What Actually Happened to C-3PO on Card #207

Card #207 of the 1977 Topps Star Wars set shows C-3PO climbing out of an oil bath. It also shows something a protocol droid has no business having, and for four decades nobody could agree how it got there.

I have been looking at this card for years and I still think the story people tell about it is wrong. Not the card, the story. Almost everyone repeats one of three explanations, and the man who was actually inside the costume says all three are rubbish.

So let's do this properly. Here is the card and every grade of it we track, and here is what really happened.

What Actually Happened

The scene is real. Threepio gets lowered into an oil bath, and that is in the film. The shoot was at Elstree, outside London, and according to Daniels the oil was real oil. The crew had warmed it up for him, which was decent of them.

He was lowered in on a platform. And while he stood there in the warm oil, chatting to Mark Hamill, the oil worked its way into the space between him and the costume legs. He came back up, in his own words, dripping but without incident.

Or so he thought.

He told that to Mental Floss in 2019, just before his autobiography came out. He also thinks somebody at Topps gave the resulting shape a bit of help before it went to print, which is the part nobody can prove.

The Three Stories That Were Wrong

People at Lucasfilm blamed a disgruntled Topps employee. That one has been repeated for years and it is still the version you hear most.

Topps said the picture arrived that way from Lucasfilm and called the whole thing a trick of timing and light.

Gary Gerani, who picked the photographs for the set at Topps, wrote that prop masters had been fooling about on set for their own amusement.

Daniels called the lot of it nonsense. He was there. I am inclined to take his word over three organisations who each had a reason to point somewhere else.

Topps Sort Of Panicked

The complaints did not come from collectors. They came from parents, because in 1977 these were cards bought for children out of packs at the corner shop.

Enough people wrote in that Topps went after boxes and put out a corrected version with the offending detail airbrushed away. It shipped in later packs of the same green series four run.

And here is the thing that dates the whole story. Quality control at Topps in 1977 was essentially one person looking at a sheet. No review committee, no second pass, no legal read. Someone looked at it, someone did not see it, and out it went. That is not incompetence, that is just how the industry worked. It happened again with the rest of this set in smaller ways nobody ever complained about.

Here Is The Bit That Surprises People

The corrected card is the rarer one.

As of 2024 PSA had graded around 1,612 of the error against roughly 691 of the corrected version. Gerani himself has argued for years that the airbrushed card is the scarcer print and ought to be worth more.

The market has never once agreed with him. The error carries a large premium and the corrected card sits there being genuinely harder to find and nobody caring. If you want a clean example of demand beating scarcity, that is it.

The One Test That Catches A Fake

This is the useful part, so I am putting it in its own section.

The fix went in before the Canadian O-Pee-Chee printing ran. Only the corrected image exists in that set. So if somebody offers you a 1977 O-Pee-Chee C-3PO with the error on it, it is fake. Not "probably" fake. Fake.

We track O-Pee-Chee separately from Topps precisely because the two printings are different animals, and this is the cleanest illustration of why that matters.

Same goes for signatures. Daniels signs the corrected card. He does not sign the error. A hard-signed error card is a problem, not a find.

So How Rare Is It Really?

PSA's population report for the error now runs to 2,451 graded examples. Six of them are PSA 10. Fifty-one are PSA 9. Three hundred and twenty are PSA 8.

The single most common result is PSA 6, with 520 cards sitting there, and roughly seven in ten come back at PSA 6 or lower. Which is exactly what you would expect from cardboard that spent 1977 being traded across a playground.

Six tens out of 2,451 works out to about one in four hundred. The green borders on series four show every chip, and the centering on this print run is unforgiving even by 1977 standards.

Famous Is Not The Same As Rare

This card is the second most-graded in the entire 1977 set. Only the Luke Skywalker #1 has been submitted more often, and that card has its own ridiculous story.

There are thousands of #207s out there. You can buy one this afternoon without trying hard. What you cannot easily buy is a good one.

That gap is the whole lesson, and it applies well beyond this card. The anecdote is what makes people want it. The population report is what sets the price. Anyone who tells you an error card is valuable because it is an error has skipped the second half of that sentence.

With the fiftieth anniversary arriving in 2027, expect to hear this story told badly a lot. Now you know how it actually went.

Every grade of #207 has a page here showing what is listed and what has verifiably sold. You can check how we work the numbers out if you want to mark our homework.