Rebranding Matchbox toy cars 1969-79:
getting Superfast to catch up with the Hotwheels paradigm
Gökhan Ersan
Assistant Professor
SUNY Binghamton University
Department of Art and Design
[email protected]
Rebranding Matchbox toy cars 1969-79:
getting Superfast to catch up with the Hotwheels paradigm
Introduction
The image of a child wheeling a toy car between two fingers from the cover of a toy catalogue
suggests the dual “values” of the automobile as an object of mobility and an object cherished for
its beauty. It is a thing of performance and aesthetics, of engineering and design, and as its name
suggests, of individual mobility. As cars enter an economy and public consciousness, they
become more than objects of individual concern, creating economies of scale, transforming
communal aspirations and setting new material standards. Therefore, automobiles embody larger
questions as to how much anonymity or distinction, cooperation or competition should guide
social and economic life. For these reasons, the definition of automobility moved to the center of
political economies after World War II as the world was redefined by a new wave of
industrialization. These very questions were at the heart of the brand competition that took place
between two toy car manufacturers Lesney Products and Mattel Inc. in the late 1960s and early
1970s. English toy car manufacturer Lesney had popularized its “Matchbox” toy cars largely by
attaching a branding discourse that endorsed the communal ethos that was guiding economic
recovery and cultural production in post World War II Europe. Mattel introduced Hot Wheels
cars in 1968 that endorsed the opposing paradigm of speed and individualism in toy car play,
quickly decimating Lesney’s market share in the United States, the largest market for these toys.
Lesney Products swiftly rebranded its “Matchbox” toy cars to respond to its emerging competitor
Mattel’s “Hot Wheels” toys. This paper is inquiring on the role that rebranding plays to attune
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the appreciation of toys with contemporary popular sensibilities—through the use of product
design, marketing and advertising. It asks if toys and toy-sets—as imaginative, representational,
and simulative environments—can serve as small scale mirrors of larger debates about the ethos
of tutelary vs free market economic sensibilities manifested in tensions between cooperative and
competitive actions; pedagogical, desirous and entertaining experiences. The argument is
developed primarily by analyzing the visual and verbal discourse of Lesney toys and toy-sets in
product design, packaging, advertising, and marketing. Furthermore, these design strategies are
contextualized by looking at Lesney’s manufacturing and distribution strategies found in the
archival records of Lesney Products at British National Archives and Hackney Archives. These
findings are enriched by borrowing insights from literature that describes the general socioeconomic mood that the Bretton Woods paradigm created in Europe and how Lesney benefited
from it.
Lesney’s case is important for two reasons. Firstly, because it demonstrates how business
strategies might be exceptionally sensitive to changes in popular sensitivities in certain product
categories. Secondly, because Lesney’s actions foreshadowed the shift from dominant tutelary
political economies towards market liberalism that was taking place at the end of the 1970s in
Western Europe. Drawing from the sources described above, this paper’s composite analytical
view that combines design history, business history, and political economy reveals new patterns
in the shift from tutelary to free market sensibilities in Western Europe in the early 1970s.
Lesney’s operations serve as a microcosm of the larger European business world. Longevity and
stability of product design and ethos were shaken up by popular consumer pressures in the 1970s
in small scale industrial boroughs such as Hackney, England that housed Lesney and
2
simultaneously in larger scale producers such as Wolfsburg, West Germany that housed
Volkswagen. Lesney’s story foreshadows large scale value shifts in the small scale of toys which
were once a stable consumer area where they served primarily as pedagogical devices, that
became more and more sensitive to changes in popular culture and became linked to popular
entertainment and media.
The discussion is concluded by looking at the legacy of Matchbox and Hot Wheels three decades
after their competition heated up and colorized toy design. An argument is made that the
excessive toy design paradigms that came forth during their competition in the 1970s came to
inform automobile styling that was in need of an entertaining edge in the era of fully developed
global market capitalism of the 2000s.
Matchbox Toys: a model of postwar economic peace
The company that would become Lesney began production as a small die-cast parts
manufacturer in 1947 (Schiffer 1983, 9), the same year the Bretton Woods conference introduced
trade regulations to ensure peaceful partnerships, and to institute economic and political stability
in Europe. (Bordo 1993, 100). In addition to these regulations, the European Recovery Program
(ERP) provided American economic support to postwar reconstruction efforts (De Long 1993,
189-191). Both resources ensured the financing of public and private companies that would
undertake European reconstruction, and beyond reconstruction facilitated the building of
sustainable economic activity in Europe. These measures were also responsible for putting
Lesney to work in a bombed-out London pub, providing for the city’s reconstruction with small
die-cast products (“Matchbox Millions” 1963).
3
Lesney introduced a groundbreaking toy concept in 1953, in the form of a palm-fitting toy
vehicle that a child could purchase with pocket money. The surprise success the company had
with a toy vehicle a year earlier had given the partners enough capital and the idea to miniaturize
and mass-produce in Fordist production mode (“Mr. Smith” 1965). The commemorative royal
coronation coach that had sold over thirty thousand units in 1952 was scaled down, its price was
lowered dramatically, and a million units were made and sold in 1953. In the 1960s, when most
European families were years away from enjoying private automobiles, one European car
manufacturer outsold America's giant General Motors by making one hundred million cars a year
— albeit in one-sixtieth of the size of the real thing. England’s Lesney had become “a car maker
bigger than GM,” Associated Press announced in 1965.1 However, the business ethos behind
Lesney’s triumph drew from Europe’s much different postwar political economy. This was not to
be an unhindered, competition capitalism, but as one European government pronounced it, “a
social market economy” with a healthy redistribution of wealth.2 Matchbox toys and their
graphic presentation, that is, the whole package, mirrored a Europe where political economy
appeared to summon the forces of industry to provide people with an acceptable standard of
living. Matchbox toys had arrived at a time of ‘Credits for Everyman,’ as rationing was lifted in
England and society anticipated access to home comforts and the family car on the easy
installment plan (Jeremiah 2000, 164). Lesney contributed to this emerging communal ethos of
consumerism by summoning children to the economic front by offering them a “pocket money
toy” that they could buy on their own, without the need for a special trip with their parents to a
toy store (Scholl 2002, 17).
4
The image of a Volkswagen 1600 gently driving into a filling station on a Matchbox catalog
page fulfilled this vision and set the pace for the Matchbox traffic. Graphic design, from
packaging to the pages of pocket-sized catalogues, brought Matchbox vehicles into this peaceful
European context. What made this toy line special was the kind of vehicles and settings that
simulated a humane postwar industrial order. It included a complete coverage of utility vehicles,
from public transportation and services to construction. Catalogs portrayed Matchbox utility
vehicles that came to life in painted dioramas of Matchbox toy sets, playing their part in a
planned world within a rationally organized division of labor–whether at the construction site,
the quarry; loading and unloading at the shipyard; fighting fire; or working at the farm (figure
1). These vehicles were equipped with moving parts that encouraged children to participate in
this vision by active play. While all this work happened, the illustrations gave no sign of
competition or hurry, but portrayed vehicles that gently fulfilled their duty for the common good.
Lesney’s tutelary role that engaged children with responsible role-play within a world simulated
in miniature was well developed in their toy catalogs. These catalogs treated their little owners
like stockholders in Lesney toys, making them aware that they were participating in a scheme
larger than the toy in their hands. The catalogs showed in a sober manner that the company
summoned a European workforce that provided raw materials and shipped them to England
(figure 2). A professional staff designed the products and well-paid British workers
manufactured parts, assembled, packaged, and distributed them. The presentation implied that
Lesney’s operation, though Lilliputian in scale, was a mirror of European economic
collaboration. It was the fruit of planning and rational action that created economic activity—one
that employed, serviced and brought satisfaction to all who participated. The peace and harmony
5
of Western European economies envisioned by the Bretton Woods paradigm was bringing
prosperity in both scales. Matchbox promoted its principles and Lesney proved their validity by
becoming one of the most successful British companies (“Conveying 1964”), recognized by
three Queens Awards to Industry in the 1960s (Scholl 2002, 49).
Lesney wanted its toys to engage American children for the same core reason that they engaged
European children, that is, by urging gentle and mindful play. Fred Bronner, who imported the
toys into the United States, was a European-born American businessman who took on the role of
cultural ambassador from the Old World (Peterson 1964). His company issued ads that suggested
that American parents give their children “the gift of creative joy” in the form of Matchbox Cars
(Matchbox Series 1961). For American children who never saw most of the Matchbox cars they
played with on their own roads, they served a more imaginary than a simulative role. The main
purpose, a Bronner executive suggested in an American TV newscast, was “the same as
collecting stamps or coins” (“Interview” 1965”). Matchbox cars were indeed, at a more intimate
level, imaginative objects that motored between a child’s thumb and index finger. Lifelike,
realistic, and precise, these delightful tokens simultaneously provided an aesthetic experience,
invited marvel, and elicited intellectual abandon that defied their pedagogical purpose.
Hot Wheels: design with no speed limits
While the English toy company Lesney prepared to move into an immense new factory to keep
up with the demand of one hundred million toy cars per year and looked forward to carrying its
mission into the 1970s (“Lesney Products & Co. Ltd.” 1967), something unsettling lurked in the
air that threatened to demolish the brand that Odell and Smith had built so painstakingly. Of all
6
people, it was an American car trade journalist who seemed to have discovered the chink in
Matchbox’s armor. After ruminating about the success of Lesney’s little imported cars, Car and
Driver ’s Warren Weith ended his column with this revelation:
“…maybe you better not go into that toy store…those little lead cars can’t do anything. They
don’t whirr or buzz, and consequently they don’t require any Yankee ingenuity to make them
go fast. They must be un-American because you can’t compete with them. And you know
what happens to things that just sit there and look nice” (Weith 1965, 22).
It seems that an all-American toy company listened to these words, because everything changed
for Lesney when a few years later Mattel introduced faster and hotter little cars that instantly
made Matchbox feel obsolete in multiple levels. Hot Wheels blazed into the toy car scene like a
proverbial wildfire, and in the process, devoured Matchbox’s polite design philosophy and
disturbed peace in the Matchbox world.
Hot Wheels emerged on the scene, ironically, at a time when American cultural values were
transforming and the consumerist ethos behind American postwar recovery was wearing off. The
promise of the American economy to provide “luxury for all,” epitomized by the excessively
decorated sedans of the 1950s was losing its appeal in the late 1960s (Wilson 1976, 288; James
2005, 218). All of this had placed Detroit on an involuntary pursuit to construct less pretentious,
more sensible vehicles. Politicians gave automakers five years “to clean up their act or get out
own town!” (Fox 1970, 44-6). Thus, Mattel's project to capitalize on the miniature car market
(Van Bogart 2007, 7) very quickly became a venue to extend the celebration of car design excess
7
in miniature that was failing in full scale. Mattel’s Hot Wheels project was an all out assault on
the senses that drew from the capital of California’s show car phenomenon in which the
triumphalism of American car culture still burned bright. The Californian toy company hired
Detroit car designers for the Hot Wheels project. People like Fred Adickes of Chrysler and Harry
Bentley Bradley of General Motors were already exploring the boundaries of visual excess that
belonged to the American postwar car design ethos in their fiery portfolios (Smith 2010; Snyder
2008)—but they were confined to tinkering with small car parts in their day jobs. In Hot Wheels,
Detroit’s young designers found a venue to exercise their bolting design dreams by realizing
complete cars. (Van Bogart 2007, 7-8). They brought together the first Hot Wheels line of 1968
by modeling high profile custom and muscle cars. Bradley’s fantastical re-imagining of a Dodge
pickup as “Deora,” the surfer wagon, summarized the Hot Wheels philosophy with its blend of
novelty, power, and speed. Cars with names like Turbofire, Twinmill, Splitting Image, and
Python were explorations into the depths of verbal, visual and performative excess. Mattel
promised that these cars would “out-race, out-stunt and out-distance,” their competitors in an
aggressive marketing campaign launched in 1968 using all the media and marketing tools at its
disposal (Gerber 2009, 154).
The design and presentation of the Hot Wheels toy worked to fulfill this promise by magnifying
it verbally and visually. The Hot Wheels logo was literally the brand name on fire. Moreover, the
designers amplified stylistic details so that the sensation of the original show cars did not
disappear in the their palm-sized versions. The cars featured tampo-printed patterns; they were
awash with chrome and glitter paint; they had exposed guts and detailed undersides. The Hot
Wheels package was not a closed box with a representative image that created anticipation and
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delayed gratification like the Matchbox package. “The blister pack,” offered pure voyeuristic
pleasure of seeing the car through clear plastic. The full sensorial assault continued on TV. The
company’s aggressive marketing strategies even pushed up against moral and regulative barriers
in the US.3
Within the first year of Hot Wheels’ introduction Mattel claimed the whole realm of little cars,
and as far as the US market was concerned, it absorbed most of this realm into its spectacular,
performative fantasy domain. At their high point, one third of Matchbox revenues came from the
US, but they plummeted from $28 million in 1967 to $6 million in 1969 (Scholl 2002, 52). Hot
Wheels had redefined the imaginary environment that little cars existed in. Lesney could not just
partially adjust to this new environment. It went on a mission to surpass Hot Wheels in
emotional heat. The question was how to transform an unassuming car that sat inside a frugal
Matchbox into a statement of power and speed, still call it Matchbox, and get away with it.
(Lesney Products & Co. Ltd 1970).
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Hotter Wheels: re-engineering and re-tooling toys for speed
What made Hot Wheels “hot” were really the wheels to begin with. “Go faster…roll farther,”
read the back of the blister pack. The wheels of the first batch, with their five spokes and
signature red stripe, bear a striking resemblance to the ones on the meanest muscle car icon of
the day, the 1967 Dodge Charger (figure 3). Beyond the fast-forward looks, Hot Wheels
designers thought that the car should actually move, go fast, race, and win. Engineers Jack Malek
and Howard Newman designed an ingenious low-friction wheel that would spin faster than any
previous toy car wheel (Van Bogart 2007, 12; Gerber 2009, 153-54), making every surface a
potential racetrack. Mattel did not stop there. They created toy racetracks for the cars, and they
made it explicit in advertising that the main purpose of Hot Wheels cars was not to marvel over
realistic details and hold them dear. As the fluid prose of the pocket catalogue put it, the logic
was to “see ‘em streak away from the starting gate! Around hairpin curves! Racing over &
under! To the finish gate.” (Hot Wheels, 1968 8).
Matchbox cars, on the other hand did not move well. They pretty much just sat there.
They could be wheeled around between fingers, but attempts to propel them with a push would
not take the cars farther than a few frustrating inches. This was because the wheels were secured
to the axles, and the axles struggled to roll inside their rigid bearings. So, shortly after Hot
Wheels’ introduction, Matchbox came up with not one, but a dozen kinds of low-friction, highspeed wheels–each with its own uniquely stylized hubcap. The new wheels made the Matchbox
car not fast, but Superfast, as the adjective that was added to the brand name suggested. Unlike
the old wheels that cruised on peaceful roadways, Matchbox Superfast could be raced on a
fantastical, looping racetrack that promoted racing as the primary purpose of Matchbox toys
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(figure 4).
Matchbox Superfast: a design discourse of superlatives
Matchbox’s design makeover is easily seen in the evolution of the logo (figure 5). First, a
forward-leaning “Superfast” subtitle was added to the brand name. Then, the brand name itself
leans forward, getting ready to sprint. Next, the brand name is underscored with a bold red line.
When all is consolidated, the logo emerges as a modern and muscular stamp that hammers the
phrase Matchbox in bold sans serif typography, encircled by not one but two bold lines. The final
Matchbox logo, while interjecting power and speed, looks patiently rationalized and precisely
executed. Its controlled, clean lines typify European design’s way of managing power and speed.
The package artwork mutated, too. The elegant gouache illustrations that typified earlier
packages gradually made the car spring forward more. The Matchbox Beetle goes from a flat
drawing gently nudged forward by faint speed lines, to a two-point, and finally a three-point
perspective drawing that appears to leap out of the page, thrust forward by speed lines that have
mutated into beams of light (figure 6). Anything from a cuddly MG Midget to a doughy
Volkswagen, and even a dump truck receives the beam-of-light treatment. The homely doubledecker bus is the only former Matchbox vehicle that is spared from over-speeding, which was
apparently thought to be inappropriate to promote this behavior for public transportation
vehicles. The entire Matchbox world, as it is portrayed on the catalog covers, speeds up to catch
up with Hot Wheels (figure 7). The road scenes on catalog covers that had been marked by
stillness are first brought into motion from the point of view of a car window in 1969. The scene
falls into disorder the following year, when disembodied cars and brand names are seen
11
pointlessly jumbling in space. It finally turns into pure chaos where all sorts of land, air, and
water vehicles are whizzing and melting into each other in phantasmagorical, fiery color space.
Hot Wheels wanted to drag Matchbox into the racetrack, so Matchbox decided to out-race it. The
first Matchbox stunt-track was introduced with the word “zoom.” The company summoned all its
powers, from its engineering to the art department, to come up with track set packages that made
Hot Wheels tracks look tame. These packages immensely benefit from the luxurious illustration
style that Matchbox was known for. Fluid gouache strokes now celebrate the phenomenon of
speed. Cars that were once carefully steered to obey traffic on “switch-a-track” sets are now
slingshot in whatever direction one desires on the new “hit-n-miss” tracks. In 1970, the company
took playtime stakes to the next level, releasing a board game titled “Crash” that foreshadowed
the cheerful intellectual abandon philosophy popularized by Nickelodeon TV twenty years later.4
At the core of Matchbox toys were still the vehicles that needed physical bolstering to truly
surpass the excitement induced by Hot Wheels cars. Lesney found a stylistic edge over Hot
Wheels in the visual idioms introduced by Italian designers in European “supercars” that
challenged Detroit in stylistic and engineering innovation (Posthumus 1970; Car 2011 210-11).
“Superfast” Matchbox cars, borrowed not only stylistic idioms but also a sense of planning and
purpose from their full-scale cousins. “What will cars of the future look like?” asked Matchbox
in its 1970 catalogue with a concept drawing titled “the future” (Matchbox 1970 63). The answer
read, “obviously low, with aerodynamic styling,” accompanied by a drawing of a car whose parts
were unified into an aggressive wedge shape. Matchbox’ first uniquely European fantasy car, the
Soopa Coopa, challenged its American rivals by its outer shell but also by an inner core that
12
sported an innovative German rotary engine rather than the old piston engine that Detroit cars
had boasted for so long.
Lesney was so determined to keep Matchbox relevant that it even remodeled its line of utility
vehicles with this swaggering motif. The unassuming ambulance, now with a wedged-nose that
tilted upward, became the defiant Stretcha Fetcha. Sharpened both by visual and verbal rhetoric,
the ambulance is imagined to zoom into space leaving yellow and red streaks behind in the art on
its matchbox.
Matchbox’ pop makeover in the 1970s was designed to satisfy the heightened expectations of its
US fans, the largest pool of Matchbox customers in the world. It simultaneously resonated with
European cultural production that was “pushing boundaries of taste and permission” (Forster
2010, 8). European culture—whether in disenchantment with, or in cheerful escape from the
socio-economic order—began to embrace a “restless push against boundaries and limitations”
coming from art and design communities (Forster 2010, 8). Social democracies and their
accompanying humanist-egalitarian design ethos came under attack both from the left and the
right. Leftist intellectuals blamed the failure of planning to a lack of will in its execution
(Jeremiah 2000, 199-200), while businessmen blamed their “moralizing” design culture for
preventing natural market relations from taking place (Betts 2004, 254). In a way, Matchbox’s
transition during the 1970s anticipated Europe’s move from a tutelary to a consumer-driven
economy.
As car journalist Weith had anticipated in 1965, “Yankee ingenuity” had shaken up Lesney’s
13
European quiescence in the late 1960s (Weith 1965, 18). It had drawn the company into fierce
competition in the arena of American pop-culture where it was not prepared to operate.
However, through part-improvised and part-rationalized design strategies such as subject group
testing (“Lesney Products & Co. Ltd.” 1970), Lesney was able to produce a strangely hybrid
form of pop-cultural output across the toys, their packaging, and their marketing. The toys had
moved from their former domain of simulated nation state into the global marketplace of the
1970s. The phrase Matchbox, in its potent new form came to serve as an abstraction for a
corporation that made “action toys of the 70s.”5 The core product, the Matchbox car, had
mutated into a strangely entertaining toy, yet it was still produced to high quality standards and
could still be purchased by pocket money. “Which will last longer?” a Matchbox TV ad asked in
1975, showing Detroit-made cars being stacked up in a junkyard (“Matchbox” 1975). “Your five
thousand dollar car, or our car that sells for about a buck.” England’s Lesney, with a voice
embattled by American competition, had aligned itself with a growing crowd that ridiculed
America’s struggling auto industry. While Matchbox toys were forced to perform at higher
stakes to be desirable again in American children’s imagination, the same imaginative excess
that operated in full scale for grown-ups had begun to fail America’s automotive industry.
The End of the Matchbox Peace
The investment it made to catch up with European design idioms, to comply with proverbial and
real speed limits, to slow down and to become smaller—as the title of Ford’s Pinto implied—had
embattled American auto industry in the 1970s, leaving it under financial burdens which it
arguably never quite got over.6 On the other hand, the investment it made to adopt the opposite
design idiom: to become “Superfast” had embattled English toymaker Lesney (“Will” 1970).
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Lesney, though the worldwide reach of its Matchbox toys peaked around 1980, did not survive
beyond 1982. The same economic and cultural entropy that broke the Bretton Woods broke the
English toymaker. Along with living standards, labor costs had risen in Western Europe—ending
the peace between business and labor induced by the Bretton Woods paradigm. The once happy
workers of Lesney struck twice in the 1970s, costing Lesney significant capital drain (Scholl
2002, 70). The paradox of capitalism continued to haunt Matchbox toys: free trade had also
brought too much competition. Diversifying, and marketing toys to maintain market share had
cost too much. Lesney also struggled because it had to compete on unfair grounds with Mattel
and other toy makers who had long ago moved their production to cheap labor havens.7
Despite appearing as the ruler of the world of small cars, Lesney actually began to lose money in
1973. The company succumbed to new business and finance paradigms that would define the
global economy in the next three decades. Lesney tried debt financing, but it could not be
sustained. The company was forced by its lenders to move production to Macau and to shut
down its English plants in 1980. Bankruptcy and receivership by a Hong Kong toy company
followed in 1982 (Brown 1993, 592-606), the year in which the underside of the Matchbox car
no longer read “Lesney England.” The brand name survived, yet Matchbox as a worldwide
phenomenon came to an end.
A Design Resurgence
This episode in toy design that involved Matchbox and Hotwheels was forgotten until the Hot
Wheels idioms were resurrected to revitalize car design in full scale. The “rational car,” now
epitomized by Japan’s Toyota (James 2005, 54-71), had reached a stylistic dead-end in the mid
15
1990s. Two decades of computer-based design rationalizations had left the car with a doughy
outer shell.8 The typical car, in an effort to regain its evocative edge, seemed to reach out to a
design idiom that was introduced by Mattel in the late 1960s. This became most evident when
Toyota began to sharpen the image of its cars with hubcaps that mimic the ones on Hot Wheels
toy cars (figure 8); and continued when the company added muscle definition to car bodies with
“energy streaks” that looked suspiciously familiar to the “Hot Wheels” flames. The resurrection
of Hot Wheels idioms continued as Chevrolet offered a Hot Wheels option of the 2013 Camaro
whose 1967 version had served to lead the Hot Wheels line (“First” 2013). All of this publicity
put Hot Wheels cars back on the grocery store shelves too, since their philosophy of challenge,
competition, and speed merged with the new car design paradigm. The cars now sold at the same
price as they were in 1969, thanks to even cheaper labor and thicker paint that concealed their
fuzzier details. Hot Wheels’ philosophy of design and business has risen to the top. Its cultural
capital, on the other hand, is playing its part in putting Detroit designers back to work in the 21st
century.
The memory of Matchbox is partly preserved by a high-rise apartment complex developed on its
factory site in 2012 (Dellner 2012). Part of the development titled “Matchmakers Wharf,”
alludes to the barges that used to carry toy parts on the canal, celebrating a golden moment in
England’s postwar industrial development. This used to be a place defined more by cooperation
than challenge that produced models of its ethos in the form of miniature cars, townscapes, and
roads. Lesney represented two domains, one real and the other in miniature scale, that were both
made possible by a political economy that ensured the livelihood and stability of Western
Europe, a small part of world population.9 But, it was looked upon by the rest of the world
16
further down the ladder of economic development. Perhaps, more so for those children who held
Matchbox toys, while living on the margins of European development. This postwar dream of a
world in balance, represented by the story of Lesney, is a reminder of our failure to respond to
the challenges of economic and cultural crises of the 1970s in an equitable manner. So, in the
second decade of the twenty-first century, as policy makers are back to the drawing board
seeking solutions for an equitable and sustainable industrial culture and design’s constructive
role in it, the layout of an old Matchbox roadway playset that invited citizens/stakeholders into
the discussion through creative play, becomes relevant again as a model to which we can aspire.
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Figure 1. Matchbox Collector’s Catalog page illustrating utility vehicles, 1968.
Figure 2. Matchbox Collector’s Catalog page explaining toy production, 1968
Figure 3. The wheels of a 1967 Dodge Charger and a Hot Wheels toy compared, 1968.
Figure 4. Advertisement that introduced Matchbox Superfast toys, c. 1969.
Figure 5. The evolution of the Matchbox logo, 1969-76.
Figure 6. The evolution of Matchbox box art in 1969, 1970, 1971.
Figure 7. The evolution of Matchbox catalog covers in 1969, 1970, 1972.
Figure 8. Wheels of Hot Wheels toys and Toyota cars in 1996, 2003, and 2010.
Notes
1
The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, for example, summed up the whole story with a tongue-in-cheek title. “Cheers: toy
Firm in Old London Pub Reduces General Motors to World’s No. 2 Automaker.” The Plain Dealer 7 Mar. 1965.
2
Rieger 2013: 129. West German minister of economy L. Erhard introduced the term. West Germany’s ruling SPD
(Social Democratic Party) promoted a centrally planned economy that incorporated elements of market capitalism as
a means for maintaining order while making room for freedom and diversity (Castillo 2010: 2). Similarly, in
England, the ruling Labor Party had enacted Keynesian economic policies that were first articulated by Keynes
himself at the Bretton Woods conference—that meant nationalizing major industries and conceiving economic
safety nets for its population (Langhamer 2005: 347).
3
The Hot Wheels TV show launched in 1969 violated Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations
concerning the separation of programming and advertising (Owen 1986, 64). In 1970, Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) declared television advertising for Hot Wheels misleading, claiming that the ads falsely portrayed the toys'
appearance and performance (Thain 1972, 897; Gerber 2009, 174).
4
See Banet-Weiser 2007. Nickelodeon TV was launched in 1979 with the objective to create a place “for kids to be
kids,” where they would not be forced to learn.
5
This tagline was on display at Lesney’s offices in the 1970s.
6The
challenge was to persuade the American public that these reinvented cars were still desirable. Car and Driver
magazine voiced these worries on its cover that that asked if Detroit’s cars had become “Unlonger, unlower,
unwider…un-American?” The article that followed reassured people that the cars had actually improved by
becoming “shorter, lighter, handsomer, quicker.” (Sherman 1976: 33)
7
A summary of the changing structure of the international toy industry is found in US International Trade 1991: 2-
3. For an account of Mattel’s outsourcing strategies see Johnson 2007: 113-133.
8
See Hucho 1998: 53. Hucho points to tensions between auto engineers and designers, a discord between “physics
and art.” Also see Aicher 1984. Otl. Aicher, a leading figure of the Ulm School of Design, is critical of auto
industry’s tendency to rationalize car styling as a direct result of functional necessity.
9
See Evans 2011. Evans notes that, “advantages gleaned through this system by dominant powers and groups
become self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating and…systemic inequalities among nations breed complex forms of
dependency–not only for nations and citizens of the Global South, but also for those of the First World.”
18
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