Hey kids, remember a time before VOD,
DVD and VHS, when you saw a movie at the cinema or drive-in and that
was it? Prior to the binge and purge mentality of the digital age, it
could take years before you'd see that film again in your living
room. When it finally made it to free-to-air television, you'd get a
jerky, pan-and-scan, watered down version, sometimes with whole
scenes or pages of dialogue missing. If you were lucky enough to own
a VCR you might even manage to tape it, sitting rigidly with your
thumb hovering over the pause button as you valiantly tried to skip the ads from the recording. That neutered rendition would become the
only version you knew, right up until the DVD revolution of the turn
of the century.
In the olden days, film novelisations,
soundtracks, Read-Along books on vinyl, souvenir magazines and
trading cards were some of the many ways you could relive your
cinematic experience in that dark period following a film's
theatrical run. Trading cards were a particular favourite. The smell
of the concrete hard bubble gum, the adrenalin rush of peeling back
the wax paper, the junkie's ever increasing desire for more, more,
even when every card in the pack was a soul crushing double.
There appeared to be no rhyme or reason
to which film or television show warranted a set of trading cards.
And more often than not, it was a film's sequel that produced the
trading card set rather than the superior original.
With this in mind (and with clearly too
much free time on my hands) I decided to right the wrongs of the past
and create my own trading cards for something that deserved it more
than, say, this abomination:
