Action Transfers

Action Transfers, also known as rub-on transfers, were an art-based children's pastime that was extremely popular throughout the world from the 1960s to the 1980s. They consisted of a printed cardboard background image and a transparent sheet of coloured dry transfer figures of people, animals, vehicles, weapons, explosions and so on. These transfers were supposed to be applied to the background scene by rubbing the top surface of the transparent sheet with a hard object or stylus; typically, this would mean a ball-point pen or a pencil; the figure would thereby be transferred from its sheet to the background. Since it was not customary to determine exactly where the transfers should be applied, surreal or comic effects could be achieved — whether deliberately or inadvertently — by juxtaposing the transfers and the background inappropriately. It was also possible to apply the transfer figures elsewhere than on the supplied background, and conversely it is quite common to come across finished transfer sets in which the descriptive lettering from the sheets has been applied to the background; an effect not intended by the manufacturer.

A number of different sets were distributed by a wide variety of companies between the late 1960s and the 1980s; these included sets based on popular comics and cartoons (e.g., DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Hanna Barbera, and Disney cartoons), television series and movies (e.g., Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica), as well as original content sets. Since Letraset had a patent monopoly on the dry rub-down transfer process, until the end of the 1970s any transfers supplied with these sets would have been printed by Letraset, firstly at Waterloo Road in London, then later at Ashford in Kent, and finally at their factory in Italy.

Letraset, the company that developed the Instant Lettering transfer sheets that dominated design and publishing before the advent of desktop publishing, created the first dry rub-down transfer sets for children and marketed them as "Instant Pictures" in 1964. They were originally silk screen printed and monochromatic, but by 1966 they were being produced using four spot colours.

...
Wikipedia