Behind the Camera: Why the Last 1977 Star Wars Series Showed How the Film Was Made

The first four series of Topps' Star Wars cards showed children the film. The fifth showed them how it was made. Toward the end of the orange series, the X-wings are hanging on rigs in front of a blue screen, Chewbacca is sitting down between takes, and George Lucas is standing beside the actor playing Luke, telling him what to do.

The orange series

Topps issued its original Star Wars set in five series, each with its own border colour. The fifth, with orange borders, runs from card 265 to 330 and came out in 1978, the last of the run. Like the others it had 66 cards and 11 stickers. We set out how the five series differ in the five Star Wars series.

The early part of the orange series looks much like the rest of the set: scenes from the film, the droids, the Jawas. Then, from around card 305, it turns into something else.

What the cards show

More than twenty of the last thirty cards are photographs taken on the set rather than scenes from the finished film. Their captions read like a production diary:

Director George Lucas with Greedo. Technicians readying C-3PO for the cameras. A touch-up for Chewbacca. Directing the Cantina creatures. A birthday celebration on set for Sir Alec Guinness. Filming the awards ceremony.

The model builders proudly displaying their work. Using the blue screen process for the X-wings. Photographing the miniature explosions. Filming explosions on the Death Star. Constructing the Star Destroyer.

Shooting in Tunisia. Make-up for the Bantha. Dave Prowse and Alec Guinness rehearsing. Lucas directing his counterpart, Luke. Animating the chessboard creatures. Filming the sandcrawler. And to finish the whole set, card 330: filming Luke and Threepio in Tunisia.

The earlier series had included the odd behind-the-scenes photograph. The fifth is where they gather, and where the set ends.

Why did Topps do it?

Nobody at Topps left an explanation that we have found.

The most common story among collectors is that Topps simply ran out of usable stills from the film. A veteran dealer put it that way to PSA: by the fifth series, he reckoned, they must have been tapped out of photos, so they used pictures from the production instead. That is a reasonable guess. It is not a documented fact, and it should not be read as one.

There are other things worth knowing. Topps had already used 264 cards' worth of material from a single film of about two hours, so finding sixty-six more fresh images was a genuine problem. And the company was listening to its buyers: the display box for the fifth series advertised more Cantina scenes, which one collector reads as a response to what children had been asking for.

The series also has the feel of something put together at the end of a run. One collector's fifth-series packs came in a leftover fourth-series box, with small stickers covering the old series number.

What children made of them

The same dealer was honest about his own reaction. As a child, he said, he did not like the production photos. As an adult he thinks they are the most interesting cards in the set, because they show how the film was actually made.

That is probably a common journey. A child in 1978 opening a pack for Darth Vader and finding a photograph of a man painting a model might well have felt short-changed. The same card now shows what most of those children had never seen: the models, the rigs, the blue screen and the people who made the effects work.

Star Wars was a film about spaceships and wizards. For the children who collected its cards, it also offered a rare look behind the curtain, and it came in a fifteen-cent pack.

What it means for collectors

The fifth series is often the last to complete. Some collectors describe its cards as among the hardest of the five to find, and put that down to series fatigue: by 1978, fewer children were still buying.

The behind-the-scenes cards are a record in their own right. Read in order, they are a short illustrated account of how the film was made.

They have aged better than the scenes. A still from the film can be seen anywhere. A 1977 photograph of the model makers with their ships, printed on a card that children bought in shops, is a small piece of film history in its own right.

We have also written about how the cards beat the toys to the shops in 1977, and about how many perfect 1977 Star Wars cards exist.

The thing worth sitting with

Whether Topps ran out of stills or simply chose to show the making of the film, the result is the same. The set that began with Luke Skywalker on card one ends with the crew filming him in Tunisia.

For a set made to sell a film to children, it is a strangely honest ending: here is the magic, and here are the people who made it.

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

Sources