Here are my problems with these:
1) They look like lobby card images that were "married" to 11x14 stills. The "top" portion does not look like any 11x14 still I have ever seen, but it looks like many lobby cards of the period. I have never seen the "bottom" portion on any lobby card, but have seen such bottoms on lots of stills of this period.
2) The NSS info appears falsified. The cards have an NSS number of "780270". I checked "THE BOOK" and the highest assigned NSS number in 1978 was 780212. This corresponds nicely to our recorded database, where the highest number we ever recorded was 780196 (We also have had five different stills that were hand stamped 7805XX, so they probably only used higher numbers for handstamping. It sounds to me like these are fakes, and that they used a number they thought was reasonable (not realizing there was a way to check it).
3) At least two long time Halloween collectors have never seen even one of these "U.S. Halloween lobby cards". Nor I have ever seen one, nor has any other dealer who does not live in a certain part of the U.S.
4) I HAVE sold an Australian lobby card for Halloween (go to http://www.emovieposter.com/temp/australian_lc_halloween.jpg to view it). Its image is the same as one of the "U.S." lobby cards, but there is no ratings box, and no white bottom portion.
I highly suspect an unscrupulous individual located an Australian lobby card set, and took it to a printer and added a ratings box and married the images to a bottom portion from a still from 1978 (first changing the NSS info). With a good scanner, an Australian lobby card set, any 1978 lobby card with an R rating against a black background, and a 1978 still, one could do the "pre-press" work in around an hour. The printer might charge a few dollars per set to print them.
The person who had them printed could surely find a dealer to buy lots of them (from another "warehouse find") and before long they could be selling these "sets" every day on eBay for $50 or more each. eBay would not care, and the buyers would not learn until it was too late that they had bought suspected reproductions, and they could not get a refund (and they might be threatened with a lawsuit if they talked about what happened).
Of course I can't "prove" the above. This is my expert opinion. I invite each of you to make up your own mind. But if these sets go unchallenged, don't be surprised if each week brings more and more new suspect sets, and it won't be long before collectors start abandoning the hobby in droves. All it takes for thieves to survive is for honest people to stand by and do nothing.
I would like to see these cards in person. I would be very surprised if they were printed on "minty white paper" (glossy on front and back) as I assume that people will grow wiser over time, even unscrupulous people. But I would still imagine that there might be ways to tell if the paper is 25 years old or not, and also to see if the printing quality is equal to that of other cards of that period.
Bruce Hershenson
eMoviePoster.com
