Upper Deck has the Hasbro licence now, and the first thing it is doing with it is ours. The debut product is a 40th anniversary trading card set for The Transformers: The Movie, announced from Carlsbad on August 26. It is going to Target and nowhere else.

Target has the hanger box up already at $19.99. The listing carries Upper Deck’s own copy: a complete 10-card base set plus 2 additional insert cards. So twelve cards for twenty dollars. The same promise is printed on the box and on the foil pack inside it. We appreciate that. You know what you are getting while you are still standing at the peg.

It is not buyable yet. Both Add to Cart controls are disabled and the page reads Out of stock. That is what a Target product page looks like when it has been built ahead of its on-sale date.

The autograph, and the week it arrived in

The card we are all going to chase is printed on the front of the pack: “LOOK FOR PETER CULLEN AS OPTIMUS PRIME AUTOGRAPH CARDS!”

Upper Deck put that announcement out on August 26. Peter Cullen died on August 26, at home in Los Angeles, at 85. The release reads exactly like a document written before anybody knew, because it is one. There is nothing in it about his death.

We are not going to dress that up as an angle. It only means these cards arrive in a different week than Upper Deck planned for, and a card with his name signed across it is a different object today than it was on Tuesday.

The line in the fine print

Under the autograph callout, in small type on the pack and on the box, sits this: “*MAY CONTAIN TIME-SENSITIVE REDEMPTIONS”.

A redemption is not a card. It is a voucher you send back to the manufacturer, and the real card ships later, once the signer has signed it. The word Upper Deck chose to print is “time-sensitive”, which is how the hobby says the voucher comes with a deadline on it. Normally that is a footnote nobody reads.

This week it is the thing to understand before you buy. Upper Deck has published nothing about how the Cullen autographs are being handled, and we are not going to guess. What we can tell you is that the packaging itself says redemptions may be in there, and that is worth asking about before you spend twenty dollars a pack chasing one.

What the cards actually look like

Three Upper Deck Transformers cards side by side: an Optimus Prime Special Edition card and a Megatron Special Edition card, both on red starburst backgrounds, flanking a Bumblebee Stellar System insert on a galaxy backdrop, beside a Transformers The Movie 40 Years 1986 to 2026 badge.

Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Megatron, from Upper Deck’s own announcement art.

The base cards are marked SPECIAL EDITION in the corner and sit on a red ray-burst doing its level best to be a 1986 one-sheet, and I think they have got it! The Bumblebee is the other thing in every box. That is the Stellar System insert series, which puts our characters against a galaxy backdrop (Upper Deck’s phrase, and for once it matches the card). Every box carries the complete base set, so the chase sits entirely in the parallels, the inserts and the signatures.

The bigger set is the hobby one

The Target box is not the whole plan. Later this year we get a second and much larger Transformers: The Movie 40th set under the Fleer name, and the sell sheet has already gone out to shops.

Fleer sell sheet for The Transformers: The Movie 40th Anniversary trading card set, listing 6 cards per pack, 6 packs per box, 20 boxes per case, a 100-card base set of 65 characters and 35 scenes, and the pack, box, case and chase odds.

The Fleer sell sheet. Its own footer says the product is shown for demonstration and is subject to change, so read the numbers as a plan rather than a promise.

That sheet is where the arithmetic lives. Six cards per pack, six packs per box, twenty boxes per case, against a 100-card base set covering 65 characters and 35 scenes. Per pack you average 4 base cards, 1 Light Blue parallel and 1 insert or chase. Per box, one G1 Introductions card. The case hits are Fallen Comrades, The Matrix of Leadership, voice actor autographs and serial numbered cards. The real chases are a 1-of-1 G1 Introductions Black parallel and single or dual autograph cards.

The inserts are the part I keep going back to. “From Screen to Page” is built on artwork from the 20th anniversary IDW comic run. “More Than Meets the Eye” is flip lenticular, so a character turns from robot to vehicle in your hand. “Instruments of Destruction” is 3D lenticular and belongs to the Decepticons. Lenticular cards were the thing we all wanted and never got in 1986!

When, exactly

Nobody has nailed this down, so here is what the primary source actually says. Upper Deck’s release has the set coming “in September” and mentions Transformers Day on September 17 in the same sentence. It does not say the set drops on the 17th. Several writeups this week have printed September 17 as the on-sale date. It may well turn out to be right. But Upper Deck has not said it, and Target’s listing carries no date at all.

It has been a heavy month for this film either way. The 40th anniversary DVD is dated for October 13, the post-credits chapter lands with the theatrical return in September, and now we have cards. Forty years on, the 1986 movie is still the thing this whole franchise organises itself around.

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