1977 Star Wars (Argentina)

the set

notes

This is a poorly documented set and this page will say so where it applies. There is more disagreement about what it is than about almost anything else on this site.

What is not in doubt is that the cards exist, that they carry the same photographs as the 1977 Topps Star Wars first series, and that almost nobody has graded one. PSA has recorded 1,317 across the whole set - an average of nineteen per card, against 50,881 for the US series that supplied the images.

Not one has graded PSA 10. Three are PSA 9.

Start with what the checklist shows, because it is more interesting than the usual foreign-issue story.

Of the 68 cards PSA lists, 45 carry the same title and the same number as the US Topps card. Twenty-one carry the same title at a different number - Darth Vader is 6 here and 7 in America, the Tusken Raiders are 15 here and 21 there, a whole block between 11 and 22 has been shuffled. Two cards have no US equivalent at all: See-Threepio at 67 and Artoo-Detoo at 68.

So this is the American series with about a third of its early running order rearranged and two cards added at the end.

There is a complication in the titles themselves. The collector reference that has documented this set says the Argentine cards carry the words La Guerra de las Galaxias on the front where the American card carries a description of the scene. If that is right, the titles in PSA's checklist are not printed on these cards at all - they are the American captions, mapped to the images. That would explain why 45 of them match perfectly and the rest are the same words at different numbers.

The count is disputed too. PSA lists 68. A collector reference that has documented the set describes 66 cards plus eleven character images and sixteen puzzle pieces, which does not reconcile cleanly with 68 and may mean PSA has catalogued two of the character images as cards.

Who made it is also unsettled. The album carries the word Figuritas prominently, the cards are usually described as coming from an Argentine subsidiary or licensee of Topps, and the Trading Card Database separately lists a Pacosa Dos Star Wars issue from Argentina in the same year. We have not found a source that settles it, and we are not going to pick one.

What is documented, and explains everything about the population, is the album.

Unlike the American release, these cards came with an album to paste them into. That is how they were meant to be used. A card glued into an album and later removed is not a card that grades, and a great many of them went in.

The grade distribution shows it plainly. The most common result is PSA 4, with 339 copies. Thirty-five per cent of everything submitted is a 3 or lower. Just 2.4 per cent reaches PSA 8 or better, against a US set where the same figure is far higher and where 1,188 cards have graded 10.

The American set that supplied these images is at 1977 Topps Star Wars Series 1.