The Cards Beat the Toys: Topps Had Star Wars in the Shops While Kenner Sold an Empty Box

Star Wars opened in American cinemas on 25 May 1977. Within weeks there were Star Wars cards in the shops, fifteen cents a pack. The action figures that would define the decade did not reach a single child until 1978. For Christmas 1977, the toy company that held the licence sold parents an empty box.

That gap, between the cards being there and the toys not being there, is one of the reasons the 1977 Topps set matters so much to the people who were children that year.

Nobody was ready

Almost nobody expected Star Wars to be a hit, including the studio that released it. Merchandise is planned many months ahead, and very little had been planned.

Kenner, a Cincinnati toy company, held the licence to make Star Wars toys. It had no product ready when the film opened. Action figures had to be sculpted, tooled and manufactured, and in the 1970s that took well over a year. By the time the size of the craze was clear, there was no way to get figures into the shops for Christmas.

The cards were ready

Topps was quicker. Trading cards needed photographs, a design and a printing press, not moulds and factories.

The first series of 66 blue-bordered cards reached shops in June 1977, a matter of weeks after the film opened. Each wax pack held seven cards, a sticker and a piece of gum. A second series and a third followed during 1977, and Topps even packaged cards in small "Fun Bags" for Halloween that autumn.

During 1977, Topps put 198 different Star Wars cards and 33 stickers into the shops. The last two series came in 1978, which is how a set always called the 1977 set came to be partly a 1978 one. We set out how the five series differ in the five Star Wars series.

What Kenner sold instead

Kenner's answer to Christmas was the Early Bird Certificate Package. It was a cardboard envelope rather than a toy: inside were a display stand, some stickers, a Star Wars fan club card and a certificate. Mailing the certificate to Kenner would bring the first four figures, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Chewbacca and Artoo-Detoo, when they were ready.

They were posted out in early 1978. Until then, a child who unwrapped the Early Bird package on Christmas morning had a promise and a stand with nothing to stand on it.

It was controversial at the time. Press coverage that autumn was largely hostile, and some retailers refused to stock it. Kenner said it was selling well, and it bought the company the months it needed.

What that meant for the cards

The cards were not the only Star Wars thing a child could buy in 1977. Marvel's comic book adaptation had been on sale since April, before the film opened.

But for most of the first year of the craze, the cards were the Star Wars a child could collect. They came in numbered series, they could be swapped in the playground, they showed scenes from the film that most children had seen once or twice, and they cost pocket money.

That is part of why the 1977 set holds the place it does. Many of the people who now collect it were children who knew the film through those small blue-bordered photographs months before they held a single figure.

It also explains something about condition. These cards were not bought to be kept. They were handled, traded, stacked and carried around in pockets by children who had no other Star Wars toy to play with, which is a large part of why sharp, clean copies are so hard to find now. We have written about how many perfect 1977 Star Wars cards exist, and about what the pack itself did to the cards inside it.

The figures caught up

Once Kenner's production got going, it made up for lost time. The first wave of figures reached the shops in 1978, and by the end of that year Kenner had sold tens of millions of Star Wars toys.

The Early Bird package, the box that held no toys, became a collector's item in its own right, and was reissued in 2005.

By 1978 the cards had company. But for the first year of the craze, a fifteen-cent pack of Topps cards was the closest thing most children could get to owning Star Wars.

The thing worth sitting with

The famous toys of the 1970s did not exist at the moment Star Wars became a craze. The cards did.

Christmas 1977 is remembered for an empty box with a certificate in it. For a lot of children it was also remembered for a stack of blue-bordered cards with the corners worn soft.

This index tracks the 1977 Topps Star Wars cards and stickers grade by grade. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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