Merlin - UK/France/Germany/Italy - Special Edition (1997)

The only regular size card set created to commemorate the Star Wars Special Edition, the Merlin cards make a great addition to any collection. The 125 card set features photos from all three movies, following the plot line of each film. In addition, special subsets focus on the movies main characters, and some of the more important vehicles from the films.

Merlin cards were issued in the United Kingdom, Italy (in Italian), France (in French), and Germany (in German). The Merlin company is a subsidiary of Topps, and did an overall great job on this set, despite some quirky errors. It can be hoped that Europe will again have a chance to collect Star Wars cards from Merlin during the release of the new films. The English language version of these cards were fairly widely available in the US through select card distributors, and at reasonable prices. The sets in other languages were much more difficult to collect.

Each card features the Special Edition logo in one corner. Card backs have the Merlin logo, text describing a scene from the movie, and a smaller photo related to the scene on the front of the card. Character and Vehicle cards feature additional information about your favorite characters, and some of the many vehicles that helped make the movies so great. The character and vehicle cards were favorites of mine, and I was lucky enough to have one autographed at the Chicago ComiCon in 1997.

This set had no chase cards, although three case topper cards were created. These cards were oversized cards numbered P1 - P3. I would like to thank Brad Harvey for providing the descriptions of these cards. They are listed at the end of the checklist.

The list below uses the card descriptions as given on the Merlin UK checklist. These descriptions contain spelling errors and other mistakes that have been left in tact. Where important, these errors have been noted in parenthesis.