Matchbox Superfast MB50-c Ford Kennel Truck

The #50-c Ford F100 kennel truck lost its auto steer regular wheels for sprung suspension SuperFast wheels early enough in 1970 to be packaged in an ´F´ box featuring a regular wheels example with black SuperFast script. However the vast majority produced during the following two years were packaged in ´G´ boxes or blisterpacks with copyright dates between 1969 and 1972.
The same dark green candycoat was carried over from the regular wheels issues but was applied over a gold primer instead of the silver primer used on the regular wheels issues. At least one example exists with a regular wheels dark green over silver primer body but this could be a pre-pro rather than a transitional. The green candy coat got a shade lighter on subsequent runs and some exist with such thin coats that the gold primer shows through on the high edges.

All issues had the same green tinted cab windows, clear bubble canopy and white dogs mostly combined with chrome plated green plastic grilles although about half of the the recolour to lime green for 1972 featured white plastic grilles.
Most of the dark green kennel trucks were fitted with solid or hollow 11.2x2mm 5 slot tyres but in common with many other thin wheeled castings these wheels were phased out during 1972 and replaced by 10x4mm wide 5 slots without the any changes to the casting. All of the lime recolour bodies were fitted with these wide wheels.

All of the thin wheeled and some wide wheeled Ford kennel trucks had black baseplates but a very large proportion of the wide wheeled examples of both colours had charcoal coloured baseplates, the shade being created from whatever colours were leftover available on the day in question.
Plated baseplates are very hard to find but were fitted to some dark green with chrome grille bodies and lime bodies with white grille examples always with wide 10x4mm wheels suggesting one run of these baseplates used when the final dark green bodies were used up.
Two uncommon variations of the dark green wide wheels bodied Ford featured #45 Corsair pale yellow baseplates or #38 Victor yellow baseplates.

Components for the wide wheeled white grille version were shipped to Brazil to allow these to be painted and assembled locally before the tooling went into to storage with the deletion of this #50.
It was revived a year later with the bodyshell, cab glazing and bubble canopy being given a new Rolamatics baseplate incorporating a cast on grille and rejoined the SuperFast range as the new #57 for a 7 year run.
The master model for this toy was also the basis for the subsequent 1982 bigfoot pickup version.