Japanese Bromide "Box" Bust: Star Super Idols

Yesterday, I mentioned life photographs, which I'm sure I'll revisit in a future post. But I alluded to their precursors, bromides. Bromides actually go back about 100 years, and the earliest known Japanese baseball cards are actually bromides. They are essentially photographs, sometimes with text included in the photo image or printed on the back. Once idols got really popular in Japan, companies started issuing bromides of popular celebrities, seemingly without any form of permission.

These days, most bromides are authorized, though they're still distributed in tabas, which are essentially covers. I picked up a few tabas of "Star Super Idol" at a really good price last year, but they've sat on my shelf for over half a year. It's time they were opened.

I didn't take a picture, but the back has a sample taped to it. There was also a smaller pack with some display cards - I'll be keeping those five peach-colored die-cut display racks for future use, somewhere. As you can see, the original price was 30 yen, which is quite steep if you ask me. Each taba pack has 30 cards inside, one per paper envelope.

 There's no text on any of the cards. The image quality is pretty low - I think many of the images were taken from TV broadcasts.

 And I have no idea who these girls are. It seems that there is only one group, or possibly a couple groups.

 If those costumes look familiar, that's because many of the images seem to come from the same broadcast. And this is what makes me feel they just ripped the images from a TV show.

A majority of the images on the two-sided cards are horizontal, but there are some vertical shots too. I don't know what a full set includes, but I ended up with 37 unique cards. And I don't think any of the images on the taba cover appear anywhere in the set.