Trading Cards And The Pre-Digital Era.

Hey kids, remember a time before VOD, DVD and VHS, when you saw a movie at the cinema or drive-in and that was it? Prior to the binge and purge mentality of the digital age, it could take years before you'd see that film again in your living room. When it finally made it to free-to-air television, you'd get a jerky, pan-and-scan, watered down version, sometimes with whole scenes or pages of dialogue missing. If you were lucky enough to own a VCR you might even manage to tape it, sitting rigidly with your thumb hovering over the pause button as you valiantly tried to skip the ads from the recording. That neutered rendition would become the only version you knew, right up until the DVD revolution of the turn of the century.

In the olden days, film novelisations, soundtracks, Read-Along books on vinyl, souvenir magazines and trading cards were some of the many ways you could relive your cinematic experience in that dark period following a film's theatrical run. Trading cards were a particular favourite. The smell of the concrete hard bubble gum, the adrenalin rush of peeling back the wax paper, the junkie's ever increasing desire for more, more, even when every card in the pack was a soul crushing double.

There appeared to be no rhyme or reason to which film or television show warranted a set of trading cards. And more often than not, it was a film's sequel that produced the trading card set rather than the superior original.

With this in mind (and with clearly too much free time on my hands) I decided to right the wrongs of the past and create my own trading cards for something that deserved it more than, say, this abomination:

Back in 1982, a little film called Blade Runner was released. Loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by visionary genius Philip K Dick, it had film noir sensibilities, existential dilemmas, Japanese fetishism, graphic violence and vaguely consensual sex with robots – all the things kids in the 80s loved. So why no trading cards? And for that matter, why no action figures? Here is my attempt at rectifying this oversight:

One of the things I loved about trading cards was when they included an image that definitely wasn't in the movie, like the octopus scene in The Goonies. Before we ever even knew the term 'deleted scene', this was as close as we'd get to seeing beyond the film. Knowing there was more out there than what we saw on the screen was mind blowing. For this reason, I've included a card for one of Blade Runner's notorious deleted scenes, which only became available to the general public in 2007 with Ridley Scott's Final Cut and the excellent documentary Dangerous Days.

A cursory search of Google reveals I am not alone - there are countless others who have created their own trading card sets for film classics. One of the best examples of this can be found on the website Branded in the 80s. This guy has been making trading cards for ages, amongst other awesome things, and is definitely worth a look.