Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Greek Star Wars Olympiada Cards


I came across an interesting bootleg version of Star Wars cards that made me laugh, they are from Greece and the set was released in 1980 around the time that the Empire Strikes Back movie was released in the U.S. They were released by Olympiada.
 
An overview; the set contains a 200-card checklist with various images and was released in pack form. There were 80 packs (as best I can tell) per box and 5 cards per pack. Inserted in to random packs were “Instant Win” redemption cards plus there were an additional 7 “Formal Information” cards that could be used to win a prize. Each of the cards had a corresponding prize, for example card #20 got you a key ring, card #100 won you a leather football and card #200 won you a bicycle.

Instant Win
 The Formal Information win cards (seen below) has the banner across the bottom corner that says "Formal information". The card number determined what you won. The #50 Luke card won you a Chinese Lantern and the #200 Lando Calrissian won you a bike.
 
What first caught my attention was how horrible these cards are, which I guess what should be expected of a bootleg set. There were images from Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back and Star Trek (WTF?). To add to the confusion the images used were taken from the original official cards so the text, card numbering and design varies based on what the original card looked like. Because they used images from elsewhere some of the images sizes were adjusted to be larger or smaller to fit the bootleg card, a couple of cards have scan lines and they even used stickers for images so some cards have what appears to be a sticker and even includes the “Peel Here” outline but they are in fact not stickers. You even find that some of the cards were duplicated in the set so you have two cards with the same image but different card numbers.
These scan lines are on the card, not from a scanner

This card was duplicated from two cards on one, you can see images from another card over the Tusken Raider's left shoulder

 
Most of the cards can be found running around $5 with the “Formal Information” cards running quite a bit higher, with the #200 card being the most rare and in turn most expensive. Sealed packs can be found in the $25 range and I found some incomplete sets that were missing cards, including the “Formal Information” cards, selling for $600 each.



1 comment:

  1. I wonder where the images and text were from, maybe www.jawatrader.co.uk ?

    ReplyDelete