About Dutch gum cards

Dutch gum cards, filmisar in Swedish, are small picture cards of film stars, and later of TV and pop stars, sold to children across Europe from 1950. Many were printed in Holland, and the first ones came with a piece of chewing gum.

Years

1950–1983

Card size

about 45 × 67 mm

Sets

104

Cards

15,832

Names

2,094

What they are

A standard card measures about 4.5 × 7 cm and shows one star, sometimes two, with the name printed under the picture. Most cards carry a number, often with the letter or name of their set. A set usually runs to between 100 and 300 cards. The film companies supplied the photographs, and many cards print the studio's name beside the star's: MGM, 20th Cent Fox, W.B., Paramount.

The first sets were all film stars. From the mid-1960s TV and pop stars took over, led by the Beatles, and the last sets of the 1970s and early 1980s added cartoon figures, the Muppets, the Smurfs and Star Wars. Collectors usually count the star cards sold in Sweden from 1950 to about 1980 as filmisar proper, and keep the cartoon and film-themed sets as a group of their own.

How they were sold

In the first years, 1950 to 1952, a card was sold on its own with a flat piece of pink chewing gum, wrapped in waxed paper. The cards caught on so fast that by about 1952 they came in packs of ten without gum. In the late 1950s a pack cost about 50 öre.

Most packs were sold in tobacconists, the small shops that also sold sweets, newspapers and postcards. The packs stood in a metal rack by the counter, several sets at a time. A window in the wrapper showed the top card; the other nine were a surprise, and a pack could not be opened before it was paid for.

Some sets reached children in other ways. Cards of the 1952 A–F Set Unnumbered came one to a small bag of popcorn around 1956. The 1957 Studio Set 2 Autographs and 1957 Studio Set 1 Symbols were also packed in boxes of cornflakes, the 1961 A Set (Sans Serif) was sold as a bingo game with boards and loose cards, and 1966 The Saint (Printed in Denmark) came one card at a time with bubble gum. Shops, cafés and clubs handed cards out as small gifts with their name stamped on the back, and an amusement park prize stall in Stockholm used cards as tickets: a word written on the back told what you had won.

From black and white to colour

Every card from 1950 to 1952 was black and white. Around the turn of 1952–53 the publishers changed to colour: black-and-white photographs were painted by hand to look like colour photographs, the method the colour weeklies already used. Buyers wanted colour at once, and black and white went out of fashion almost overnight.

Many early pictures came back coloured. The 1952 Serie B (Colored) repeats the 64 cards of the 1951 Serie B in colour under the same numbers, and most of the pictures in the 1950 Serie A reappear, coloured and renumbered, in the 1952 Numbered Set 7 (1-198).

Where they were made

Holland and Belgium were probably the largest producers, and many sets sold in Sweden carry the words "Printed in Holland". Many others were made in Sweden and Denmark. Our catalogue records where 23 of the 104 sets were printed: 15 in Holland, 6 in Sweden and 2 in Denmark.

The same pictures were often printed in several countries. Dutch and Belgian printings are usually on thin paper. The Swedish editions are on thicker card with a glossy front, which collectors call laminate, and the same card often exists both glossy and plain. Some sets were also issued in Finland, with a chewing-gum advertisement on the back; those versions were not sold in Sweden.

The boom years

The peak came from 1957 or 1958 to 1963. Most sets were issued in these years, many of them in large print runs, so their cards are the most common today. Popular sets were printed several times, which is why one number can exist in different colours, or glossy and plain. The rock craze helped: in 1958 Sweden argued over whether Elvis Presley or Tommy Steele was the king of rock, and both appeared on large numbers of cards, Elvis most of all.

From 1965 to 1969 came large runs of unnumbered pop and western cards, and in the 1970s numbered pop cards, sold in packs of seven or eight as swap cards, until about 1980. The ten-card wrapper stayed in use, little changed, until the early 1980s.

Telling the sets apart

The picture alone rarely identifies a card. The makers reused the same photograph in several sets and changed only the colouring, the crop or a small detail, and some sets follow another set's numbering closely. The small print settles most cases: what stands next to the number. Collectors sort the sets into six broad kinds:

• Serie sets print "Serie" and a letter, as in "SERIE B No. 12".
• Letter sets put a letter beside the number without the word Serie: "K 106", "S 35".
• Mixed sets use two-letter codes or named runs: CA, PA, HB, BA, Star Bilder A–E, TV, TEVE.
• Number sets print only a number, and are told apart by where it sits and how it is set: left or right, large or small, in a circle, in a black box.
• Name cards have no number at all, only the name, sometimes as a printed signature or with a record company logo.
• Pop and western cards from 1965 on, unnumbered at first, then numbered in the 1970s.

Every set page here shows how its numbers are printed and the sets it is easily confused with. The full list is in the series index.

Rarity and condition

The first sets, from 1950 to 1954, were printed in smaller numbers than the later ones and are scarcer today; the sets of the boom years are the common ones. Inside a set some numbers can be much harder than the rest, often for reasons nobody knows. On a double number, where one number was printed with two different pictures, the second picture is often much scarcer than the first. A few sets printed in Holland, among them the 1964 Serie A (Printed in Holland) and the 1965 Serie G (Printed in Holland), are hard in every number.

The cards were cheap and handled by children, so soft corners and edge wear are normal, and even a common card is hard to find in like-new condition. The paper of most cards has yellowed with age, and some sets had a greyish tone even when new. A stamp or a handwritten word on the back usually comes from how the card was given away. Copies of a few rare cards have been made: paper that looks newer and whiter than the original, on a card in perfect condition, is the usual warning sign.

About this site

dutchgumcards.com lists every set card by card, with the number, the name, the film studio where the card prints one, and photos as we find them. It is run by retroallover, a vintage card shop in Gothenburg, Sweden, that sells on eBay; we have 4,284 of the cards in stock. A card page links to our listing when we have the card, otherwise to the cheapest copy another seller has on eBay. Card pages give a value: what a copy in EX condition sells for on Buy It Now, worked out from recorded sales of the card, adjusted for the condition each copy was sold in, and from how wanted the star and how hard the card is. Each value says what it rests on, and the hardest cards that have not sold show "rarely sold" instead of a figure.

The history on this page and the notes on the set pages are written in our own words from En värld av filmisar! by Bo Öfwerlund (Premium förlag, 2018), a collector's guide to the cards sold in Sweden from 1950 to 1980.

Our cards ship worldwide with tracking for one flat $9.95 per order, however many cards. Links to eBay are affiliate links via the eBay Partner Network.

Contact

Questions about a card, a set or an order? Write to retroallover@gmail.com. The fastest way to reach us about a listing is the eBay message button on that listing. New cards and short videos also go out on Instagram @dutchgumcards, YouTube @retroallover, TikTok @retroallover, Pinterest retroallover and Instagram @retroallover.

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