Karen Carpenter sang “rainy days and Mondays always get me down,” but I can only agree with half that sentiment. I love rainy days; always have ever since I was a kid! Probably because it was so rare where I grew up in Southern California, rain always invigorated me and made me feel creative, and rain also meant indoor play! The exception was the period between 2000 and 2005, when I was going really heavy on building hot rods and working on old cars, but before I had acquired my own garage, and had to work outside if one of my friends’s garages wasn’t available.
Today, I got my own garage-got two, in fact-and I still love indoor play! So although I’m back to loving rainy days, I do indeed hate Mondays! And you probably know that with the exception of the early times in 2020 and ‘21, I rarely post on Mondays anymore. Today I’m making an exception because I like alliteration, and some recent activity down in the toy room makes this Matchbox Monday!
As you know from this post and many before it over the last year, Jason and I are almost always hunting for 1:64 die-casts anytime we hang out. A quick trip to a local grocery store this last weekend just to pick up some coffee yielded a superb find, a new reissue of one of my favorite recent Matchboxes, the Jaguar XJ6C. The first output of this car, which I detailed here, arrived in a realistic, but rather uninspired, basic blue with black interior. It has now been put out in this purplish-red metallic with biscuit interior and the “baby moon”-style wheels but I happen to be very fond of. Although this particular color was never offered on the real car, it’s a much more elegant take on the original, IMHO, and it looks spectacular. They actually had two of them at the grocery store and I wanted them both, but Jason wanted one for himself, so as of now far I’ve only got the one, but it won’t take long for me to have a little squadron of them just like I do with the blue ones
I also just recently took delivery of another good eBay purchase, another addition to my stack of newer (post 2000) yellow Matchbox cases, which I like to use to keep my newer MBX models in. This was inspiring enough for me to write this post specifically about some of the Matchbox cars that I have acquired over the last several months, and I think it’s time for me to give another tip of the hat to Mattel, and acknowledge a matter that has always been a major concern to me: the integrity of the Matchbox brand under Mattel ownership.
Now, I will admit that they got off to something of a rough start, but I don’t think that’s entirely Mattel’s fault. When I first learned that Mattel had finally acquired their number one competitor in the toy car market in 1997, I was a little shocked, but by that time the Matchbox name had been dragged through the mud for so long, and by so many owners, that I really didn’t think it mattered much. In the final years of the Universal Toy ownership, after all the production had been relocated to “Ginah,” the quality of the toys they produced dropped to a degree that was truly embarrassing. For the first few years, it didn’t seem like Mattel was doing much to change that.
The “Wokipedia” article on the Matchbox brand is particularly concise here, so I will quote part of it…
You can count me among those skeptical collectors, who was concerned about what this acquisition might bring, and for a few years, it seemed like my concerns were being borne out. Fortunately, the cheesy early Mattel efforts were a turn-off to collectors and did not sell well, and while that could have resulted in the brand being killed off entirely, it seems that somebody at Mattel finally realized what a goldmine they were really sitting on, and about five years into the 21st-century, things began to change. First, the new “retro Superfasts” hit the market around 2005; I loved those and bought quite a few of them, although not as many as I wanted because they were hard to find due to their limited production. I figured that would just be a flash in the pan, but fortunately I was wrong: by 2006, some really nice cars were starting to show up in toy stores bearing the Matchbox name. They brought back the Convoy series, the Skybusters aircraft, and even brought back the famous logo that was originally designed in the early 1970s but was dropped by Universal sometime around 2001. Finally seeing Matchbox cars in boxes again, with all their proper names and logos, made it feel to me like happy days were here again!
This isn’t to say that I don’t have my complaints: the quality is nothing like what it used to be 30 or 40 years ago, but then again, neither are Hot Wheels, and let’s not fool ourselves: things are never going to be like that again. Considering what we have to work with in today’s world, I think Mattel has done a pretty decent job; while it’s not universal – there is some made-up junk in there – Matchboxes today tend to be models of real cars, many of them classics, and with today’s ink jetting technology they tend to have the type of detail that the brand was famous for in it’s heyday in the ‘60s and ‘70s, albeit painted on rather than cast into metal. It’s still impressive, seeing all those realistic headlights and license plates and grill and trim decorations on some of the premium models. Even a lot of the mainlines are really nicely detailed: just look at the pictures in this post and you can see what I mean!
They could have done better, sure: I dislike the emphasis on the modern European-market “microcars,” and I especially dislike all the models of electric cars, and the company’s self-described goal of “instilling environmental consciousness in children.” That smacks of the kind of virtue signaling bullshit that most of us are sick to our stomachs with from corporations. Everyone has their taste, I guess, but I’ll leave the models of the electric cars to warm the pegs. Whenever a new release of a classic car makes an appearance, I immediately snap up every copy I can find!
I’ve already gushed at some length over the past year or so about some of the best castings that have been released recently, including the Porsche 356 coupe, the Bizzarrini 5300 GT, the ‘60 Chevy El Camino, the ‘53 Buick Skylark, and numerous others, many of which you see right here. And that XJ6 coupe? Superb! It’s long past time that the world got one of those at 1:64, and it couldn’t have come from a more appropriate brand!
All of that being said, we can’t expect too much, and we shouldn’t be surprised that some “parts sharing” is occurring between the two brands, and Mattel is just now releasing a racing version of the XJ coupe as a Hot Wheels. I haven’t found one in the wild yet, but I’m actively looking, and it looks like it’s going to be excellent! So, while it seems that some cars that have been released as Hot Wheels over the last few years should have been Matchboxes, I want to give credit where it’s due, and thank the folks at Mattel for keeping us Matchbox collectors in mind. This is a brand name that is very dear to the hearts of countless people of my generation the world over, and we should be thankful that it’s still with us!
Hey, its Monday! As soon as you get home from work, lay down the “adulting” and go play!
The level of details on these models is amazing and some models that I’d never think anyone would make, like the 77 Caprice. This makes me think of Lego. While traditionally a kids toy, I had read their comeback and bread and butter sales were also to the adult collector markets with their various offerings, like the Titanic, Big Ben and Parliament, and Notre Dame. I know I enjoy them!