Have you ever paid much attention to the small announcements written on your calendars? I don’t usually.  You might glance at it once and see something like ‘July 10th: Kidney Stone Awaremess Day” or something like that.  The calendar I on the end table in my living room is not much different. Glancing at it now, I see October 2nd was ‘Senior Citizen Day.’  But earlier tonight I saw something written on it that caught my attention. It says under October 27th that the Korean Movie Stamp Series will be released that day. Seeing as this particular calendar was picked up for free at the local post office, it is not surprising that it has stamp news. What was surprising to me was written under the announcement. It says ? ?? ?? which means it is the fourth in a set. What?  Why didn’t I know about the others? When were they released? And can I still get my hands on them?  I don’t collect stamps, but these just seem like something I might like to have. A quick look at the search engines Daum and Naver revealed some information and images of the earlier released sets. What I found is listed below the image…

The image above is from the first series released back in 2007. It consists of stills from four films made during the Occupied Era. Arirang (1926), Ownerless Ferryboat (1932), Looking For Love (1926) and The Story of Chunhyang (1923).  Set Two featured films of the 50s/60s: Mother and the Houseguest (1961), Coachman (1961),  Wedding Day (1956) and Seaside Village (1965). Set Three is four films from the 70s–Yalgae: High School Joker (1976), March of Fools (1975), Winter Woman (1977) and Hometown of the Stars (1974). It would stand to reason that the next set would contain films of the 80s, but that decade is being skipped. Reading information when the first set was released back in 2007, it was apparently planned that this next round would be the 80s, 2011 would feature films of the 90s and 2012 would have images from more recent films. But that plan has been scrapped. One theory I read suggested that this was because of the upcoming G20 meeting. They wanted images on the stamps that might be familiar to visitors or stills of films that would be easily available for viewing. Therefore, October 27 will feature images from six films, Shiri, Taegukgi, Take Off, Seopyeonje and two others that I can’t see well (the image I have seen is quite small…one might be a still from Oldboy, and I can’t make out the other at all)  I will update this when I know for sure.

I plan to go to the post office Monday afternoon to ask about these and to see if I can order the other three sets as well…