Five Series From One Film, and by the Last One They Were Out of Pictures

Three hundred and thirty cards from a single two-hour film. By the fifth series Topps had exhausted the film stills and was printing photographs of the crew making the movie.

The border colour is the fastest way to date a 1977 Star Wars card, and it tells you more than most people realise.

The five colours

Series 1, blue, cards 1 to 66. Released June 1977, alongside the film. This is the one everybody pictures.

Series 2, red, cards 67 to 132.

Series 3, yellow, cards 133 to 198.

Series 4, green, cards 199 to 264. The alien-and-vehicle series, heavier on hardware and battle scenes.

Series 5, orange, cards 265 to 330. Issued into 1978.

Each series ran to 66 cards and 11 stickers, sold in fifteen-cent packs of seven cards and a sticker, thirty-six packs to a box. Five series makes 330 cards and 55 stickers.

The detail almost nobody mentions

The blue borders have white stars in them. Every subsequent series is a solid colour with no stars at all.

So the design changed after the first series and then stayed changed. If you are looking at a card with a starfield border it is from the first sixty-six, and if the border is plain it is not, regardless of what colour it happens to be.

Another oddity while we are here: there is no Topps logo on these cards. The 20th Century Fox logo appears instead, which is unusual enough on a Topps product to be worth knowing.

Topps nearly did not make them

The set exists because 20th Century Fox went and asked for it. An executive named Marc Pevers pitched the idea of a Star Wars card set to Topps, and the company was sceptical. It took the president, Arthur Shorin, warming to the proposal before a representative went back to Fox and said they were interested.

The images for that first series arrived as ordinary 35mm slides sent to Brooklyn. One of the people who handled them recalled there being nothing especially exotic about the content.

Two details from the design tell you how routine it was treated as. The blue starfield in the border was reused from Topps' Star Trek set. And the illustrated puzzle on the series one backs is the Hildebrandt brothers' famous poster, reinterpreted by a Topps illustrator, Augie Napoli, rather than the poster itself.

Why five series existed at all

Because the first one sold. Demand for the blue-bordered singles was strong enough that Topps kept going, and each new series was a response to the last one working.

Which creates a problem nobody at Topps could solve. A film is a fixed quantity of images. Five series of sixty-six cards is three hundred and thirty pictures, and the movie runs two hours.

PSA's registry article on the set quotes a collector on what happened by the end: at that point they must have just been tapped out of photos. The fifth series leans heavily on production photography, the crew at work, the models being filmed.

That was a disappointment to children in 1978 and is one of the more interesting things about the set now. Behind-the-scenes photographs of the making of Star Wars, printed on cardboard, before anybody thought that was a thing worth documenting.

The box that gives the game away

There is a detail from a collector's account of the fifth series that tells you everything about where Topps had got to.

Their series five cards arrived in a series four box with small stickers pasted over it to indicate the change.

Not a new box. Old stock, relabelled.

What our own grades show

Two claims about this set get repeated constantly. Our figures settle one of them and contradict the other.

Average PSA grade across the classes this index tracks, by series:

Series 1, blue: 6.25.
Series 2, red: 7.45.
Series 3, yellow: 7.78.
Series 4, green: 7.15.
Series 5, orange: 7.64.

The first claim holds emphatically. PSA's own card facts note that the set is hard to secure in high grade, particularly series one, because the cards chipped and wore badly. Blue averages 6.25 here. The next worst is green at 7.15. The first series sits nearly a full grade below everything that followed, and it is not close.

The second claim holds too. The registry article says the yellow third series is the easiest to find in top condition. Yellow is the highest average on our list.

But the third claim does not. It is widely repeated that the orange fifth series is difficult in high grade because orange edges chip. Orange averages 7.64 here, second best of the five, ahead of both green and red.

We would not assert that orange never chips. What we can say is that across the classes we track, the fifth series grades better than the middle of the set, and the claim that it is a condition rarity is not supported by what we see.

Why series one grades so badly

Three reasons stack up, and only one of them is about the cardboard.

It was handled most. Series one was the summer of 1977. It went to the most children, at the highest pitch of excitement, and was carried around accordingly.

The blue border shows everything. A dark saturated border with white stars printed on it makes every edge nick and corner touch visible, in the same way black borders do on the Wonder Bread cards.

And card number one is in it. We have written about what happens to the first card in any set, across four different sets: it sits on the outside of every stack and takes every knock. In this set that card is Luke Skywalker, and it averages well below the rest of its own series.

What this means if you are buying

Three practical points.

Series is not a proxy for scarcity. All five were printed in quantity and none is genuinely rare. What differs is how well they survived, and the differences are modest apart from series one.

Centering is the real problem across all of them. One dealer quoted in PSA's article reckoned that from a box of more than two hundred and fifty cards you would be lucky to find ten that grade high. That is the constraint, not the border colour.

And a high-grade blue card is a genuinely different proposition from a high-grade yellow one. The same number on the holder does not represent the same achievement, because the underlying populations are not comparable.

The thing worth sitting with

Topps set out to make one set of cards for a film nobody expected much from, sold out, and kept printing until they had used every usable frame and then some.

By the end they were putting the film crew on the cards and shipping them in last season's boxes with a sticker on the side.

This index tracks all five series card by card and grade by grade, alongside the Wonder Bread issue and the overseas printings. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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