Monday, February 7, 2011

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: Great Movie, Average Trading Cards.




The Good: Great images, Relatively inexpensive
The Bad: Pre-assembled nature turned off a lot of collectors, Dramatically overproduced, No bonus cards.
The Basics: A minimalist card set, the Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Cinema Collection set is average-at-best, but is one of the few in the Cinema Collection worth buying.


In the mid-1990s, SkyBox owned held the license to the Star Trek franchise for trading cards. In that time, they made the transition between the classic style of trading cards and a more modern look and feel to cards, which included glossier images and screen captures. They went from creating cards which used then-cutting-edge technology like holograms to the still-popular autographed trading cards. But not all of their endeavors were successful. Arguably one of their greatest failures was the Cinema Collection sets. While the sets could be bought together, they were individually sold as complete movie sets. One of those was Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

The Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country trading cards were released well after the release of the film and it was part of a substandard release that was available (originally) only directly through Fleer/SkyBox. Unfortunately for collectors, the sets were so overproduced that they became almost instantly worthless and now, on the secondary market, sets like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country have failed to retain any value.

Basics/Set Composition

The Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Cinema Collection trading card set is a boxed set of trading cards, focused entirely on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The set comes individually boxed in a box that was made special for the set. As such, there are no packs to open, no other cards for the set to fish around trying to find; the entire set is contained within the collector's box.

Those who bought directly from Fleer/SkyBox when the sets were originally released were given the opportunity to purchase the binders for the set, but ironically, those binders are now harder to find and far more valuable than the actual cards!

The Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Cinema Collection trading card set is comprised of seventy two cards and a survey card. Despite the popularity of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the way the card set - especially the some of the sets from weaker films - bombed prevented SkyBox from repeating the marketing exercise. SkyBox never again released a "Star Trek" product direct to consumers like this.

Common Cards

More than likely, SkyBox failed to sell as many sets of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Cinema Collection trading cards because of how expensive they were directly and as a result, they ended up dumping them to dealers who wanted to buy them at dirt cheap rates. The Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Cinema Collection trading card set is comprised of seventy-two cards. The cards are created using the widevision (theatrical framing) size of trading cards. All of the cards are oriented in landscape orientation.

With the Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Cinema Collection trading card cards, the consistent landscape orientation would have been fine, save that the set includes a card of the movie poster, laid out in portrait format. As a result, the movie poster card that has the credits for the film on the back is severely truncated.

The Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Cinema Collection trading card set includes a card with the credits for each movie, seventy trading cards plotting out each film and a checklist card.

The cards look phenomenal. To be fair to Fleer/Skybox, the cards utilize an incredible array of uncommon images, making them ideal for finding characters played by obscure actors who appear at Star Trek conventions! There are a few special effects shots and most cards have an additional - much smaller - image on the back. The writing is concise, accurate and incredibly detailed. In other words, for a set that was considered not strong enough to be released as a proper release, it sure has a lot going for it.

Chase Cards

The Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Cinema Collection trading card set does not have any bonus cards. The closest thing to a bonus card this set has is the Survey card. There were no real bonus cards; these are sold as fully assembled common card sets.

Non-Box/Pack Cards

Because the cards were sold exclusively as boxed sets, there were no promotional cards or cards not available in the boxes.

Overall

Terribly overproduced and blown out right before Fleer/SkyBox lost the license, the Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Cinema Collection trading cards remain one of the big failures of Star Trek trading cards, despite having good images. Found inexpensively, they are easy to recommend, but at the original issue price of $19.99, they are a big waste of money. Still, for fans of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, they make an amusing and enjoyable keepsake, but not much more than that. Serious card collectors will find them to be below average, but casual fans and those looking for Star Trek movie memorabilia will likely enjoy them just fine.

This set culls material from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which is reviewed here!

For other film-related trading cards, please check out my reviews of:
Batman Returns Movie Photo Cards
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Cinema Collection Cards
Twilight trading cards

6/10

For other card reviews, please visit my index page!

© 2011, 2010 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.



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