Sticker Albums and Movie Cards

Collecting Sticker Albums and Movie Cards in the early 80's.
On
June 29, 2007
I've been reading here for years and sharing in all the wonderful memories. I'd like to start by saying thanks to all the other writers out there. You have given me many a smile or laugh as I fondly recall things I had forgotten. You have brightened many a gloomy day for me. Having been born in 1974 most of my best childhood years were centered right in the 80s.

I often wanted to write an article, but I needed to be able to add something that wasn't already covered (or at least not that I had seen). I have finally found a topic and it was a craze that swept through my friends and I in the early 80's: collecting movie trading cards and sticker albums.

Many an allowance was spent on cards or stickers. It became an addiction at times when you wanted to complete a certain set and needed just one final card or worse a limited bonus item. Trading of cards and stickers became rampant and sometimes a little cut throat. New card packs were easily found at corner stores and we had a flea market not too far from our neighborhood that sold many new packs as well as older cards so availability was never a problem. Also since most of these packs sold for .25 - .50 cents a pack they were pretty easy to talk mom into buying for us.

Here is a review of some of the many sets that my friends and I chased after.

Sticker Albums

Return of the Jedi Sticker Album


Like all sticker albums The Return of the Jedi Sticker Album was a book filled with blank placeholders. You would then have to go out and buy packs of stickers and hope that you got the ones you needed to complete the book. Overall this book had my friends and I buying many packages of stickers from the local corner stores. Then we would accumulate tons of doubles and try to trade them off for the missing stickers we still needed. I did eventually manage to fill this book. Unfortunately I couldn't find any pictures of the inside of the book or the actual stickers.

Wacky Sticker Album


Wacky Stickers came out in the 70's and were designed as stand alone stickers, but to our group the first sighting of them came about through the Wacky Sticker Album. These stickers were twisted pun versions of real products. Many of them we thought were really clever and most were a bit gross and sadistically themed. Completely and utterly politically incorrect there is no way that something like this would fly today. They were often frowned upon by our parents but that just made us want them even more.

Here are a few of the less controversial ones:




Sports Sticker Albums
What can I say, they were filled with players from each team and usually a section of "action" shots. I didn't even watch baseball, but that didn't stop me from wanting to collect the stickers!







Video Game Stickers and Scratch Off Cards

These were really loved by us. The video game cards came in two varieties either stickers or scratch-offs (rub-offs). We especially loved the scratch-off cards, the premise being to recreate a video game in a scratch off format and see how high you could score. It was a bit of a treat to buy these as they didn't last very long, I mean once scratched it's not really much fun anymore. But that didn't stop us from buying them and then just wanting more.

I recall these coming in two varieties:
Pac Man





Donky Kong





Collector Cards

These collector card series would come out around the same time as the movies as a promotional tie in/merchandising. Most of these card collections also had some type of limited edition bonus materials. Either a series of stickers or perhaps "special" gold or foil cards, etc. Sometimes each pack would contain one bonus item, other times it was random if you would get one or not. These led to some of the most frustrating hunts.

As most of these movies should be well known and I'm not here to do a movie review I'm going to just post up a bunch of pictures of the various movie cards. To anyone else who collected them I hope they give you that happy flashback experience.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind


The Dark Crystal



Dick Tracy
Dune



Star Wars
These cards came in many colored series with collector stickers:






There were also various promotional card series:


such as the ones released by Burger King:


The Empire Strikes Back
These cards came in two series the red:



and the blue



with a limited edition of gold cards and stickers:


Return of the Jedi
These cards continued the red and blue series theme.

Red:



Blue:



Stickers, Cases and Packs of Cards:





ET


Gremlins



I had a Sticker Album for Gremlins too:


Superman


Tron


WWF



Thanks all for reading, I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. It was a nice trip down memory lane as unfortunately a flood destroyed my original collections....now I just have to decide if I want to Ebay them and have my wife think I am crazy...wait...it may be too late for that :-)

AzureKnight
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