8th GET-BACKS Report: Yatmings Aplenty! The Elusive Last ‘66 Finally Shows Up, And a Pair of Corvettes Highlight the…“Charm” of the Budget Diecast Brands

Lemmetellya Dear Readers, getting recognized for being good at your job isn’t all it cracked up to be. You finally get that promotion, and what’s your reward? More work! YAY! Well, since your humble blogger is back to putting in 50 hours+ a week at the office lately and I’m also getting ready for my October vacation, time and money are both in short supply at the moment, so while I’m keeping watch for interesting things to add to my collections and blog about, I’m doing it on the cheap for next month, which means fewer Thunderjets.

Thus this seemed like a good time to focus on some of those more affordable “Get Backs” on my list, those cars I had in childhood that are no longer with me for one reason or another, but which I intend to add back to my ranks. For this outing, we have a trio of Yatmings, one of which is a sequel to my last post about this brand where I lamented being unable for months to find one of the cars you see featured here.

So let’s hark back to that post on the “Yatming ‘66” trio with the good news that, at long last, I finally found a good copy of the missing one, the ‘66 Ford Galaxie 500, at a good price, bringing me back to what I originally had back in 1981 or thereabouts. I already had the Chevy Malibu and the Mustang coupe, and now the Galaxie fastback gets to join them. These are all 3 of the original releases of these castings with their narrow 6-slot wheels and color schemes just like I got them as a kid, and while the quality leaves much to be desired, I loved these cars then, as they were the only castings available of cars from this era back when the real things weren’t more than about 15 years old. It’s a testament to how much cars changed between the beginning of the ‘70s and the beginning of the ‘80s that I was so excited as a lad of 10 to get these, but it’s also a testament to how tuned-in to the automotive zeitgeist your HB was at that tender age: even then, I knew what was cool and what wasn’t! 😀

As for what’s not cool…well, the other 2 cars I’ve reacquired from my past illustrate that a bit too. In my post from earlier this year about “those off-brands we had as kids” I made the point that the incestuous and often chaotic horse-trading done by most of the low-budget Asian die-cast makers of the ‘70s and ‘80s often produced very odd results, and you see that here in what appear to be a pair of C3 Corvettes. These are both Yatmings, but they clearly have different lineages, as they are entirely different interpretations of the same car by the same maker.

You find that a lot with Yatming and some of these other “Hong Kong brands” of the era; in that earlier post I referenced their 2 completely different castings of the Mercedes 450SEL, and here’s another example of that. I’m not sure which of these is the older car-my best recollection is that the yellow one predates the gray one-but looking at these two from every angle, you can tell what they are, while at the same time wondering how the same company produced 2 completely different renditions of the same car!

I recall that sometime in the early ’80s Yatming produced a series of these “international cars” that I think were called “Cars of the World” or something like that, and each one in the series represented a different nation with it’s flag tampo-painted on the hood or roof: Britain was conveyed by their Jaguar E-Type 2+2, Germany by their 350SL, Japan by a Toyota 2000GT, and Italy by one of their 2 (at least) castings of the Lamborghini Miura. For the good ol’ U S of A they choose a Corvette, and that makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the baseplate text, which identifies this car not as a Corvette but rather as a “Chevrolet Racer.” Strange! Sure looks like a ‘vette to me! Is it possible the fine folks @ Yatming didn’t even know the proper name of the car? Despite the overall shape being right, its a pretty bad model, with poor proportions and strange styling features like vents on the trunk lid and no back window; as a kid I wondered if maybe it was supposed be a model of some pre-production prototype Corvette, but I was probably giving them credit where it wasn’t due; who knows what they were thinking?

Well, as a clue to the answer to that question we can take a look at the other C3 they put out. This casting, which was released also in red, white, and no doubt other colors, is significantly smaller in scale than the yellow one and seems like a much more sincere effort in some ways: the front-end looks good with the spoiler under the bumper mimicing a popular add-on of the day, the doors open, and its nicely proportioned. It looks pretty good until you look at the back of it and see no trace of the C3’s beautiful quad of round tail lamps; instead, there’s just a ridged bar across the back…almost as if the makers had no knowledge of what the real car’s tail lights looked like.

Thing is, its doesn’t look bad! Its actually kind of cool in a way; maybe it was meant to look like a custom job. But I doubt it; while it may not be the most charitable interpretation, my suspicion is that the modelers did not, in fact, know what the real car’s tail lights looked like! More likely than not, these were cast by people who had nothing more than a few photographs of the cars they were modeling, and if they didn’t have a snapshot of the rear end, they probably just “winged it.”

But I will be charitable in calling out metal baseplates and spring suspension; you could do much worse back in the early ‘80s, so even if these don’t rise to the craftsmanship of the Lesney Matchboxes of the day, they were still decent toys. I wouldn’t put them on my diorama, but they are fun throwbacks to the past. That’s what my “GET-BACKS Project” is all about: reconnecting with the past, when even the lo-end models seemed cool in the days when just getting any new toy car made me happy.

Today, it still makes me happy!