By David Wharton | 7 years ago

These days you can find more information about your favorite things in 10 minutes with an internet connection than you could in 10 hours in the days before we all purchased real estate along the information superhighway. Today sites like GFR fill a space once occupied by genre magazines, convention hype, and word of mouth. I’ll admit, I do occasionally pine for the days when running across some juicy new rumor in a dog-eared copy of Starlog felt like unearthing the Ark of the Covenant. Another very cool source to get your geek fix in the pre-internet days of yore was collector’s items such as the Star Trek trading cards released by Topps in the ‘70s. They’re the subject of a book titled Star Trek: The Original Topps Trading Cards Series, and the folks at io9 shared some great artwork from the collection which you can see throughout this post. After a brief period of intense examination, we can confirm that they’re 100% awesome.

The Star Trek Topps trading cards were published in 1976. The base set of 88 cards included included images from the show along with info on the flip side digging into the show’s characters and mythology. They included all sorts of awesome titles such as “The Phaser – Tomorrow’s Weapon” and “The Purple Barrier” and “Trapped by the Lizard Creature.” Also, I’d like to go on record as saying that “Arena” should definitely be retroactively retitled “Trapped by the Lizard Creature.” Let’s make it happen, people.

The set also included “chase cards” in the form of 22 different stickers. Each set of the cards would include five cards and one of the stickers. Among other things, the chase cards seemed to be heavily into both Mr. Spock and exclamation marks — they included such gems as “Mr. Spock — Unearthly!” “Spock Lives!” and “Spock Forever!” Incidentally, “Spock Forever!” is the name of my Leonard Nimoy-themed ska band.

Honestly, the set’s existence would be completely justified even if the only card it ever produced was this gem.

Everything! Is More Fun! When Shouted!

You can dig deeper into the history of the Topps Star Trek cards — and all the other Trek card sets over the decades — in the exhaustively detailed Star Trek Collector’s Information Portal. Or you can pick up the book right here.