Star Trek: The Original Topps Trading Card Series by Paula Block

The Star Trek writers realized early on that the Enterprise was too big to land on a planet’s surface. That’s actually a good thing, because landing the ship each week would have eaten up the show’s visual effects budget in no time! Gene Roddenberry’s brilliant solution to the problem: the transporter.

31

Where’s Sulu (George Takei)? The answer is shrouded in mystery and speculation. Whatever the reason for Sulu’s absence from the card set—and this cast roster—we get the opportunity to make amends. You’ll find a brand-new Sulu card in the back of this book! (In that same spirit of healing, note that: 1) It’s K-o-e-n-i-g; 2) Neither Uhura nor Nichelle Nichols is a man.)

35

Actually, it’s Miri’s world, a planet that is, per Kirk, “an exact duplicate of the Earth.” The image on this card was flopped in the printing process; you can tell because almost every shot of the Enterprise in Star Trek shows the ship traveling from left to right across the television screen (holes were drilled in the production model’s port side to accommodate wiring for its tiny running lights).

45

In the 1950s, Topps began including trading cards as prizes in its chewing gum packages. For collectors, however, cards like this handsome shot of Kirk with a dueling pistol became the focus, and the gum quickly took a secondary position.

85

COOKIE CUTTER STICKER SHOCK

BY PAULA M. BLOCK AND TERRY J. ERDMANN

“Getting our stickers die-cut was quite a process,” Len Brown, Topps former creative

course,” Brown says, with a chuckle, “our die-cut machines were never that precise. We

director, recalls. “We printed them in large

couldn’t thread the needle quite that easily.

sheets. Then we made matching die-cut

That’s the reason you see a heavy color

knives designed to cut them out. On some

outline around the heads; it wasn’t there

trading card sets, we designed a uniform

for an artistic reason at all. The outline was

shape because it was less expensive, but

only to make sure we didn’t cut off a guy’s

each Star Trek sticker had its own shape. Of

ear. We gave a lot of extra ‘bleed’ on those outlines—and believe me, we learned to do this the hard way.”

“We had little paintings done for the sticker background,” Gary Gerani, a former writer and editor at Topps, adds. “They had some stars, and a little Enterprise zooming off. Then we’d pick a character’s head that was slightly different from the one featured in the character cards and set it in the foreground.”

“Our offices were in Brooklyn at the time,” Brown notes. “And we had a plant in Connecticut where we printed the sheets.

But we had the dies made somewhere else. I never saw what the dies looked like—and I never knew how they aligned all the stickers on the sheet as well as they did.”

187

199