CARDBOARDFILE
non-sport / Topps Star Wars Series 1
66 cards
Topps almost did not make these. Company staff were sceptical of a science fiction film nobody had seen, and it took the president, Arthur Shorin, warming to the idea before Topps told Twentieth Century-Fox it wanted the licence. The cards reached shops in June 1977, the month after the film opened.
Sixty-six cards and eleven stickers, sold in fifteen-cent wax packs of seven cards, one sticker and a stick of gum, thirty-six packs to a box. C-3PO was on the wrapper and on the box.
The blue starfield border is the thing everyone recognises, and Topps did not draw it for this set. It was lifted from their own Star Trek cards, with an X-wing dropped in where the Enterprise had been. The photographs came from ordinary 35mm slides sent to Brooklyn.
Backs came in three kinds - a story summary, a movie facts panel, or a piece of a puzzle. Two puzzles assemble across the set: a still of Luke, Chewbacca, Han and Obi-Wan in the Millennium Falcon, and the Hildebrandt brothers' poster for the film, redrawn for the cards by Augie Napoli.
Series 1 is cards 1 to 66. Four more series followed through 1978, colour-coded red, yellow, green and orange, and together they run to 330 cards. This page covers the blue ones.
The condition profile is bad and the packaging is a large part of why. The gum sat against the sticker and the wax against the card at the back of the pack, so a sealed pack reliably ruined two of its own contents before anyone opened it. Topps' quality control in 1977 was poor by any standard - cards came out off-centre, with print defects, and sometimes out of focus.
PSA has graded 50,881 cards from this series and 1,188 are PSA 10, a rate of 2.33 per cent.
But that figure hides the shape of the thing, because one card carries the damage for the whole set.
Card 1, Luke Skywalker, has been graded 5,252 times - a tenth of the entire series population on a single number. Twenty-one per cent of those copies come back PSA 3 or lower. Across the other sixty-five cards the same figure is three per cent.
It gems at 0.17 per cent. The series average is 2.33. Card 1 is thirteen times harder to find perfect than a typical card from the same packs, printed on the same sheets, in the same year.
That is what being the front of the stack does. It is the same mechanism that put the 1984-85 Star Michael Jordan on the outside of a polybag, and the same reason the 1940 Superman card 1 is the most graded and worst preserved card in its set.
The rest of the series is more even than its reputation suggests. Artoo Is Imprisoned By the Jawas at 11 gems at 6.31 per cent, Who Will Win the Final Star War? at 52 does 5.90, and See-Threepio Diverts the Guards at 34 manages 5.62. Those are ordinary cards nobody was fighting over in 1977, and they survived accordingly.
These cards are also covered on NonSportCardIndex, which tracks what is currently listed and what has recently sold, grade by grade. This page is about how the cards were made and why they survive the way they do; if you want the live market for a particular grade, look them up there.
Card 1 is the expensive problem and everything else is affordable.
Luke Skywalker at number 1 has nine PSA 10s in 5,252 graded copies. If you want the set in high grade, that card is the project and the other sixty-five are shopping. A PSA 8 of card 1 is a perfectly respectable card and costs a fraction of what a 9 does.
For the rest of the series a PSA 8 or 9 is readily available and reasonably priced. This is one of the cheapest ways to own a complete graded run of anything culturally significant.
Buy raw with your eyes open. Centring is the usual failure and it is visible in a photograph if the seller shows the whole card against a plain background. Print defects and soft focus are original to the printing rather than damage, and they cap the grade regardless.
Watch the border on a raw card. The blue shows every handling mark and a card that looks clean in a small image often is not.
Two print runs exist, distinguished by one or two small stars in the copyright line on the back. Collectors generally treat them as the same card and PSA does not separate them in the population report.
And check which series you are buying. All five look similar at a glance and only the border colour tells them apart - blue is Series 1, then red, yellow, green and orange. A listing that says 1977 Topps Star Wars and gives a number above 66 is not this series.