OMG...Is This Real?

The pic is from the net, but I remember my Eagle was just like that one! I suppose they are British, just as the show (original network: ITV)

Hehe, British expertise time

So basically, from the 50's/60's to the 1990's, there were several UK based die-cast toy car manufacturers, with the biggest being Tri-ang, Dinky, Matchbox & Corgi.

Tri-ang were a company known for a large variety of products, who later bought out/merged with Hornby, the UK's oldest and most well known manufacturer of model railway products.

Matchbox were an independent company for many years, and were called 'Matchbox' thanks to their early packaging and vehicle sizing being similar to that of a standard box of matches; For many years, they were similar to Tomica of the present day with a revolving selection of models sold in the standardised matchbox packing. By the late 1970's, they shifted towards being a British equivalent to Hot Wheels as a line, with more tracksets and other similar products being sold, and by the early 1990's, were basically the same as Hot Wheels, eventually being bought by Mattel and actually ending up as a secondary alternative brand of toy car to Mattel's mainline Hot Wheels, with less of a focus on British models.

Corgi was another make with a similar story, starting as makers of predominately British models, and eventually losing market to Mattel, being bought by them in the 1990's, surviving for a few years as 'Corgi Auto-City' before being amalglamated into Hot Wheels; However, Corgi as a brand actually survived beyond Mattel's ownership, as Hornby bought out Corgi, and managed to restart the line as a line of die-cast models specifically aimed at collectors.

Finally, and most pertinent to the discussion here, Dinky.

Dinky is probably, from a history standpoint, the most interesting of all these; It was the biggest selling British die-cast line, and shares common ancestry with the rest of the Hornby group, being the third major commercial success developed by Frank Hornby alongside his eponymous model trains and Meccano [better known as the Erector Set to places outside the UK/Commonwealth]; Their biggest success came with the fact that as a British company, they secured the merchandising rights to what was at the time Britain's most lucrative set of TV shows, the Gerry Anderson 'Supermarionation' puppet shows, and later his live-action works like Space:1999 and UFO, which netted them a ton of money; To this day, the vehicles from any of the Dinky Anderson releases are still highly prized collectibles, with complete sets of Thunderbirds vehicles in good condition netting hundreds of pounds at auction as far as i'm aware.

And yeah, Gerry Anderson headed a team of people who would go on to basically shape the entire UK film industry - to give you an idea, the SFX director went on to work on most of the James Bond films up to GoldenEye, and the Christopher Reeve Superman, while other team members went on to work in other projects, including several Anderson alumni such as David Mitton working for Clearwater Films, who of course were responsible for the original Thomas the Tank Engine series and TUGS [the episode 'Munitions' in TUGS is very Anderson-esque with it's huge amount of explosion effects lol  ]

All of Anderson's works were for ITV, at the time the UK's first and only commercial TV network and actually this was where he found his start in TV programming and filmmaking, through work with puppets for children, which culminated in the development of Supermarionation, a process using extremely advanced marionette puppets on screen; The results of this were a huge back catalogue of now-legendary British sci-fi content, including the now-revered Thunderbirds, argued to probably be the best thing that Gerry Anderson and his team ever created [and given how long it's lasted, and is still going strong, i'd be hard pressed to disagree], probably only just about matched in longevity by Britain's own Doctor Who [from the BBC, our state-run television] from the same era. Interestingly, after Thunderbirds, Anderson expressed an interest to move away from puppets to more realistic filming, despite Thunderbirds being his greatest success, and this is how UFO and Space:1999 came about, UFO coming first as Anderson's first major success with live-action, with Space:1999 being originally planned as Season 2 of UFO but shifted to become a show in it's own right.

However, Dinky also suffered the same fate as all the other UK die-cast manufacturers; Hot Wheels appeared, and Dinky was effectively unable to compete, so Matchbox bought the remains of Dinky in the late 1980's, selling Dinky branded products as special collectors editions for a few years, before terminating the name entirely; The last gasps of Dinky as a brand came in recent years when DeAgostini magazines attempted to revive the Dinky name for a collectible line of model vehicles  [based on reconstructions of the original Dinky castings, as the originals were sold or lost] which were sold alongside magazines, but these apparently have since fallen out of production too.

Interestingly, for what it's worth, the Gerry Anderson series have been made into merchandise by various parties, and Matchbox actually later had involvement with releasing merchandise to coincide with a revival in popularity of the Gerry Anderson series in the 1990's, mainly Thunderbirds, including diecast models and other products; This was one of the last major projects Matchbox did before being bought by Mattel, and it could be speculated that maybe this was because Matchbox [at the time] were the spiritual and legal successors to Dinky, the previous merchandisers.

Of course, nowadays the Gerry Anderson merchandise is made by loads of different manufacturers, including Bandai, Vivid Imaginations UK, and probably most relevant to this site, Tomy - Thunderbirds recieved a CGI remake in 2015 [a most excellent remake too, coming from a lifelong Thunderbirds fan], and as a result Tomy made die-cast Tomica Thunderbirds for the Japanese market, although I have suspicions the UK versions [marketed by Vivid Imaginations] were actually re-packaged Tomica models, as I have Thunderbirds 1,2 & 3 for my Tomica World layout, bought from a UK seller, and looking at pictures, the UK and Japanese models appear to be the same - I could be wrong though, but it is interesting that in the end, die-cast Gerry Anderson vehicles have fallen into the Tomica line, although the sustained popularity of Gerry Anderson's works over in Japan goes a way to explain why Tomy would have been so keen to get the Thunderbirds into Tomica 

[Also, fun bonus trivia on Gerry Anderson - Such was the juggernaut success of his work, that an entire line of ice-cream products were marketed with his characters, including Stingray, Thunderbirds, Space 1999, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 and others; These were all made by the British company Lyons Maid, a division of the then-wider Lyons group, a major UK company of the era who were mainly involved in foodservice but also had roots in the early British computer industry with the Lyons Electronic Office range of computer mainframes developed from their own proprietary company network. Most of the Anderson sponsorships had ended by the 1980's, and Lyons Maid were bought from Lyons by Nestle and amalglamated into their ice cream division; The sole survivor of the Anderson ice creams, which still retains it's Thunderbirds-themed name, is the 'FAB' ice lolly, which is still widely avaliable in the UK, albeit with no reference to Thunderbirds on the packaging; 'FAB' was both the catchphrase of the Thunderbirds team, and in the UK is a shortened version of the word 'fabulous'.]

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Quite the lesson P-Man, I did not know that, Thank you!

Oh, Matchbox! I had a full “Matchbox” showcase in those days, but this one was my favourite:



I took it to my English class because the teacher wanted us to bring our favourite toy. She would put her hand in the box, and we kids had to guess what she grabbed. I guess she was thinking of expanding our vocabulary .... She called this "Dragon Wheels VW" a green car. Little did she know that I was not interested in any other toys that the other children brought. I just shouted every time, "Green car! Green car!"

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I just shouted every time, "Green car! Green car!"

LOL...I literally laughed out loud upon reading this 

Lol, I'm showing one of my other hobbies here a bit lol, being from the UK and with a dad who remembered the original run of Thunderbirds etc. as well as Dinky and the like, I grew up with these too, and I suppose its testament to how well made the Anderson canon was, that I'm still enjoying them as much now as I ever have -
In a way, I was fortunate to be born in 1998 because around 3 years later in 2001, as I was just the right sort of age, Thunderbirds experienced a major revival that lasted through to about 2004, and of course I had most of the toys from that era as a result, as well as some of the older stuff secondhand - I still have most of them somewhere xD

The revival sort of died in 2004 though thanks to Hollywood - Basically, Universal Studios happened to own the film rights to Thunderbirds, a side-effect from them becoming the de-facto owners of the Anderson library in the 1990's for a short time, before selling them to 'Carlton' - Carlton was the London division of ITV at the time; Without writing an essay on the subject (it would be very easy to), the original UK ITV was run by a set of region-based companies on a franchise system, where companies bid to run the service for contract periods; This meant that ITV was effectively different networks and programming for every region of the country, but all the ITV networks pooled major programmes for national broadcast, so shows like Thunderbirds, Space 1999 etc. were always shown nationally.

Carlton was, by this time, the successor to ATV, the company formerly responsible for London and the Midlands ITV system during the era of Anderson's work, and ATV was the company he sold almost all his work to, having a close working relationship with station head Lew Grade, who also owned ITC, a separate company under common ownership that sold ATV and other programmes across the world, as well as distribution of movies. Interestingly, after Anderson stopped distributing through ITC in the 1970's, more puppets would replace him - Jim Henson worked with Grade to bring the Muppets to TV via ITC!

The whole reason that Universal ended up with the Anderson rights was because eventually, ITC was bought by PolyGram, who in turn were bought by Universal - ATV was wound up by the end of the 1970's and its successor, Central would eventually become part of Carlton, so it was seen as a logical move to re-unite the ITC library, mostly made up of old ITV programming, with what remained of its original broadcaster. However, this didn't include the rights to a then-in-development Thunderbirds movie...

Basically, Universal had the contractual rights to see through a live-action Thunderbirds movie, with Gerry's blessing. At least, that was the idea.

Here's the bad news - After being in development hell since the mid 1990's, Gerry and his former wife (and major Thunderbirds contributor) Sylvia were bought on to supervise. Gerry quit after only about 2 weeks, because he probably saw exactly what was happening.

Needless to say, Summer 2004 saw 'Thunderbirds', an overhyped rehash of the plot of Spy Kids, now starring all the IP of Thunderbirds, because why not?

Now, in the movie's defence, the soundtrack, SFX, some of the actors, and many of the visuals were actually excellent, and still kind of hold up.

Not defensible is the excessive product placement (practically every damn scene) from Ford Motors and Unilever ice-cream, the pretty poor child actors (although Vanessa Hudgens has since got better, so she gets the pass), the criminal underuse of the Thunderbirds, and (biggest sin because it's a British franchise), the immense lack of continuity in the final scenes, shot in London (guess they were rubbing salt into the wound)...

The movie tanked, Gerry went on record to say, and I quote 'It was the biggest load of crap i've ever seen in my life', and the sole audience now are kids who've probably seen the show, and ex-kids who watch the movie with a beer for a laugh (wait, that's probably just me then )

But yeah effectively, Thunderbirds '04 killed much of the mainstream Anderson revival in it's home country for over a decade, till ITV (Carlton merged with rival Granada, between them both they owned the entire ITV regional system, and converted the service to a single national service called ITV) decided to work with Pukeko Pictures (Lord of The Rings anyone?) to bring Thunderbirds back in CGI; the new revival, Thunderbirds Are Go! was nothing short of a phenomenal success, and actually worked to establish a much more solid canon for the Anderson universe, by making references to most of his previous works; establishing that all probably took place in the same universe, across different times; And yes, Space 1999 gets a couple shout outs in there too, UFO as well, so maybe one day we'll see a proper attempt at a live-action Thunderbirds; Guess we can live in hope lol ?

For now anyway, the revival efforts continue as most of the Anderson canon is avaliable here on Bluray, DVD, and on BritBox (ITV's answer to Netflix), and honestly, I can't recommend them enough to anyone, especially people who appreciate the model work in things like Thomas; As previously noted, Thomas and Freinds was in part a legacy of Anderson's work, being worked on by many alumni from his studios in the early series made by Clearwater, and the similarities in technology and special effects are pretty clear if you watch both together

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You still have most of your toys...fantastic...keep them if you can...not for the value but for the memories...you will appreciate that when you get older.