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I've got the Corgi lockup garages,in red rather than the usual yellow.I'll get a picture when I get home.

It was also recycled into the Coastguard set,and this garage sold by Avon the cosmetics company.I saw it last week on eBay but forgot to bid.Avon sold a couple of sets of Corgi Juniors too,that's where some of the unbranded Corgi Juniors come from.

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Coupla new arrivals yesterday.

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These have been looking at me for years, from their glass case over at the model shop in Belfast's Smithfield Market.

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And yesterday I finally broke, and bought two of them. US releases, both.

 

While the plain black Thunderbird is obviously superior as a model, the tampo printed cream and red one appealed because nostalgia...

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Yes, this is a mint/boxed version of a toy I received back at Christmas 1985, and plainly I it gave some hard use over the next lot of years.

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I'm not quite sure why I like comparing my battered one side-by-side with an as-new example, but I kinda do...

Maybe it's something to do with the lived-in physicality of the changes I wrought on my childhood original: running it over walls and up and down driveways; firing it off flights of steps (in best Dukes of Hazzard stylee); burying it in the sandpit (and forgetting it was there until the next summer); and yes, loading it onto a plastic boat at the beach and then sand-bombing it until it sank.

There's stories there, I guess. Sort of like a before and after. And despite rolling off the factory lines in their millions, I like to think that no two battered Matchbox cars are exactly the same - the chips and scuffs will always be slightly different. I fondly imagine I could recognise some of mine by their unique patina.

 

Funnily enough though, this Thunderbird does have an actual story attached. A written one. 

 

So it was January 1986.

I was in Primary Two, which due to the peculiar way in which the education system works in Northern Ireland, meant that I'd already enjoyed a year and a half of formal schooling, despite the fact I was only five years and six months of age.

I was one of the youngest in the year. A wee June baby, as they're apparently known in the profession. Children who start school just after their fourth birthday, and are noticeably smaller and less able to adapt to the rigidity of a school environment. It was a fairly big primary school too, with nearly 600 kids.

In common with most of my class, I did not particularly like my P2 teacher, Miss Finlay. She was old-school in every sense, having first come to the school not long after it opened in the 1950s. 

However,  the one upside of Miss Finlay's room was that she had a big box of cars. Old cars.

I don't know if they'd belonged to some family member of hers, or if they'd been donated, or otherwise acquired from jumble sale cast-offs, but they mainly consisted of 1940s and 50s Dinkys together with 1950s and 60s Lesneys, many of them King Size.

All of them were beyond fucked, with many just reduced to indescribably bent and battered shells, often with no roof or axles. Something like this would represent the absolute best condition available:

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The one I remember best of all, for some reason, is the Lesney K-12 Foden Breakdown Wagon. Like this one, only with the tyres gone, no paint or glazing, and the crane on the back snapped off.

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I mean, as playthings they were total rubbish, but I absolutely loved these moments of respite during what was called 'free play', when we had half an hour to muck about with whatever toys we liked from the boxes in the corner. I always made a dash for the box of cars.

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So anyway. January 1986, not long after term had started again after the Christmas break. I was sitting there at my tiny desk, probably daydreaming as usual, while Miss Finlay outlined our next task. And all of a sudden my classmates reached into their schoolbags, and it suddenly dawned on me with a sense of rising horror that I'd forgotten something.

We'd been asked, as a topical writing exercise, to bring in a toy we'd received at Christmas which did something, and then write about whatever the thing it was that it did.

For some reason, I'd completely forgotten about this task.

But! All was not necessarily lost.

As ever, I had a car in my pocket. I usually always had a car in my pocket, to fiddle with, or run along the top of a wall. Sometimes the car would get confiscated if it was noticed by the teacher, and then I wouldn't have a car in my pocket. Not until I brought another one in the next day, anyway.

And today, that car was my new Ford Thunderbird.

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I glanced around, warily.

Some of the girls had dolls that emulated various bodily functions, as well as those pretend babies' bottles that look like milk is being drunk from it. These were not particularly useful to me.

One or two had those squirty water-filled Tomy game things, where you frantically pushed a plunger button to try to get plastic hoops onto hooks, in soporifically slow motion. Again, not much help.

But I could see a lot of boys with Star Wars stuff, especially those Speeder Bike things from Return of the Jedi, which broke apart when you pressed a button at the back. And Masters of the Universe figures, that did things like show battle damage or 'power punches' and the like.

I was annoyed because, had I remembered, I could have brought in one of my prized Hot Wheels Crack-Ups, which emphatically Did Something. I had two of those. But neither of them happened to be in my pocket today.

But really... who was to know that wasn't what I had in front of me? I just had to fill a page in the book.

Okay. I could wing this.

We'd been told to call the story  "A Christmas Toy' and start with the words "My toy is __________" before going on to describe it.

So I set the Thunderbird on the desk in front of me, opened my story book, and started to write.

 

I hadn't got very far when I realised Miss Finlay was bending over me, reading what I'd written. And, before I knew what was happening, she'd whisked both my book and my Thunderbird away from me and held them up to the class.

"What's this?" she bellowed. "Smash Cars?"

There was a silence from the class.

She started to read out loud, from my book.

"My toy is Smash Cars. They smash and if you smash it - "  she finished and threw the book back onto the desk, then glared down at me.

"Smash Cars? What does it do? You were told to bring in a toy that did something."

I felt the blood run out of my face. She had my car, and I didn't like that.

"Erm, well it does - it's a Smash Car, you can smash it into things and it smashes up - "

"So show me." She threw the Thunderbird back down on the desk. It skittered off and hit the floor, and I dived after it.

Even though I could be a destructive little bugger with my cars, this one still retained its soft newness. I was horrified to notice a chip in the front bumper's bullet overrider, where it had smacked into the scuffed parquet floor.

"Well, the thing is you can only do it once, and it's just new..." I rubbed at my injured car, increasingly aware of how unconvincing my lies were sounding.

"He means Crack-Ups, not Smash Cars."

That was Gareth Murdoch, across the table. 

"No, that's not what it is!" I shot back at him, stung, my face no doubt reddening.

"It's Crack-Ups." Gareth seemed unperturbed. I don't know whether he genuinely thought he was trying to help, or dig me even deeper into a hole.

"Crack-Ups are made by Hot Wheels, this one is by Matchbox. It's a Smash Car. They're COMPLETELY DIFFERENT."

I could feel the situation was rapidly sliding away from me, and my head started to throb. I'm sure my voice was becoming rather shrill, too.

 

But to no avail. Miss Finlay may well have had an encyclopaedic knowledge of diecast and therefore knew I was lying, or she might have just been looking for an excuse to pour out some bitterness on a bleak January morning when retirement still seemed impossibly far away. Either way, she roared at me.

"Enough! This is just an ordinary toy car that doesn't DO anything. It is NOT a Smash Car. YOU are a LIAR."

She cracked me over the knuckles with the wooden ruler she carried expressly for this purpose (yes, this was early 1986 and corporal punishment was still just about legal in state schools, although thinking back I'm astonished to believe it was ever considered appropriate in a class of five-year-olds).

Then she put her blue pen through what I'd written, and drew a line under it. 

"Right! You are going to start again. Write about your car this time, not this stupid Smash Cars lies. Make sure your writing doesn't run downhill. And start it MY TOY IS______"

She wrote the word 'My' in pen, to start me off, and then stalked off, muttering.

I squeezed my sore hand between my knees under the desk, trying not to cry. Like it made any fucking difference whether the car did anything or not. It was a thing of small beauty in its own right, and I was more than capable of describing it. I rubbed at the chipped bumper. I wanted to run out of the classroom, away from Miss Finlay, away from all this bollocks.

 

But I didn't. I did what I was told. And my writing didn't go downhill, not that much anyway (why didn't they ever give us lined jotters?) And I finished it, almost.

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I didn't have time to complete the phrase 'left hand side' before the bell rang and we had to hand our books in. That annoyed me.

But at the same time, she didn't notice that I'd inadvertently defied her by restarting my story with the words "My car is..."

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Still. I'm quite sure Miss Finlay's long gone by now (if not, she would have to be knocking on 100) - but the Thunderbird is still here.

 

And despite what that crabbit old witch might have thought, I was right, after a fashion - it was a Smash Car, insofar as I did smash it into quite a number of things over the years, clearly.

I was also correct that you can only smash it up once, and you can't really put it back to the way it was. That's kinda it.

But that was enough for me - it didn't have to DO anything else. Although I owned 'action' diecasts like Key Cars, Crack-Ups, Colour Changers, Light 'n' Sound, Flip-Overs, Insiders, etc - these novelties never really appealed to me as much as a good miniature replica of a real-life car. Still don't, really.

So, like my beat-up Cortina MkIV a few weeks ago, every scratch tells a story - for good or for ill.

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11 minutes ago, Datsuncog said:

(yes, this was early 1986 and corporal punishment was still just about legal in state schools, although thinking back I'm astonished to believe it was ever appropriate in a class of five-year-olds).

Crikey DC, what a tale. Took me right back to infant school myself. In my school the headteacher occasionally administered the slipper to your backside. In the early 80's that threat was able to keep me on the straight and narrow and I avoided it!

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Nearest I ever encountered to corporal punishment in school in the 1980s was some ancient old teacher complaining he couldn't administer it to sort out 'the rough uns'.  I mean, I say ancient, he was probably only in his 50s or 60s, but to pre-teen me, he was practically a dinosaur.  I do remember the kid that brought really big, expensive, NICE diecast to school just to smash up.  Bburago, Dinky, Corgi, that sort of thing.  He'd get new ones at the start of the week, spend the week demolishing them, and turn up the next week with another new one and repeat.  My friends and I didn't much like him.

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All this talk of Matchbox and Corgi playsets brings back memories. The Matchbox car wash must have stayed in the catalogue for a long time as I got a brand new one for Christmas some time in the 1990s, which probably came from Argos as most of my presents did in those days. I also had the Corgi Motorcity multi-storey car park and the thing I remember most about it was the showroom on the ground floor with a rotating turntable and working spotlight. Oh to go back to that simpler time when such basic things would impress me.

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I do enjoy Datsuncog's stories, even if that one was a bit sad!

 

On a lighter note, here's a few comparisons for you. First, early vs late Superfast BMC Pininfarina 1800. The arches are cut back to the point where the tyres are almost visible from above

49060116847_e98ce9e5e6_4k.jpg20191113_131558 by RS, on Flickr

49060116012_f80a79011e_4k.jpg20191113_131533 by RS, on Flickr

 

Regular vs late Superfast Rolls. I like both versions

 

49059870072_b310de2f86_4k.jpg20191113_105410 by RS, on Flickr

49059659341_0f779b287a_4k.jpg20191113_105444 by RS, on Flickr

 

Lastly, the Hot Wheels 944 vs the Matchbox version. They're very similar but I think the Matchbox just edges it, having proper doors, a B post and better base detail

 

49059382368_b7c29478fb_4k.jpg20191113_131656 by RS, on Flickr

49059895506_f5a56f83c7_4k.jpg20191113_131752 by RS, on Flickr

49059895026_968cdf21d0_4k.jpg20191113_131831 by RS, on Flickr

49059894596_99aac7561e_4k.jpg20191113_131733 by RS, on Flickr

 

 

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On 11/13/2019 at 2:08 PM, junkyarddog said:

I picked up a few sets of these knocked off Matchbox roadways,during the summer at a car boot.

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"Advanced Toys" - okaaaay.

"Motorcity-B001" - risking copyright infringement, but if you must.

"Good" - eh?

"Pick up brains" - WTF??

That's utterly demented fantastic. Well found!!

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Nice little haul Mr Panda.

Let's focus on this Silver Spirit, I've never had one of these, a bit late for me as they started mid-80s and most of my matchbox were a bit earlier. It's a substantial, heavy, large thing for this scale as befits one of these. Made in China (by which they mean Macau? Or a different factory?). It is in good condition, but as it is fairly modern and not uncommon, I hope no-one will object if I repaint it in a suitably RR colour?

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On 11/13/2019 at 4:57 PM, egg said:

Crikey DC, what a tale. Took me right back to infant school myself. In my school the headteacher occasionally administered the slipper to your backside. In the early 80's that threat was able to keep me on the straight and narrow and I avoided it!

 

On 11/13/2019 at 5:29 PM, vulgalour said:

Nearest I ever encountered to corporal punishment in school in the 1980s was some ancient old teacher complaining he couldn't administer it to sort out 'the rough uns'.  I mean, I say ancient, he was probably only in his 50s or 60s, but to pre-teen me, he was practically a dinosaur. 

 

On 11/13/2019 at 5:45 PM, junkyarddog said:

So much for letting toys fuel your imagination DC,miserable old biddy.

 

On 11/13/2019 at 8:06 PM, flat4alfa said:

That violent teacher story had me whincing

If my child was treated like that I’d be raising the school roof

 

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I do enjoy Datsuncog's stories, even if that one was a bit sad!

Aye, it's strange but I'd never really thought all that deeply about it until I was writing it all down yesterday.

Diecast Therapy, anyone? ?

 

From what I can gather, teachers weren't really meant to behave the way Miss Finlay did. I don't remember there ever being a school culture of 'the slipper' as an ultimate threat; the headmaster was great and I couldn't imagine him as the disciplinarian type. But there were supposedly rules for administering physical chastisement, as per a 1956 Department of Education memo - involving two senior members of staff and a permanent written record of the infraction and the punishment meted out.

Finlay just used to lash out with that ruler for any minor infraction, such as whispering, or messy work, or whatever she didn't like; a quick but sturdy rap over the knuckles. We were all frightened of her; and frightened to tell anyone else too. That wasn't all she did, either.

Clearly she didn't view herself as doing anything wrong, but a year or two later she took 'early retirement' which makes me wonder if she was eventually rumbled for what were, looking back, highly abusive patterns of behaviour.

I don't know what became of the big box of wrecked diecast, though!

 

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I do remember the kid that brought really big, expensive, NICE diecast to school just to smash up.  Bburago, Dinky, Corgi, that sort of thing.  He'd get new ones at the start of the week, spend the week demolishing them, and turn up the next week with another new one and repeat.  My friends and I didn't much like him.

Yeesh, I'm sure he wasn't popular... what a knob. I can just imagine the sort, too.

I can remember being horrified at seeing a bunch of older kids smashing up a Corgi VW Polo rally car (the metallic bronze one, with opening doors and boot) out in the playground, and leaving the bits scattered all over the tarmac. It just seemed like such a waste.

I mean okay, so I smashed up loads of my diecast with a hammer, and crushed them in a bench vice, as previously confessed - but in my mind, I was building a toy scrapyard out of already-broken old diecast. I kept all the bits in a metal tin, and I would then arrange all them in rows of wrecks and heaps of parts, and load them into trucks, just like Bobby Shaw's yard up the road... I prefer to think back to that short but destructive period as a phase of extreme creativity, not just smashing stuff up for kicks.

 

On 11/13/2019 at 9:16 PM, bunglebus said:

On a lighter note, here's a few comparisons for you.

Ohhhh, that's good to see!

I've been trawling through my 70s Matchbox catalogues, and it's surprising that some models don't seem to ever be shown in 'widened arches'  format - the Mk IV Zodiac, for example.

Whether the folks who put the catalogues together just used an older model when setting up their layout, or whether the later modified versions tended to appear in gift sets and twin-packs rather then as separate mainline diecast - I'm not sure.

I'm putting a list together slowly, though!

 

On 11/14/2019 at 11:45 AM, egg said:

Let's focus on this Silver Spirit […] Made in China (by which they mean Macau? Or a different factory?).

As far as I can tell, Matchbox's China and Macau factories were quite separate, both administratively and in terms of output.

From what Wikipedia tells me, Macau was one of those Special Administrative Regions, like Hong Kong, and was under either direct or indirect Portuguese rule between 1557 and 1999 - first as a trading post, and latterly as an autonomous colony.

As a landmass, Macau's absolutely tiny - the very tip of a peninsula sticking out into the Pearl River Estuary, totalling twelve square miles in size - and two-thirds of that is reclaimed land, mostly housing container ports and an airport. It remains the most densely populated place on earth, with nearly 700,000 people living there. Imagine somewhere not much bigger than Canvey Island, but with twenty times the population...

But like Hong Kong, Macau's peculiar status meant it could offer global corporations a winning combination of low labour costs coupled with extremely low corporate tax rates, making it a popular site for export-oriented manufacturing.

When Hong-Kong based Universal Toys took over the Matchbox brand in 1983, the first thing CEO David Yeh did was set up a new factory in Macau to take over production, shipping most of the tooling over from England. 

However, Universal Toys quickly realised they couldn't source enough skilled labourers in Macau or Hong Kong to produce the toys in the volumes needed, and in 1984 set up a separate Hong Kong-Chinese joint venture sub-company, called Shanghai Universal Toys Co (SUTC). This was co-owned, with the Chinese government acting as the sole investor for the Chinese side.

Sources disagree on details, but once the Chinese factory came on-line in the mid-80s it seems that one of the two factories produced all the metal components, much of which were then cleaned up and shipped in bulk to the other one ready for painting, assembly and packaging for export.

Between 1985 and 1991-ish, both factories produced finished models, but partly as a result of these kinds of successful arrangements, China began to liberalise its own export market rules from 1985 on.

Because of these changes, it didn't take long before Macau's main point of difference was lost and by the early 1990s Matchbox followed most other factory owners by moving all their production to the more convenient Chinese mainland.

By the time Tyco bought the Matchbox brand from Universal Toys in 1992, their toy manufacturing was based solely around Shanghai.

Production largely continued as before, with the SUTC concern still part-owned by Universal and continuing to manufacture the Matchbox range on a subcontractor basis to Tyco.

Macau nowadays exists basically as a casino city, its legacy semi-autonomous status allowing it an effective monopoly on gambling (which remains illegal everywhere else in China and Hong Kong). As it result, its revenues are seven times higher than Las Vegas...

So, a Matchbox diecast stamped with 'Made in Macau' can be dated between 1983 and 1991-ish; while 'Made in China' diecasts date from about 1985 to 1998. Because of the overlap, it's quite possible to find two identical models: one made in China and the other made in Macau. Good to know, if you're a completionist...

Following the Mattel acquisition of Tyco in 1997, Matchbox production was gradually moved across to Thailand - but there were still plenty of Matchboxes stamped 'China' well into the 2000s.

 

As an additional factoid, Universal Toys also set up another Chinese joint venture called Shanghai Universal Plastic Toys Co (SUPT), who were subcontracted to make all the plastic mouldings for Matchbox diecast lines, such as wheels and interiors. SUPT also produced the range of Matchbox plastic model kits alongside other plastic toys such as their preschool range. They also - rather topically - produced all the components for the Motor City range.

But whenever Mattel bought over Tyco, including the Matchbox brand, they severed all previous arrangements with both SUTC and SUPT. They also decided to immediately kill off the entire Motor City range, since it was in competition with its own Hot Wheels playsets.

This sudden decision left SUPT with a huge stockpile of unpackaged Motor City components stored in their Shanghai warehouse, which under the terms of severence Mattel  forbade them to sell on. It was agreed that they were to be destroyed.

SUPT were eventually re-named as the Yuan Jie Co - but, going by @junkyarddog's 'Advanced Toys' playset, it would appear that some of the components perhaps made it out of the Shanghai factory, eventually...

2016591626_MatchboxMotorCityripoff2.jpg.3d48a3338df5b9b1bd4441ac56c1d7e9.jpg

I'll wager that although the box itself may be a total knock-off,  at least some of the components inside are 100% genuine Matchbox items.

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Nice info DC - In my opinion the Macau/China MB castings of that time still have a certain quality to them. It may have been cheaper labour for sure, but it wasn't quite race to the bottom stuff. Strange to think how Smith and Odell's ideas ultimately played their part in the move to a capitalist economy in the far East!

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