someone ended up with them and they still exist somewhere.

As for the Topps cards from the sequels (and the Marvel Comics adaptation of Jedi and even the action figures, to a degree), they actually turned out to be major spoilers for me. The city I lived in was small, and though we had a movie theater, we wouldn't get big movies like Empire or Jedi until they had been playing elsewhere for at least 6 weeks. (Only so many celluloid prints to go around even for these movies, and they had to hit the bigger markets first.) But in the meantime, all of that auxilliary merchandise, we'd get right upon its release at our various department stores, supermarkets, and convenience stores. I tried SO HARD to only read a little bit of the Marvel Jedi magazine at Safeway that summer, just a couple of pages at a time, but by the time the movie cannisters finally arrived, I knew exactly what was going to happen in the film, so it unfortunately couldn't be anywhere near the same experience I had while watching the first Star Wars at the South Bay Center in the summer of 1977, or even Empire in the fall of 1980. Even so, pretty much the entirety of the experience of the original is still with me, nearly 50 years down the line, and these cards are a wonderful complement to the memories themselves. I find it strange I've had these exact cards for 35 years. It doesn't seem like that long.

[jdandns]

Here's the Luke #1 and corrected C-3PO #207 from my other set. These were purchased in the mid to late 90's from a mail order dealer (good 'ol Marchant Cards) and I'm very sure the error was widely known by then.



I don't have a 2nd set of series 5, though, just a partial set, and some of those were given to me in the mid 90's by a friend who found them in his garage. They weren't in the best shape, but two of them that actually did have decent edges and corners also were actually highly off-register, making for interesting misprints.

[jdandns]

Around 2015, Abrams Books began publishing a series of small hardcover books that provided galleries and behind-the-scenes info about various vintage Topps trading card sets including Star Wars, which kicked the whole thing off. There was a volume for each movie from the original trilogy, and each book came with four bonus trading cards. This picture shows the cards from both Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back. Images selected for Star Wars were the display box art and the wax wrapper art as well as a couple of stickers (reprinted here as cards).

[Hollywood42]

I love this set so much. I've had S1 completed for a few years now, S3 is pretty close, and still chipping away here and there at S2, S4, S5, and the stickers. S1 is by far my favorite, the white stars in the blue border are just perfect, and the other series just feel a little plain without them. I really enjoyed the 2022 Sapphire re-run of this and I'm down to needing ~15 cards to complete the base set

I'm also missing just a few cards from my 1980 TESB and 1983 ROTJ sets. It's funny, I was just reorganizing my 1980 TESB cards the other day and found I had like 60 of the cards I was missing sitting in my duplicates box - that was a nice surprise to be able to fill in a big chunk of my needs without having to leave the house

I know there are a few other 70s/80s Star Wars cards out there, but outside the big 3, the only one I want to start that I haven't yet is the 1977 Wonder Bread. Those just look really appealing to me as well

[jdandns]

Here's the Wonder Bread set. We only had a few of these at the time, as Wonder Bread was a little pricey, but I was able get this beautiful set of the original 16 cards in the late 90's from a mail-order vintage non-sports dealer (Witcraft).





About 10 years ago, a small homebrew company called CNCPT CRDZ made a reprint version of it and additionally created 11 new cards in the Wonder Bread style, as seen above, beginning with the Uncle Owen/Aunt Beru cards. They even made vintage-style Wonder Bread wax pack wrappers, which of course, never existed since the cards were distributed in bread loaves.

Here's a comparison of the originals (right) versus the "remastered" (left) version:



Interesting that for whatever reason, they chose not to correct the spelling of "Millennium".

[DynaEtch]

Originally Posted by jdandns

Here's the Luke #1 and corrected C-3PO #207 from my other set. These were purchased in the mid to late 90's from a mail order dealer (good 'ol Marchant Cards) and I'm very sure the error was widely known by then.



I don't have a 2nd set of series 5, though, just a partial set, and some of those were given to me in the mid 90's by a friend who found them in his garage. They weren't in the best shape, but two of them that actually did have decent edges and corners also were actually highly off-register, making for interesting misprints.

This thread is awesome, love all the detail about this classic SW set.

I know I said it before but wow this Luke #1 looks really nice, centered too….man I’d be grading that the prices of anything psa 8 or higher are getting very high on this card. This is coming from someone who doesn’t usually grade things or care for grading, but that’s a beautiful example and probably worth it.

[jdandns]

Thanks, Dyna. On the grading, we'll see, someday.
I was extremely fortunate to pick up the first set just as card grading was beginning, and only for sport cards, and the second when grading non-sports was still very unusual, so there was very little to no cherry picking of the top condition cards from a set by the sellers. They pretty much put a set together by the numbers and sent it out, however it turned out.

About 15 years ago, I was at a comic shop with very few non-sports, but they had a little box of singles priced at 25 cents each and there were some Blue series 1 cards in there, maybe 20. I obviously should've got them all, but I know I did get a single of #1 Luke and I remember that one being in nice shape, too. I'll get a scan of that.

Beside some more pictures of vintage to post, I also plan to post cards made by Topps since then for newers sets featuring images from original trilogy using the '77 designs. I'm going to confine that to just cards with original trilogy images, because they've also used the designs for Prequel and Sequel trilogy cards, and other things, too.

If any one else has anything else original trilogy-related in the original Topps designs that they'd like to share, I'd love to see it. I'm sure some of our members must have some of these PSA or BGS graded, or perhaps even autographed.

[jdandns]

OK, it looks like the first time Topps went back to the 1977 well for cards was in 1999 for "Star Wars Chrome Archives". This was an all-reprint set featuring a selection of vintage cards and stickers, but with a chromium finish. This is long before the recent "Sapphire" sets, driven by numbered parallels and the like.

The base set was 90 cards, with 30 cards apiece for each film in the original trilogy. Here are just the ones for Episode IV: A New Hope, which, unlike the original cards, do tell the basic story of the film in order.
As you can see, they leaned heavily on cards from the first two series (Blue & Red) for subjects, with those series comprising 22 of the 30 cards:









There were two different chase sets, 4 semi-translucent "clear chrome" cards:



And, finally, 9 double-sided refractor cards which reprinted stickers on front, while the reverses featured a puzzle of the Hildebrandt Brothers iconic poster illustration.



Five of the stickers are from the '77 set, but for Han, Leia, Darth Vader, and C-3PO, they went with a 1983 Return of the Jedi sticker for the reprints.

Next up, 2004's "Star Wars Heritage".

[jdandns]

2004 Star Wars Heritage featured 22 "Episode IV: A New Hope" cards in the classic design with imagery largely new to cards. If the technology of 1977 had been about 25 years more advanced, this is what the original cards might've looked like, with much sharper pictures & typeface and better centering:




Note the "Special Edition" Jabba and Luke/Biggs meeting that made it onto these "retro style" cards. It's neat to finally see a few cantina denizens (here, the little feller Kabe ordering a beverage, Greedo, and the back of Dr. Evazan) on a blue border cards, since none originally appeared on an actual vintage '77 until the 5th and final series, the orange bordered. Also shown in the bottom picture to the left side are the Star Wars Heritage promo cards in the classic design which feature a mix of previously used and new images.