Cecil Gibson was a bit of a curmudgeon, and it is true to say that many of the die-cast car collectors I have met in my life also are. I have his original Dinky book, with all the mistakes later rectified by writers such as J.M. Roulet or Mike Richardson. Gibson did not like slot cars, hey? Well, that's OK, we will forgive him, I don't particularly care for many "toy" like slot cars either... did anyone mentioned early 1970's Scalextric or late 1960's Eldon?
Thing is, 1/43 scale (O-gauge) die-cast cars were TOYS to begin with, and Gibson was taking them a bit too seriously... I fondly remember when my uncle (the only one in the family who appeared to have any disposable cash) brought me home a Dinky Talbot-Lago (the French one, there were not too many British Dinkies in France). I was 10 years old and thought that the Talbot was the coolest car I had ever seen with all those little louvers on its hood.
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I had already scrounged a few used Dinkies bummed from buddies who had already thoroughly savaged them and had been discarded after they lost most of their former glory including their little tires, and was spending days removing the damaged paint, polishing and sometimes filing the bodies back to shape depending on the amount of damage, and repainting them with a fine brush, trying to not leave any dust on them. Then went the search at the local hardware store for suitable replacement tires in the form of O-rings, since the local toy shop did not carry spares... so I made my own customs following the trend shown in period British magazines.
When in November 1957, the first slot cars appeared in French department stores, I could not believe how great they were, at last we would be able to race realistic looking cars instead of make-believe pushing them on the carpet! So as soon as I could afford it, away went the Dinkies (and Corgies, and Marklin, and CIJ and all the other "toy" cars) and in came the slot cars.
And indeed soon, the die-cast market lost its bottom, the Meccano companies as well as all the others finding themselves in near bankruptcies as other toys had taken over the previous "boys" market. However it was not related to the rise of the slot cars, simply a coincidence.
Now and after many, many years of slot car interest, I contemplate what has taken place to the die-cast market, and am not sure that it is so great:
First, the Mattel Hot Wheels satisfied the needs of the kids with, as Bill Cosby in his famous "All Children Have Brain Damage" sketch, had little of good taste. Indeed, the smaller cars with their red-line tires, butt-ugly colors, mongrel bodies but improved rolling properties put an end to the conventional toy car. Matchbox, to compete, had to follow suit, and we were blessed with 30 years of terrible junk in the most horrid shades of lead-free paint seen by mankind.
The nice old Dinkies and Corgies, now fast disappearing as new items were now collected by adults seeking the most perfect examples and rarest colors in which those rather charming and naive toys had been manufactured. For the form purists, dozens of cottage manufacturers began making white-metal kits cast in rubber molds so as to assemble most precise models of cars they wanted, John Day being a pioneer in that. Kids no longer bought "toy" cars, it became an adult market. Then, the cottage companies began assembling the kits and selling them ready to display, but the prices became quite high.
Then, as what happened with the later slot cars, the Chinese arrived and suddenly, what was only accessible to the relatively wealthy collector was now available to all, with greater and greater precision and detail, that Gibson, Sinclair and Jose Rodriguez would have loved, but that leave me cold.
So as many, I went BACK and began collecting the ones no one cared for anymore, the prewar Dinkies, Marklin, and especially the American Tootsietoys, because I wanted to recover that lost charm that is so missing in the precise Chinese models.
Recently, I wrote
THIS ARTICLE for an online magazine, so as to expose the best of the prewar era to new collectors. A far cry from the high-precision die-cast models of today, but more dear to me.
Recently, "old" Dinky Toys have been reproduced by "Atlas", a Chinese company working for Mattel, so that nostalgics from the old days may retrieve their youth. Sorry Mattel, but it is just not the same, as the "Adventures of Tintin" by Spielberg will hardly cut it with the true Tintin aficionados... reproductions are ersatz, and ersatz is cr*p in my book (while others, who do not qualify as I now do, as curmudgeons, may differ!).
Same goes for the re-editions of supposedly "collectible" slot cars actually... but good for spare parts!
So I guess I have now reached Gibson's level of "toy intolerance".
