lazypadawan's Holocron

You can now pre-order internet exclusive Express Mail envelopes from http://www.uspsjedimaster.com...you can't buy these at the post office and they come in packets of three. In case you're nuts enough to want to actually send something in them, the packages are pre-paid, meaning you just drop them at the post office and away they go.

The bad news? The three-envelope set is $48.75. That's right...fifty bucks for envelopes. Cool envelopes, but envelopes nonetheless and ones most collectors are unlikely to use. Bummer.

But the sheets of stamps go on pre-sale April 25 and those will be $6.15 apiece.

Here's AP's story:

http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=256562>1=7701

And here's USPS's updated site with sound fx and stuff:

http://www.uspsjedimaster.com/main/splash.html

It looks like Darth Vader is winning the favorite stamp tally. The stamps are all cool actually. I think the set is fantastic. The AP article says they'd considered issuing a SW stamp as part of its century retrospective series back in the 1990s. Actually, at the time I wondered how USPS could completely miss the SW phenomenon. But I think that it turned out to be for the best. I'd rather have a SW series all to itself, featuring the saga as a whole.

Right now the only stuff they're going to sell from this series are the stamps themselves, the special Express Mail packaging, and an individual stamp featuring the winner of the USPS poll. I remember when they did the Star Trek stamps some years back, there were piles o' spinoff merchandise. In the 1990s, the USPS went crazy with that sort of thing. Now, not so much. We'll have to see.