CARDBOARDFILE
non-sport / O-Pee-Chee Star Wars Series 1
66 cards
Forty-two of the sixty-six cards in this series have never been awarded a PSA 10. Not one. And no card in the series has more than two.
The Topps version of the same sixty-six cards, with the same photographs and the same blue starfield border, has at least one ten for every single number.
That is the whole story of the Canadian issue in two sentences, and the reason for it is in how the cards were cut.
O-Pee-Chee ran Star Wars in Canada off Topps' design work, and it did not follow Topps' release plan.
Topps issued five series of sixty-six, numbered 1 to 330. O-Pee-Chee issued three, numbered 1 to 264:
The first two series track Topps card for card. The third does not. O-Pee-Chee folded Topps' fourth and fifth series into one double-length run of 132, and Topps' third series - the yellow one - never reached Canada at all.
So Canadian children got sixty-six fewer cards than American children, and a series the Americans had went straight past them. We have written about the traffic in the other direction, in the cards that only exist in Canada; this is the same border working the opposite way.
The giveaway on the card itself is the language. Most of these carry a French translation under the English caption, in a different typeface from the Topps original. If you are looking at a 1977 Star Wars card and the back or the caption is bilingual, it is O-Pee-Chee.
The published accounts all say the same thing: these were cut from large sheets on a duller blade than Topps used. The edges come away rough, the centring drifts more often, and a meaningful number of the cards come out under PSA's minimum size.
That last point matters more than it sounds. An undersized card is not graded low. It is not graded at all - it comes back under N6, the minimum size requirement, one of the nine reasons PSA declines to put a number on a card. Those cards never enter the population report in the first place, which means the figures below understate the problem rather than overstate it. The grading codes are set out in the letters after the grade.
Set against the Topps first series, card for card, the same sixty-six subjects:
The scarcity and the condition are two separate findings and both are real. There are twenty times fewer of these in holders, and the ones that are in holders grade worse.
The qualified copies make the same point from another direction. Across this series, 4.31 per cent of recorded copies carry a qualifier - a letter marking one specific failure, almost always centring on a set like this. On the Topps series it is 1.71 per cent. Two and a half times the rate, from cards carrying the same picture, which is about as direct a measurement of a blade as a population report can give you.
Card 1, Luke Skywalker, is the most-graded card in the series at 186 copies, and it is one of only two cards with two tens. The other is card 17, Lord Vader Threatens Princess Leia.
The famous numbers do not help you here. The Villainous Darth Vader at card 7 has 88 copies graded in this series and not one ten; the Topps card of the same photograph has five, from 1,624 copies. The four actor cards at 57 to 60 - Hamill, Ford, Guinness, Cushing - have 60, 60, 43 and 27 copies between them and not a single ten among the four. The Topps Harrison Ford at the same number has fourteen.
At the other end, card 49, The Rebels Monitor the Raid, has been graded seventeen times in total.
The packs were the same shape as the American ones: thirty-six to a wax box, seven cards, one sticker and a stick of gum. Series 1 came in three wrapper variations, two of them carrying mail-in offers - a lock-and-key diary and a "Wonder Camera", wrappers plus money.
Forty-four stickers run across the whole issue, numbered 1 to 11, 12 to 22 and 34 to 55. The gap from 23 to 33 is not an error; it is the hole left by the Topps series Canada never saw. The stickers themselves are effectively indistinguishable from the Topps ones, which is why almost nobody collects them as a separate set.
Two errors worth knowing sit in the later series rather than this one. Card 183 reads "Ken Kenobi" instead of Ben, which is O-Pee-Chee's alone. And card 141, the Canadian number for the notorious Topps 207, exists only in its corrected form - so an uncorrected O-Pee-Chee copy of that card is a fake.
Buy this set in 8, not in 10. Forty-two of the sixty-six cards have never produced a PSA 10 and the ceiling on any card in the series is two, so a high-grade run is not a project with a finish line.
Check for French before you pay an O-Pee-Chee price. Most of these carry a French translation under the English caption in a different typeface. Same photographs, same blue border, different card - and the Topps version is twenty times more common.
Rough edges are original to the printing. O-Pee-Chee cut on a duller blade and a slightly furred edge is how these cards left the factory. It is not damage and it does not mean the card has been handled.
Size is the hidden risk on a raw card. Enough of these came out under PSA's minimum size that undersized copies come back ungraded rather than graded low, so a card you submit may return with no number on it at all.
Centring is the usual reason for a letter on the label. More than four per cent of recorded copies of this series carry a qualifier, against under two per cent on the Topps series.
Card 1 is the one to buy first and the one to inspect hardest. It is the most-graded card in the series and one of only two with more than one ten.
The stickers are not worth chasing as an O-Pee-Chee set, because they cannot reliably be told from the Topps stickers. A small packaging tear is the usual hint that one came out of a Canadian pack, and that same tear caps the grade.