Every weekend, I like to share a curated list of retro & nostalgia-themed articles, stories, and posts that I’ve come across in the last week. It gives you a chance to grab a hot cup of coffee, tea, or cocoa, and sit back and pass the time reading about the good old days. So with that in mind, here are six things I wanted to share with you this week.
Weekend Reading 01/02/22
Every weekend, I like to share a curated list of retro & nostalgia-themed articles, stories, and posts that I’ve come across in the last week. It gives you a chance to grab a hot cup of coffee, tea, or cocoa, and sit back and pass the time reading about the good old days. So with that in mind, here are a few things I wanted to share with you this week.
Recommended Reading
- My friend at The Toy Box wraps up his series looking at cartoons of the ’80s by looking at the cartoons of 1989.
- In a little something I wrote for The Retro Network, find our Whatever Happened to the Actual Love Boat.
- The Retroist looks into one of my favorite promotions of all-time in The History of McDonald’s “Mac Tonight”.
- Mark Evanier has a nice little story about the time he met Betty White.
- And as always, here are 5 Awesome Things on eBay This Week, curated by Plaid Stallions.
I’d also like to take a minute and tell you about a new project coming from our friend Tony Grate. Tony founded Retro-Daze several years ago, and is the producer behind the awesome RD’s Retro Detention series on YouTube. He has been working on a new, and very exciting project called Tommy and the Order of Cosmic Champions. At the website, there is a trailer you can watch for the novel coming this fall, and you can also get an early look at the action figure line that is coming to support the launch of the book. I’d like to urge you to stop by and check out all of the exciting things happening around this coming release. I’m also embedding the trailer for the whole project below for you to check out.
MTV’s 1992 New Year’s Eve Special
Spend your New Year’s Eve enjoying this retro night of entertainment via the 1992 MTV New Year’s Eve Special. It’s a 30-year-old time capsule featuring Cindy Crawford, MC Hammer, Bell Biv Devoe, Marky Mark, EMF, Naughty By Nature, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Guns n Roses!
1983 Matchbox Catalog
Matchbox cars have been around since 1953, and every year have offered new varieties of their cars. In this time capsule, you can see all of their new offerings for 1983.
Five of My Favorite Matchbox Toys
Growing up in the ’80s and early ’90s, Hot Wheels, and Matchbox cars were a big part of my playtime. Both lines produced a lot of really fun cars and playsets, and in this edition of Retro Ramblings, I’m sharing a few of my favorite toys from the Matchbox side of things through the years.
Matchbox Super Spin Car Wash
After a long day of play in the dirt and mud of the hills around our house, a good car wash was just what the cars and trucks needed. This car wash was kind of automatic…as in you had to get the car in the wash and then turn a crank and it would go all the way through. It featured real water jets, a foam roller “scrub” brush, and a spin dry feature. The perfect play set for getting all of your cars clean before packing them away for another day.
Watch the commercial for the Matchbox Super Spin Car Wash HERE
Days of Thunder Cars from Hardees
In 1990, Jerry Bruckheimer’s Days of Thunder movie starring Tom Cruise hit theaters to a great reaction, and merchandise based on the movie started to flow. One of the better pieces of merchandise to come along were the replica cars from Hardees based on the stock cars from the movie. The five main cars featured in the movie were in the set, which allowed us younger viewers of the film to recreate all the action at home.
Matchbox Cars Based on the Code Red Television Show
In 1981, CBS debuted the little-remembered Code Red TV Show. It featured Lorne Green as the Father of a firefighting family in Los Angeles and the Chief of one of the many stations in the city. The show only lasted one season, but Matchbox produced a series of cars featuring the iconic vehicles from the show. There were two fire trucks, the Chief’s car, motorcycle, fireboat, helicopter, ambulance, and police car. As a kid whose Dad was a fireman, this set was one of my absolute favorite toys to play with in the ’80s.
Matchbox Connectables
One of the cooler concepts that came along in the 80’s toy landscape were these Connectables cars from Matchbox. Each car was in at least two pieces and connected in the middle. This allowed you to interchange parts of different vehicles to create all new cars and trucks to play with. There were also packs of other car parts available so you could even extend the new cars into total monstrosities if you wanted to! You could make a big rig limo or a drag car with tank treads! With these cars, you could take your imagination and play to a whole other level.
Check out the commercial for Matchbox Connectables here.
Matchbox Trains
Matchbox released a series of train cars in the early ’80s to go along with all of their already awesome car collection. There were various engines in different colors, along with box cars, passenger cars, flat cars, and cabooses. The really fun aspect of this series was you could hook any of the cars to any of the other cars, meaning you could make many different configurations with varying train cars. They weren’t exactly in scale with the rest of the line, as they were each about the size of one of their normal cars. I used to love these things! My brother and I would hook all of ours together and make an imaginary track all through the house. We could get hours and hours of fun out of these trains.
So what about you? Did you have any of these awesome Matchbox toys? Did I leave out your favorite Matchbox toy? Tell me in the comments!