24K Gold Card (Jabba the Hutt & Han Solo) from Authentic Images

In 1997 a company called Authentic Images put out a series of 24K gold cards featuring images from the three original Star Wars movies. This one is from A New Hope and features the infamous scene between the computer-generated Jabba and Han Solo. The card itself is quite thin as you might expect (I imagine the actual amount of gold in it is very small), so it’s encased in a thick slab of acrylic to protect it. It comes in a leather (?) case that does lend it a bit of class, especially since the card in the case weighs about a pound and a half.

It’s not easy to take pictures of a polished gold surface under a layer of acrylic, so I’m not sure I can convey what it really looks like, but in person it looks fairly nice.

And I guess it’s impressive that they were able to replicate a photo in gold the way they did. I don’t really understand how they went about it.

That said, I don’t get what they were going for with this product line. Why make photo cards out of gold? Who was buying these things, anyway? And to use the terrible CGI version of Jabba is the very definition of polishing a turd. I believe these originally sold for around $100, but I got this one for less than $20, so like many of the high-end items from the late 90s, it hasn’t held its value very well. I do still want to get the one depicting Jabba from Return of the Jedi, but I’m a little mystified by this whole idea.