Vintage 1993 Marilyn Monroe Trading Card Set 💋 Sports Time 100-Card Complete Series I Hollywood Cards

Remember Marilyn Monroe Trading Cards? 💋 A complete 1993 Marilyn Monroe card set

Size: 3 3/4" x 2 1/2" ~ These are complete sets sold as new old stock — never assembled into an album or worked through as a collection.

This is the complete 100-card "MARILYN" set issued in 1993 by Sports Time Card Company, Inc., licensed by the Estate of Marilyn Monroe. Every card front is wrapped in a marbled slate blue-gray border, with the word MARILYN in big tall capitals (silver on some cards, bright white or purple on others) and a gold facsimile of her own signature stamped over the image. The backs carry MONROE in silver caps, a numbered position running the full 1 through 100, a second photo, and a paragraph of trivia written for the release, with the credit line printed right on the card stock: "Design © 1993 The Estate of Marilyn Monroe. All Rights Reserved. [signature] & MARILYN™ are trademarks of the Estate of Marilyn Monroe. Represented by The Roger Richman Agency, Inc., Beverly Hills, CA. Photo courtesy of Silver Screen Photo Library." Sports Time also ran a mail-order "Collectors Club" alongside the regular release, and followed this set with a Series 2 in 1995 numbered 101 through 200 — a separate release, not part of what's in this set.

🌴 The Beverly Hills agency behind the gold signature

That "Represented by The Roger Richman Agency" line is there because of a real piece of legal history. Roger Richman founded his Beverly Hills licensing agency in 1978, and the turning point came in 1979, when the estate of W.C. Fields asked him to go after companies using Fields' image without paying his heirs. Richman took it on, and helped push through California's Celebrities Rights Act, signed in 1984, which gave a person's name, image and likeness real legal protection even after death — prompted in part by a 1979 court ruling in a similar dispute over Bela Lugosi's image. Marilyn Monroe's estate came under his agency's representation roughly twenty years after her death, right around when this set was made. The gold foil signature stamped on every card here exists because of exactly that licensing framework.

🎞️ Norma Jeane, discovered

Card 23 in this set tells the origin story: Marilyn was "discovered" by Army photographer David Conover, who was shooting a young war worker for a magazine piece, and she was soon modeling for him at "the princely sum of five dollars an hour." The card places this in 1945 at a Burbank aviation plant; the more commonly documented account has Conover photographing her in 1944 at the Radioplane munitions factory in Van Nuys, where she was building drone parts before she left the factory in January 1945 to start modeling full time. Either way, it's the same young woman, a handful of years from becoming Marilyn Monroe.

Card 22 is the fun one. It asks, "Notice anything Tinker-Bellish about Marilyn?" and says the character from Walt Disney's Peter Pan — "originally a beam of light," in the card's words — was given "a Marilyn / human appearance" by the animators at Disney's behest. I love that the card gets the beam-of-light part exactly right: when J.M. Barrie's play opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in London on December 27, 1904, Tinker Bell was nothing but a darting little circle of light, bounced onto the stage from a small mirror held in someone's hand off in the wings, and her voice was a collar of bells, plus two special ones Barrie brought from Switzerland. Disney's animators drew her for the 1953 film, and the Marilyn story has been told about her for decades — though the live-action model Disney animator Marc Davis mainly worked from was a dancer and actress named Margaret Kerry, not Monroe.

🖋️ What's on the cards you're holding

Card 20 in this set describes her as "the temptress," noting how she kept showing up for the publicity shoots she enjoyed even after her film career had peaked. Between the gold-signed fronts and the trivia-packed backs, this set does what a good trading card set should — it hands you a little piece of her story, card by numbered card.