[YouTube] Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Fan Club Photos & Topps Stickers

https://youtu.be/SWaQ_0RKZFM

This is a look at a few Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back items that I believe I acquired via mail-in promotions. There isn't a lot to say about them, they're simply cool to look at. The four 8" x 11" photos are from the Star Wars Fan Club in 1980 and I'm fairly certain that the movie logo patch is from that as well. What I don't know is where I got the last item from. It's a sheet of Topps trading card stickers from The Empire Strikes Back Series 2 set. My best guess is that Topps had a mail-in offer to get all of the stickers on a single sheet, and my parents ordered it. Maybe it involved sending in some wrapper and money for postage? It's also very possible that it was part of the fan club package too. I've done many Google searches and wasn't able to find any information on this. It looks like an uncut sheet of stickers, however, it's not thick enough to be card stock. The actual trading card stickers could be flipped over to create the film's poster which can be seen multiple times on the back of this sheet.

While there really isn't a need for a video of these items, I made one anyway because I've not made many videos lately and it was an easy one to put together. I did edit the photos a little bit, so the scans look better than what you'll see in the video.

1980 Star Wars Fan Club

1980 Topps Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Series 2 Sticker Sheet

May the 4th be with you!

11/11/25 UPDATE: I found a couple ads in old issues of Starlog magazine about the Star Wars fan club. That first ad shows the patch I have, but I don't recall receiving the Bantha Tracks newsletter.

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi Foldout No. 2

I'm not entirely sure what to call this; it's part magazine and part poster. It's labeled number two so there is at least one other. The first section discusses the film's production, including the creation of the Ewok costumes and casting the Ewoks. It goes on to detail how the creatures in Jabba's palace were designed and has a walkthrough of those movie scenes. On the back are a variety of "strange facts" that aren't too strange but they are interesting. Once the magazine is completely opened up, the other side features a poster of Wicket W. Warrick.

LucasArts/Lucasfilm Games: The Adventurer - Spring 1991

As part of Star Wars Day and Lucasfilm's 50th anniversary, I've scanned the complete Spring 1991 issue of The Adventurer from LucasArts/Lucasfilm Games. This was a quarterly newsletter for fans that was printed on newspaper. It's rather big and not easy to scan, and was a bit too wide for the copier I used. While there is some skewed text due to the paper being wavy, all of the articles are legible. I do own the Fall 1991 issue as well and scanned that at the same time but I'll post that one at a later date. This issue has a surprising spelling error seeing how this is from the maker of Star Wars. On page 11 two of the image captions spell Obi-Wan Kenobi as Kenobe!

Year 5: January Update

NFL/McDonald's
1986 Promotion 

The fifth year of the blog has begun! I'm not sure how much I'll keep up on things which I know I keep saying in the monthly updates. Once 2020 wound down I ended up getting pulled into Assassin's Creed Valhalla and put a lot of my free time into that before completing it about two weeks ago. Now I'm taking a break before jumping into another long game. I should probably get around to completing the G.I. Joe game and maybe some others that are likely on the short side. Right now, I don't have any videos in the works. I've got an idea for baseball's opening day but nothing for the Super Bowl. While sports isn't a focus of the blog, I try to tie a few things into some of my favorite events and I do own a lot of sports video games and other sports-themed things from the '80s and '90s.

Being January, there hasn't been a whole lot of video game news to report on. LucasArts did announce a new Star Wars game in development at Ubisoft and a new Indiana Jones game being developed by MachineGames. No specifics were unveiled and I'd expect neither will be released for at least a couple years. This year's video game schedule doesn't look too appealing to myself, though there is still the upcoming launch of the Intellivision Amico. In case anyone doesn't know, Nintendo platinum points expire. I recently received an email that I have a few expiring and after viewing my account it looks like I've had more than 1,000 points expire in the past so I don't know why this is the first time I've been alerted to that. They can be spent on digital or physical items, and it appears some of the physical rewards don't stick around too long. Currently there are 13 out-of-stock listings, Pikmin decals, some Mario-themed things, and a couple Hyrule Warriors rewards.

How about some Star Wars toy news because we can never have too many different versions of Star Wars action figures, can we? Lucasfilm is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and to mark the occasion is releasing a series of new Star Wars action figures in classically styled packaging. The first three will be Obi-Wan Kenobi, Greedo, and a Jawa, and they'll be exclusive to Amazon.com at a price of $19.99 each on May 1st.

Thanks for stopping by,

Jonathan

Gaming Holiday Cards

This post is about greeting cards game companies sent to the press, most are from many years ago. Unfortunately, I only have a few so I wasn't sure if I should share them. In fact, I skipped writing a post about them the last two Decembers before finally deciding to post them this year because even if they aren't too interesting where else would anyone really get to see them, you know, on the off chance someone wants to. Back in the early 2000s my employer received many cards but most were eventually thrown in the trash by my co-workers. I was able to hold onto a few and while we're still in business, nobody sends us physical cards these days. Once in a while a company does send a link to a digital card like this year's from Capcom: Happy Holidays featuring Monster Hunter. Not sure how long that link will be active so I grabbed a screenshot which fails to display that the snowflakes are dropping down the screen. Digital cards are easy to share so I expect this one and others are posted to social media for the public as well.

First up is Sammy Studios which has the most boring card because it is just a regular greeting card. It does look nice and at least some folks signed it but an original card with game-related art would have been more fun. 

The second card is from former publisher Southpeak and defunct developer Renegade Kid. While the other cards are probably all from around 2000-03 (none are actually dated), this one is likely from 2010 based on the game being promoted.

Next up is one from Sony Computer Entertainment America with the PlayStation controller button icons representing snowflakes. It's a very shiny card that looks quite nice in person but not too good when scanned. That very blue image is the scan where the gray parts should actually be white and the blue is silver when it's not reflecting other colors. I'm adding a couple photos to try and give a more accurate look at it. I do like the appearance of this card quite a bit but nobody signed it! What's up with that, Sony? 

Last is a long foldout card with four panels on each side.This one isn't gaming specific as it represents the many divisions of George Lucas' companies back whenever this card was made: Lucasfilm Ltd., Lucasfilm Animation Ltd., Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound, LucasArts, Lucas Online, and Lucas Licensing. It is signed by six people who I will assume were all public relations representatives at LucasArts. 

Before ending this post I decided to see if any old holiday card links are still active and I found Atlus' 2016 and 2017 digital cards. Both feature a few rotating photos of the Atlus (and Sega in 2017) sales and marketing team. Here are a couple screen grabs of just a single photo from each and, like the Capcom card above, the snow does move if you visit the links.