Category: Blog

45+-Year-Old Star Wars Cards

February 9, 2025

The above pic shows the extent of my collection of the first series of Star Wars cards released by Topps back in 1977. As a child I had many more, but as I’ve mentioned on this blog before I glued them into a scrapbook 🙂

At the antique fair last year I purchased the above ‘repacks’ of vintage Star Wars cards. Here’s some of what was inside the one on the left:

In total the repack contained one sticker and 28 cards. They’re all original Topps cards, but they’re from the fifth series released in 1979! In Australia we only ever got one series of Star Wars cards, and had I known American kids saw five different sets on shelves all the way up the release of The Empire Strikes Back I would have been green with envy! I’m happy to have added these to my collection 🙂

Speaking of Empire, I still own my complete set of cards, which you can see above. These are in excellent condition since by that age (8, in 1980) I had stopped destroying my cards! As with Star Wars, Australia only had one set of Empire cards, but America had four, and the second repack I bought at the fair was from the third series:

There were 33 cards in the box, all different, and all in remarkably good condition considering they’re 45 years old. Again, I’m pleased to add them to my collection, but one in particular I was quite surprised to see.

The one on the left – which was also in the repack – is card #1 from the first Topps Empire set. On the right is my card #1 from my childhood set. I’ve circled the differences.

These are typically referred to as ‘Topps’ Star Wars cards today, but the truth is that Topps only sold them in the USA, and they were licensed and sold in other countries by different companies. In Australia it was a gum company named Scanlens, as you can see on the top left of the card shown above. I suspect this is the reason we only ever got one set for each film. Interestingly the Scanlens cards have a slight premium over the Topps ones, and a full set of Scanlens Empire cards in good condition can easily sell for over $100. The stickers are quite a bit rarer (I have most, but not all of them) and a Scanlens set can sell for several times the cost of the card set!

And what about Return Of The Jedi? Ive got a few dozen cards from the first Topps set, as well as about a half dozen unopened packs, including no-doubt rancid gum.

Should I open them?

Still Lovin’ It?

February 5, 2025

It’s been 636 days since I last reviewed a Happy Meal here on this blog, so let’s do it again. This time, it’s this one:

It’s a Pokémon happy meal! We had to wait in the drive-through about 20 minutes for this, and when I was finally able to order they didn’t even have frozen cokes! But that’s another matter and while criminally negligent I won’t hold it against them in this review.

That was in the box: a ‘sticker activity sheet’. Given I was expecting Pokémon cards there was a moment of rage that I only got stickers, until I found this in the box:

I’ll return to the cards in a moment.

The box also contained a poster with a scene on the back on which the included stickers (which I forgot to photograph) could be stuck. I daresay this would have amused children for not much longer than it took me to immediately trash both.

The apple slices were Pokémon themed, which was cute. KLS ate them in record time so I can’t comment on their quality but I imagine they were just as acceptable as Maccas apple slices always are. Also it’s worth mentioning that unlike Australia, you must get apple slices here and can’t swap them out for extra fries!

That’s the ~~Junior Burger~~ Hamburger, and i know you agree it looks absolutely delectable! I devoured it like a professional:

It was… edible. I’m a bit of an expert Happy Meal eater these days – although rarely in the USA – and I have to say that was in the middle range of the below-average USA Maccas food quality. Which is to say worse than it should have been but better than it sometimes has been.

We won’t speak of the fries.

The card pack contained four cards, one shiny. I don’t know if these are random or if everyone gets the same one, and I don’t even care enough to check. One of the reasons I got this meal was because I’ve started playing the Pokémon tcg app on my phone, and after opening dozens of ‘digital packs’ I wanted to open a real one. If you want any of these cards, let me know.

I’ll end with a comment on price. This was a substandard ‘meal’ with not much food and it cost over $6 including tax. Given that in Japan the very same meal with better food and better toys costs about $2.50 I think I’m safe in saying I was fleeced.

It’ll be at least 636 more days before I consider buying another…

Gum

January 30, 2025

Much like every other stripling, I had a healthy fear of chewing gum in my youth since I didn’t want it staying in my stomach for ten years (or however long the urban legend claimed). The only gum I chewed in those days came in trading card packs (then called ‘bubblegum cards’) or (usually in tiny pellet form) from the lolly machines at shops.

I used to think of chewing gum as an adult pastime – much like smoking – and never much understood it, only chewing until the taste was gone. Why would someone want to keep chewing such tasteless stuff? Unable to understand, I simply dismissed chewing gum as something not for me.

Those were the ‘big three’ in the 1980s in Australia – vintage examples no less – and while I don’t recall ever really buying it myself I can remember powdery sticks of Wrigley’s occasionally offered to my by someone who did. Since I was never one for spitting it out – much less sticking it somewhere – I’d always keep the little foil wrapper so I had something to put the gum into when I was done. There was another brand as well – Stimorol – but to me that was well into the ‘for grown ups’ camp, and I thought of it as a weirdly tasting lolly old guys consumed while they read the racing pages of the Sunday paper. Like Fisherman’s Friend.

And then, somewhere around maybe 1981 or 1982, bubblegum seemed to explode. All of a sudden every kid at school was chewing Hubba Bubba or Bubble Yum and blowing big ‘nonstick’ bubbles. Quickly we learned the more pieces you chewed the bigger the bubbles and had mouths full of the stuff! Schools banned it quickly of course, but that hardly stopped us. We’d smuggle packs into class, chew it surreptitiously, and put it in each other’s hair for laughs. As kids do.

Reading a bit about this now I learned that Hubba Bubba came to market in Australia in 1980 and that’s what triggered the ‘wars’. In the USA it was Bubble Yum vs Bubblelicious since Hubba Bubba had been retired (as a brand) even before their wars had began. My memory of gum exploding isn’t wrong either: the market increased more than tenfold between the late 70s and mid 80s, and bubblegum started being sold almost everywhere.

At first I was happy with the standard flavour since that’s all that was available, but a while later I got into orange Bubble Yum and swore it was best. And then Hubba Bubba released pineapple and I never looked back! I used to buy multiple packs at a time, and recall having a stash of a dozen or more packs secreted in a drawer in my bedside table (alongside the giant pile of Redskins). Even today I can almost recall the taste, although it’s been decades since I last bought a pack. Is pineapple even available any more? Is Hubba Bubba?

The bubblegum wars led to a massive increase in types of gum available. I remember Spurt (a type of gum with a liquid center), Big Tooth (a plastic tooth container full of gum), a dinosaur-head container with bone-shaped gum pellets, gum being added to ice creams (such as Bubble’O’Bill) and the various gums that came with tattoos, like the above type still sold in Australia today.

As with all fads, gum passed, although this was more due to increased awareness of the sugar content than kids losing interest. By the time sugar-free bubblegum turned up I had lost interest, moving on to a healthy obsession with chips, Mars bars and Polly Waffles. The rare times I bought gum was the occasional pack of Juicy Fruit since I craved the taste. I think Bernard still bought gum, as did some of my friends, but it was the chewing type and never bubblegum. I recall a brief flirtation with sherbet-filled fruit-shaped gum balls from machines, but even that didn’t seem to last long.

I almost never buy gum now, and only eat it when it comes with some sort of ‘candy toy’ I buy in Japan. After I started this post I became curious and picked up a pack of Juicy Fruit to see if it tasted the same. Imagine my surprise – and disappointment – to find the pellets are gone and it’s now a bland stick product without the wonderfully fruity taste. It has become a worthless thing; only fit for geezers dreaming of horses.

I’m sure gum will never die, but it may be that it’s long been dead to me. I’ve probably never really understood why anyone likes it, nor why it would be chosen over virtually any other candy lolly or snack. I suppose it’s just not my thing.

Do you chew gum? If so, why?

Robot Claw