As 2023 draws to a close and Christmas has just passed, its worth noting that the end of this year marks the 60th birthday of the Thunderjet!
You can get some people’s dander up quite a bit with a discussion about the terms “toy car” and “model car.” I’m not so easily riled (in most cases, anyway), but although I do think there is a lot of overlap in these terms, they are not completely interchangeable. An artistic creation like a 1:8-scale Amalgam is definitely not a toy, but a Matchbox or Hot Wheels car is a “model.” It’s just…well, a cheap model: a toy. Nothing wrong with that, especially when you’re a car crazy kid.
A lot of kids outgrow that, but I’m certainly not alone in being one who never did: “model” cars are very popular; just look at the traffic on sites like The Lamley Group or DiecastSociety.com for proof of that! There’s more selection now than ever before thanks to computers and 3D printing, and even if the sales of the <$1 toys my generation knew as children are waning, the sales of the “premium” models, the limited editions aimed primarily at adult collectors, seem stronger than ever. Now, I have to predicate this series of posts with the disclaimer that I have not done a statistic analysis of the toy market over the last 50 or so years and plotted a graph to indicate sales of toy and model cars through the years. However, being deeply involved in the model car hobby essentially all my life – and having reached the age of 50 – it seems to me from observation that model cars are more popular now than they’ve ever been! If I’m right about that, the question is, why?
I’m getting all philosophical here (I know my readers just love it when I do that)! I explored this burning question in a post I did nearly 2 years ago, in which I posited that adult toy collectors are largely motivated by nostalgia for our childhoods; I think that has a lot to do with guys like me who can’t stop buying these things: we can still feel the joy we felt at the age of 3 or 4 when mom let us pick out a Hot Wheels at the local drug store. And yay for us for being able to hang on to that childlike wonder as we age! There’s also the issue of the “collector’s disease,” another topic I’ve broached more than once on this here blog o’ mine. But I think there’s even more to it than this, and once you start to look more deeply into it, I see the darker side of it: I think there are some hard truths buried in this love for model cars that we may sometimes find difficult to articulate. Over the next few days I’ll be posting a 5 part article with some thoughts on this, so stay with me and tell me if you think I’m onto something or not.
