I have now found Nigel Cooper's in his Ambassador report 32, bringing the total in this thread to eleven for now (or maybe ten as I think the one from Vectis is the same as Jason's example with its dotdash wheels and very neatly painted windows and no silver trim).ritchie wrote:Shall we be seeing all the 2 dozens resin Green Hornet Black Beauty in this thread? Let's keep it up....
http://lamleydlm.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03 ... eport.html
Nigel Cooper wrote:This model shown below was called Black Beauty and was driven by a character called Green Hornet. I seem to remember that it was often the case that licensing could take several months or even longer and this has been echoed even today. Design was carried out in great secrecy in case a competitor got wind of it and fast tracked production to steal a march. One way to speed up releases was to assume that licensing approval would be given. This was the case with this model. However, another company had already secured the licence and Matchbox stopped development immediately. There is no interior and no decoration for this model and I believe this was the extent of the manufacturing process. [...] What a pity this model did not proceed, though of course the model could only appear in black and that would have restricted variations.
Interesting that Matchbox worked on the Black Beauty already around 1998. Johnny Lightning's Black Beauty was released with wave 3 of their "Hollywood on Wheels" series quite some time later, in 2001. The first batch of HoW arrived in 1999 - it looks as if JL had made their homework and secured their licences years in advance of the planned releases.
Regarding the limited colour variations it is worth noting that Matchbox seems to have also considered a green Black Beauty - and JL did just the same and produced a Spectraflame green variant as an exclusive for the Target stores.
I doubt that the final product would have looked nearly as nice. As part of the Star Car Collection it wouldn't have wheels with rubber tyres and white lettering, and not that much silver trim. This model seems to have been detailed by an owner at a later time.
And most likely Matchbox wouldn't have resisted to print the name of the show somewhere on the car as they did with the other Star Cars. The main reason I can't stand this series, so I am quite glad that Johnny Lightning released their version instead. But to be fair, the JL HoW also had a higher price point than the Star Cars.
The axles would be easily changed on these resin samples to get rid of the rather ugly wheels. I guess it is also possible that the dotdash wheels have been swapped by a former owner to make the prepro look more like a proper Matchbox and less like a Hot Wheels. - Just noticed that the grey sample is different at the rear.
- BlackBeautyGloss2.JPG (272.67 KiB) Viewed 2098 times
- BlackBeautyMatt2.JPG (276.63 KiB) Viewed 2098 times
- BlackBeautyGreen2.JPG (278.5 KiB) Viewed 2098 times
- BlackBeautyGrey3.JPG (269.82 KiB) Viewed 2098 times
) I have found a few more Vectis auctions, including the one Ritchie showed:
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