Matchbox club

[Tinman]

Sounds like your punching above your weight Joe being married to a celebrity!!!!

Don't you know it!

[Moyboy]

Mate - your a classic !! Joe if there is one thing before I die that I would like to do and that is catch up with you - emails over the years just ain't the same. I could chat for ages and presume you like the music of the Nam era like me - good old US soul music - one of my favorites and have a great tape compilation here playing now. Or we could just go fishing mate as long as you keep the gators away from me as I am wary of them like the big salties over here.

I was reading some of the posts here about the quality of fakes nowadays and good old Makarius came to mind - is he still practising ??
On the subject of MICA I sent an email to Kevin requesting details about running the club but got nothing back and I presumed he needed a large payment for it although now it is just 'The Matchbox Club' not MICA. Dawn was great when it started but now she has gone I presume no one manning the ship so to speak. From what I gather on other posts Graham has a full time job to do so the club is a bit of a sideline currently. Hopefully it will improve but a lot are getting disheartened by it all and miss the emags and the annual which seem to have gone already. There are lots of promises but nothing seems to eventuate.

For me I seem to get all the info and more from my Moyboyz site and Nicks one here but the problem is that there is no tangible record - if the site crashes then all goes ( look at Lefora) - you just cannot beat a good mag with info in. On moyboyz we are compiling a reference listing to which others post photos for each variation and I save all on my files to hopefully confirm any variants not in the YY book (and there are a few). Wether this can be compiled to a book later or even as a CD would be most helpfull

[Tinman]

Mate - your a classic !!

That's what everyone says about those rusted out old cars sitting behind someone's barn. You know, the ones that are far too gone to restore (or be worth anything). That's me all right ... abandoned, rusted out and not worth much LOL!

I was reading some of the posts here about the quality of fakes nowadays and good old Makarius came to mind - is he still practising ??

His main gig was as an artist. He gave up the faking and fraudster business when his art work became popular. He was doing many one man shows and had become a popular artist. He had also contracted the HIV virus and it had gone to full blown AIDS before he was diagnosed. His facebook page used to be quite active and was always touting his latest show. A few years ago, the page became inactive and has since been removed. I suspect his health has turned for the worse.

He was always proud of his handiwork (the fakes) and for reasons unknown to me, he continued to email me and confess his sins (sometimes in great detail). This made it easy to track his latest eBay user names and to contact many of his victims. That latter point put me in contact with the buyer of that infamous copper color Triumph (which he sold to a dealer and then the dealer sold it off and made up an elaborate back story to cover up it being a fake).

The buyer of that Triumph opened up and we went through his collection. Nearly every rare decal model, rare wheel color model and all of his very rare models turned out to be fakes. He had bought his high priced models from a who's who of fakers and fraudsters. That collector had his collection gutted with the discovery that nearly all of his prized models were fake and he abandoned the hobby.

When the debate was going on about the Triumph and while everyone was waiting for the paint test results, Makirus contacted me and bragged that he had indeed sold the model in question to the now disgraced dealer. I went after the dealer very hard in my posts and comments. The dealer actually had to take out a second mortgage on his home to repay the money he charged for that fake. While I have no idea if he still deals in antiques, he did get out of the vintage matchbox business.

That Triumph mess took down two people and caused one collector to leave the hobby. The collector's total financial loss was a significant figure (going far beyond just the Triumph). One thing is certain, fraud and fakes of collectible items rakes in millions each year.

When Makirus' art sales took off, he too got out of the faker/fraudster business He contacted many dealers and dumped his remaining handiwork on them. Goodness knows how many more were passed on as genuine/authentic. IMHO, there are others out there who were/are far worse. These are the one's who once had a decent reputation in the hobby (along with great knowledge about the models and hobby). They have stolen far more money from collectors than Makirus and a couple of them are still out there and getting away with it.

The 6b with gray plastic wheels in another thread has all the earmarks of one of those once respected people who has cheated so many collectors over the years. It's not going to stop because a handful of people are identified on this or that forum. Fakes and fraudsters have been around in this hobby since the first model sold for more than the original purchase price. The names will change with the seasons and the number of fakers and fraudsters only seems to grow with the advent of global instant communications and sales.

Every collector now has to be a "detective" and should be just as knowledgeable in spotting fakes as they are in general hobby knowledge. Especially those who now have all the common models and are moving up to the hard to find and rare models. Every one of those collectors need to be fake spotting experts today.

I'm also very disturbed to see what Harvey has been up to in recent times. Some of the things he's done are simply outrageous! It bothers me that people don't know what an authentic decal or label looks like and the posts here with fake decals/labels are all too frequent. It's upsetting to see people buying rare wheel models and they don't have a clue what genuine axle ends look like (and they are different through the years). Some don't even know what the casting differences are and pay good money for bad items.

So many of the fakes on the market have the tell tale signs right there for everyone to see and yet many simply do not see it. Others fail to request additional and detailed photos (and/or information) and send off their money. It's upsetting to see someone (who should know better) show a Land Rover with darker than normal luggage and for them to not know what reproduction plastic parts look like. So many of these things are a no brainier and yet honest collectors are the very ones who fuel the growing number of fakers and fraudsters.

OK, sorry, I kind of went off on a rant there and completely changed the subject (again).

[matchboxkiwi]

I can't see why anyone should save MICA. What's the point. Surely it's better to just guide any one who is interested to this site. I would have thought one or two matchbox sites is good. To many and everything just becomes fragmented.

Cheers Steve

[GHOSTHUNTER]

I can't see why anyone should save MICA. What's the point. Surely it's better to just guide any one who is interested to this site. I would have thought one or two matchbox sites is good. To many and everything just becomes fragmented.

Cheers Steve

This is a forum and not a 'Wiki' style site about Matchbox and collectors browsing the 'Net' tend not to want to get involved in a forum but would rather go and look at a 'Wiki' type site.

If it were feasible to have MICA on-board, I would encase it into Nick's proper website, the one we use to check on model details in his guides etc, with a quick link to it.

So many collectors know the name 'MICA' and will still put that into search engines looking for information about Matchbox toys and models etc, so I would re-instate the name because that is what people are used to and what appeared on printed newsletters.

GHOSTHUNTER.

[nickjones]

I was a member of MICA in the late 80's, As a 1-75 regular wheel collector there was very little to interest me apart from the quarterly article on 1-75s in the club magazine.
It seemed to me that the club was run for the benefit of the club organisers in selling vastly overpriced code 2 Yesteryears and nothing more. Sorry if I offended anyone but these were my feelings at the time.
After 2 years I let my membership lapse.

[GHOSTHUNTER]

I was also a member of MICA and while the newsletter type magazine was good, it clearly could have been better and I got the feeling they were snowed under with articles but did not know what to put in the magazine first. It must have been a case of trying to please all of the collectors all of the time and this is near impossible to achieve.

Again, the club was relying on interaction from it's members with sending them articles and stories with pictures etc, but as we all know, it is not that easy to sit down at a typewriter or early computer and do an article, especially if your not used to it and I well remember them printing regular requests for articles to be sent in.

As regards their own promotional models, yes, they were constantly being shown and promoted at prices I had no interest in, I did not want the models so the price did not interest me either, weather they were cheap or expensive.

Ultimately the club should have been organised to cater for the specific areas of Matchbox like the 'Regular Wheels, 'Yesteryears', early toys and 'Superfast' etc, etc. so collectors only interested in say the 'Regular Wheels' models had club material just on those with it's own dedicated newsletter, that way he would not be reading articles about the latest Disney themed 'Glow in the dark' Calendars!!

Ghosty.

[kerbside]

I like Nick felt that the Mica Club was very much Yester-Year orientated not a patch on Ray Bush when he ran "Matchbox UK" and covered the 1-75 models.

I bought their Mica Annuals but again there was very little 1-75 coverage in any of them, just more about the YY Code 2 models.

I do collect the YY models up to about 1994, only gave in to collecting then as the were doing so many sets, such as Brewery, News Papers, Fire Engines just to name a few, that's when I moved on to the Regular Wheel 1-75 models, and still looking for the variations that I am missing

George T.

[Moyboy]

MICA always promoted YYs as that was the main focus of a high proportion of the membership at the time. When the over priced and basically repainted code 2 models came out originally they were snapped up as very little on the YY front was coming out. Then the Collectible fiasco started, driven by the fact that here in Oz the mail order process suddenly took off due to the fact most could not get to a hobby shop etc. Our great US cousins at Mattel thought everybody liked lovely sets of 6 so they released these every year at an alarming rate and totally killed it leading to shorter and shorter runs as most couldn't keep up with the pace - instead of 6 new models a year we now had 6 sets of 6 at a far higher price so collectors slowly dropped off - some of the later editions are hard to find now and still command a high price. The new issue models were a total joke - cheap plastic rubbish all US themed so not attractive to the rest of the world. MICA's code 2 offerings also dropped with fewer collectors and totals for these models were only in the 40's plus the ones for the boys of 1 of 3 or 4 which no one else could get killed it off.

MICA was always asking for contributions to the mags but seems very little was ever sent and most of the late mag articles was more about the processes at Lesney from different departments. Did any 1-75 collectors ever send articles in ? - I have no idea apart from the Ambassadors reports on the new crap being issued (what happened to the ambassador report - not seen one for ages). Stewart had left so obviously the membership drop off was not enough to keep 2 in full time work and Kevin plodded on and at the conventions here we used to have around 400 which at the last one held had dropped to around 100+ so shows the decline. I think it was a combination of several things - bad marketing, the drive to kill off the Matchbox name ( I believe Mattel hate this as even now ask the average Joe what this model is and they will always say 'a Matchbox car' be a Hotwheels or any other brand - must get right up their noses.)

Yys are declining mainly due to appeal to the older collector and even the regular wheels only appeal to a lot who remember them - kids nowadays only want toys they grew up with like my boy with GI Joe and Transformers - there are still a lot of collectors out there, just with a different focus nowadays so a decline in the hobby is ineviatable.

[Taniwha]

I'm a Superfast baby. Never had RW models, but love 'em now. I'm not alone in my generation, there might just be fewer of us in the long term.

YY models have never held any appeal for me - even when I was young, I think it was only Grandfather-types that seemed interested in them even back in the 70's!

Cheers,
Gavin