Trading Card Spotlight- Star Trek The Original Series In Motion

Item Name: Star Trek The Original Series In Motion Trading Cards
Manufacturer: Rittenhouse Archives



The Rundown: I love Star Trek trading cards, don't you? Well if you don't, you should. They are awesome. There have been some really sweet sets over the years, with Rittenhouse Archives being responsible for the bulk of them. Today we'll look at one of their earliest efforts- Star Trek TOS In Motion. The set was released back in 1999, with a retail price of $4.99 per pack (3 cards per pack, 20 packs per box).



The first thing you'll notice with these is the size. These puppies are much larger than your average trading cards, with an overall size of 5" x 7". While it makes the images a little easier to look at, the larger size is a little strange and it's makes it weird to think of these as trading cards. The only reason I can see for them being this big is to accommodate the lenticular effect. Check it out-



Tilt the card and you get the appearance of movement, thus "In Motion". While the effect is cool, it's a bit on the "herky-jerky" side. This set is over 10 years old now though and Rittenhouse has greatly improved this technology since this early release.



You can store your set in this nifty binder! The binder is a bit wider than your average card binder to accomodate the larger card size, and includes 15 2-pocket pages to hold the cards. The back of the binder has a checklist showcasing which cards are in the set:



The basic set consists of 24 cards covering 12 different episodes (2 cards per episode). Not really sure why Rittenhouse chose to only go with 12 or why they chose to have 2 cards for each of those episodes (instead of 1 card per episode covering 24 different episodes). Some of the episode choices are pretty odd too, like putting in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" instead of "Arena".



There's also 8 "Sound In Motion" cards supplementing the basic set. These cards not only have the same lenticular effect seen on the regular cards, but also feature a sound effect! The sound cards are a bit thicker to house the electronics necessary for this, making them even more difficult to classify as trading cards. The effect is awesome on these though-



Man, is that cool. 6 sound cards were randomly inserted in packs, 1 came with the binder, and 1 was a case topper. It's pretty difficult to put this set together, and it's tougher still to find ones that still work (though I guess it would be possible to get in there and switch out the batteries).

The set is rounded out with a 3 card "DeForest Kelley In Memoriam" subset. All 3 of these cards were limited to 500 pieces and feature a different shot of McCoy on the front. I don't actually own one of these yet, but if I ever do, I'll update the post.



For an early effort, the set is pretty neat, but the small amount of episodes covered and the large size knocks these out of the "must-have" category. I'm really glad that Rittenhouse moved away from this size on some of their later "Motion" releases and made them standard size. The sound cards are way cool though, and it's worth trying to track one of those down just for the novelty.

-James