As an exercise in graphic design, and also just because I wanted to, I sometimes make mock trading cards for media I enjoy.

Occasionally, when a movie is released, as promotion they might put out a series of trading cards. These tend to be incredibly similar to baseball cards, except with movie characters or stills instead of ball players. Its a practice that’s all but extinct today; aside from star wars I cant think of a single movie in the past decade that released alongside a trading card series (there are no doubt a few, but none i am familiar with.) In the eighties and nineties (and even several decades prior) though, this was far from uncommon, and it wasn’t exclusive to movies either. They released series of JFK trading cards, Jaws 2 cards, The Flying Nun cards, Close Encounters with the Third Kind cards, A (poorly aged) series about various terrorist attacks, Super Mario Bros movie 1993 cards, etc.