I bought some Matchbox cars!

I wouldn’t describe myself as a spoiled kid, but I did have a lot of toys as a child. It spanned a wide spectrum of action figures, plush toys, Lego and various other novelty items. But some of my earliest toy memories are connected to cars. In a way, cars are the ideal toy for little kids. They’re small, so you can carry quite a few around. They’re very cheap, generally around $2 or $3, so they’re easy to get on your average trip to the supermarket. They’re readily available and there’s almost infinite variation, so kids need never get bored. And pretty much any surface is good terrain for a toy car to drive on. Reality need not apply. 

I had a fairly large assortment of them as a child, as well as a parking garage. I remember a friend of mine owning a large-scale one that – if memory does not betray me – featured a working elevator for cars, hand powered a pulley and crank system of some kind. It was awesome. If you’re reading this now Paul, thank you for the hours of fun we had with cars, in between playing rugby league and Police Rescue in your backyard. (Balmain Tigers and Brian forever!)

Rivalry!

It’s difficult to discuss toy cars without highlighting the two major brands that dominated the toy car market during my childhood – Matchbox and Hot Wheels. These two brands still own the market, with any other brands looking pretty average by comparison.

Of the two brands, Matchbox was the more realistic. By and large, they produced toys based on real vehicles, or at least similar enough that they didn’t stretch your five-year old credibility too far. There was something British and dignified about them. In fact, I’m fairly certain I used to own what I still think of as the ultimate Matchbox car – a black British taxi.*

To contrast – and though I dislike using this expression – Hot Wheels was a lot more American: cooler and edgier, with over-the-top adverts. Their toys tended to be highly outlandish, often bearing little resemblance to real-life cars, or at least real-world paint schemes. Of course, I wouldn’t want anyone thinking that Hot Wheels produced bad cars. Certainly some were ridiculous and unacceptable to look at, but their durability as playthings was never in question.

This trend continues today, and I think it’s actually become even more pronounced as the years have gone on. One of the last Hot Wheels cars I bought as a child (probably around age 12) was some kind of green and purple plane/tank hybrid. Pretty awesome to look at, bright 90s colour scheme and all, but stretching the boundaries of what constitutes a toy car, I tend to think. Their associated playsets followed a similar pattern. Cool as it was to be able to race your cars around a track featuring a T-Rex…well, I think that says it all, really.  

Yet despite Hot Wheels having the edge in marketing, a quick survey of a handful of friends reveals an overwhelming consensus that Matchbox was the better of the two brands**, though most (myself included) owned their fair share of both. The argument has become redundant now, too – Matchbox is now owned by Mattel, the creators of Hot Wheels.  

The Ugly Truth

Full disclosure: in spite of this great enjoyment of toy cars, I have never acquired a great love of real cars. As a teen, I found car chases in movies unbearably tedious. I only acquired my learner’s license at age 23, and didn’t get my P-plates until I was 27. So if you asked me what my ideal car was now, I would say it was the 1989 Batmobile, without any trace of silliness. 

The Vaguely Relevant Finale

I keep an eye on the toy cars in the stores when I’m scoping out Lego and TMNT, but it’s very rare I buy any,

unless it’s for a gift. These days I can take or leave toy cars, due to my lack of interest in the real thing.

But the other night I was in Woolworths and I came across these two beauties pictured above – the Matchbox Desert Thunder V16 and the MBX Two-Story Bus. The photos do most of the talking, of course – everyone loves a double-decker bus, whether real or toy – and it does tie into the essential Britishness of Matchbox.

The Desert Thunder V16 is a little more outlandish, given its paint scheme. The words “T-Rex 

Transporter” dot the side, as does a silhouette of a roaring T-Rex. Ordinarily, we’d already be well into Hot Wheels territory with something like this, but look at it more closely. Aside from the out-of-scale accessories sculpted onto the roof, this is kind of convincing as a dinosaur transporter. Well, maybe for baby or juvenile dinosaurs, but dinosaurs nonetheless. That’s good enough for me.     

I am a die-hard opener when it comes to toys – but these two beauties are staying sealed for display. Guests to the house will admire their majesty, just as I do.      

*Recent toy archaeology at my parent's place indicates that I did! But it doesn’t seem to actually be a Matchbox car – rather, some no-name brand.

**Number of people surveyed: 2 or 3, including myself. 

Snoopy -- Hot Wheels

I don’t often think about it these days, but Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang were some of my great loves of childhood. I owned a huge amount of merchandise – t-shirts, books, stuffed toys. I was even bought an exceptionally nice Snoopy watch from America around the age of 8. His arms were the hands of the clock, and it was far too expensive a watch for a kid to wear during day-to-day life – so much so that I think I only wore it two or three times before the battery eventually conked out, years later. It was one of the great treasures of my childhood.  

When I've read Peanuts in more recent years, it tends to make me sad, more than anything else. This is at least in part to do with Charles Schulz’s passing in 2000. It was a big moment for me; I have not had many relatives or friends die, and this though a beloved member of the family was now gone. 2000 was not a good year for many reasons, and in hindsight this was pretty close to the top of the list of those reasons.  

But there’s more to it than that. I remember reading Charles Schulz saying that he had never intended Peanuts to be for children; it was for adults who remembered what childhood was like. I dismissed this when I was a child myself. Surely he could see the joy that Charlie Brown and the gang brought to millions of children all around the world? I’m sure he did. But filled as it is with surprisingly adult themes – religion, unrequited love, absent parents, inadequacy, disappointment, just to name a few of them – the strip has taken on a new poignancy for me as I too have grown older. There was very little "closure" in Peanuts, and I think nowadays it pushes some buttons that I didn’t even know I had. Schulz was a deep thinker -- this strip from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal may not have been too far off the mark.  

But we have digressed – we were here today look at a car based on Snoopy. Hot Wheels, in fact. I don’t really “do” toy cars anymore, unless it’s a Transformer, a Batmobile or otherwise DC-related. But when I came across this guy, I felt a stir of the old fondness and decided that I’d plonk down $2.25 (AUD) to own it. How does he come across?

Well, I wouldn’t have opened him had it not been for the fact that his packaging was already a little torn. It’s pretty standard stuff Hot Wheels – a CG-rendering of the “car” with Snoopy sitting atop the doghouse. It’s kind of a shame they didn’t deviate a little more from the traditional packaging style; I think a proper Peanuts illustration would have been a much better option. Maybe they’re testing the waters for a deluxe series in future? I could get behind that.

The doghouse portion of the car is a little weird, but what we’ve/I’ve come to expect from Hot Wheels. A red doghouse that looks like it’s straight out of the strip sits atop a thin green chassis, presumably representing grass. Some of the red paint of mine was chipped in the packet, so keep an eye out for that.

We now move into more stereotypical Hot Wheels territory with a massively oversized hotrod engine with funnels that are surely too big to be practical. Massive rear wheels, and small front wheels. I don’t know enough about cars to offer more thoughts than that, save to say that I don’t think this would be road legal if it were a real car. 

   

Onto Snoopy himself! Cast in softer plastic, and attached to the doghouse roof by a small post, he is the main drawcard of the toy for me. Even in the box I could see this was going to be questionable though; he’s got paint apps for his eyes, ears and nose but none for his mouth or collar. He looks a little half-finished, and this is worsened by the mould flash that’s left on the crown of his head. He also sits a couple of mm above the roof of the doghouse, rather than flush, so that’s a mark against it too.  

Speaking of paint apps, Snoopy’s ears tend to be a problem for merchandisers. Ostensibly, Snoopy is a beagle, but his markings don’t match up all that well with a real Beagle. Schulz tended to draw Snoopy with partially coloured ears, even across his different appearances over the decades. Merch manufacturers tend to give him solid black ears (which is technically wrong) or partially colour the ears black and leave the rest white, which usually looks worse in 3 dimensions. This one tries to split the difference and colours the exterior of his ears black while leaving the interiors white. It’s not great, and I think they should have just made them all-black.  

This car is a great concept, but lacking in execution. While the doghouse portion is well-executed, Snoopy himself is definitely lacking. I’d much prefer to see Peanuts deluxe releases, with nicer card art and “real” cars, to make for a nice desk display. Perhaps with the movie on its way next year, we’ll get that.