The other day I received a box of (belated) birthday gifts from my brother! Amongst other items, the box contained these:
With a big grin on my face I opened them all just now. Here’s what I found inside…
The Desert Shield cards (1991) chronicle the leading to the Iraq War of the early 90s. As you can see they are a tedious collection of military vehicle photos interspersed with publicity stills of ‘celebrities’ of the era. This is one of those sets that I am astonished has an audience.
I’ve never seen Rocky IV, but from the surprisingly detailed card backs I’m guessing it’s about a Russian boxer (Drago) who defeats an aging US champion (Apollo Creed) and is in turn defeated by Rocky. The cards are ho-hum, but I got a good sticker for AW!
That’s the entire contents of one of the E.T. sticker packs from ’82. It’s one of those album sets, but imagine how disappointed you’d be had you bought one pack and got these five! I wager had I not said, you’d be hard pressed to guess the movie they were from!
All I’m going to say about the above is it’ll look great on AW’s dresser 😉
The oldest cards are from Alien (1979) which makes the included gum 36 years old. Naturally I had to taste it…
It was strangely bitter, and incredibly hard, like a piece of plastic. It hasn’t aged well.
The cards themselves were decent (the usual promo shots) and as with many sets of the era the backs formed a puzzle. Strangely it had nothing to do with Alien:
The last pack was timeless:
Fun fact: as a child I used to glue trading cards into a big ‘scrapbook’! I suppose I never cared about the backs 🙂
What’s this?!? I forgot a pack:
For a set based on the eminently forgettable sequel to a very average film, these cards were surprisingly good!
1) The card backs are detailed and bilingual…
2) The print quality is high and the images shown are decent (although the cards are perforated as if they were hand separated!)…
3) And best of all the puzzle on the backs seems very cool!
However the pack lies when it says ‘A sticker in every pack’ since neither of mine had any sticker. Sorry Adam 🙂
No stickers of fundamentalist lunatics, thanks.
The Rocky one will look “good” in my cubicle at work.
It’s the 40th anniversary of “Jaws” – have some respect, son!
I owned that “Jedi” set. Industriously trading for it was how I met JH, who attended a different primary school to me.
Is that meant to be the Nostromo?
What ever happened to your Jedi set?
I think I have a full ESB set somewhere in this house, or maybe Jedi. But it was a rebuy, some years after arriving in the US.
Trading cards was fun wasn’t it? I traded ST:TNG cards over the internet back in ’93 🙂
“R/O/T/J” set now in landfill.
Was that the light blue “Next Gen” series? BS and I earnt stacks of packs playing shitty prize games like “Whack-A-Crock” at Timezone in the Hunter Mall. I remember we became so adept at some that we were guaranteed a minimum number of tickets and there was little point playing anything else.
Oops – make that “Whack-A-Croc”…although it was a crock.
Jaws is NOT an average movie! All the sequels however are most certainly very average, some you could say are below average.
And I remember Rocky IV being a good, but it’s been decades since I’ve seen it.
I was looking for the worst non-sport cards I could find. I was going to get you only an entire sealed box of those Growing Pains cards. Although it would probably have made a hilarious blog post, I decided that the asking price was too high for something that would either be immediately thrown away seconds after being opened. or worse, returned to me as a full set for my birthday.