Vintage 1994 Doctor Who Cybermen Foil Trading Card 🤖 Card 5 of 6

Cybermen on Foil? 🤖 Vintage 1994 Doctor Who Trading Card, Card 5 of 6

Size: 2 1/2" x 3 1/2"

Ever wonder who was inside those silver suits, and why the early Cybermen sounded so strange? This 1994 Cornerstone foil card tells you. CYBERMEN! on the front with the Doctor Who diamond logo, LIVES AND TIMES OF THE CYBERMEN on the back, marked FOIL 5. Every one I have is new old stock and never circulated.

🧵 Sandra Reid's costumes

The card starts with Sandra Reid, the costume designer who built the first Cybermen from Kit Pedler's script. She had hardly any time or money, and she wasn't happy with what she came up with for The Tenth Planet - the suits were hot and heavy and miserable for the actors under the studio lights. So she redid them top to bottom for The Moonbase, and tweaked them again for The Tomb of the Cybermen. Designers kept changing the look over the years, a little and a lot, but every one of them kept the jug handles on the sides of the helmet. Sandra Reid had never designed for science fiction before the Cybermen. She goes by Alexandra Tynan now; she left the BBC in 1968, moved to Australia and spent her career teaching costume, fashion and textiles.

🎙️ The men inside, and the voices

The early Cybermen were played by actors like Reg Whitehead - the card calls him the perennial Cyberman of those years - Harry Brooks and Gregg Palmer, but they didn't do their own voices. Roy Skelton and Peter Hawkins did, the same two who gave the Daleks their voices. The first Cybermen didn't really talk in a monotone; they had odd, unnatural jumps in pitch, and later on the actors wore mechanical gadgets in their mouths to change how they sounded.

The fine print on the back reads: © 1994, Cornerstone Communications, Inc. Doctor Who Diamond Logo © BBC, 1973. Licensed by BBC Enterprises. Doctor Who is a trademark of the British Broadcasting Corporation and is used under license. Cybermen © Kit Pedler & Gerry Davis, 1994.

📦 Where it fits

Cornerstone Communications put out four series of Doctor Who cards between 1994 and 1996. Series 1 was 110 cards, ten to a pack, with six foil villain cards - three Daleks, three Cybermen - and a seventh, Davros, said to have come only in the factory set. FOIL 5 is the middle Cybermen card, between the scientist who invented them and the story editor who co-wrote them.

🤖 About these

Keep it in a sleeve with your Who cards, put it beside a Cyberman figure, or give it to the fan in your life who can name every regeneration. The supply is finite - nobody's printing 1994 Cornerstone foils again, and once these last uncirculated ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire. Like everything I sell, they're stored in the dark at a steady 72°F and under 40% humidity.