John Player & Sons Film Stars

I don’t usually post “look what I got” posts but I have a feeling that my forays into pre-war issues will be the exception to this rule. There are tons of pre-war cards sets out there covering all kinds of subject matter. In many ways each checklist is a cool and interesting example of the kinds of things that were deemed collectable and represent a snapshot of popular culture of some sort at the time. Now though a lot of that stuff is only interesting for what it says about the past and doesn’t hold much of any current cultural interest.

Those sets though that do retain cultural interest though are super cool and hard to resist when I encounter them at a decent price. For example:

Yeah. I just got a set of John Player and Sons Player’s Cigarettes Film Stars. This is the 1938 Third Series. I love this design with the painted portraits and facsimile autographs.  And the checklist is wonderful with a bunch of 1930s film stars who capture that late-30s era when 3-strip Technicolor and the end of the depression gave us a number of films that still make up our visual literacy.

Being a 1938 set puts this release after Adventures of Robin Hood but before Gone with the Wind. The three Robin Hood stars—Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Basil Rathbone—are highlights of this set for me. Robin Hood is one of the first classic films I watched on the big screen at the Stanford Theatre when I was a kid and it’s one I’ve already made sure to show my kids as well.

The backs are also interesting. I enjoy seeing what studios people are with (and who’s without a studio). The bios are pretty bland but frequently include birth names vs Hollywood names. It’s also nice to see real birthdates and, for many of the actors, heights and weights.

Anyway supercool. Superfun to look through and read. I’m very happy to have these in my collection and will enjoy looking at them again and again.