February 2005

Each month I go through the most recent e-mails I've received and pick a few to share with you.  I try to personally respond to every e-mail I receive, but I also post a few here in my Q&A column.

As far as I know, James, there is no officially licensed die-cast of the Sanford & Son pickup truck in ANY scale.  According to sources, there were two different trucks used throughout the life of the TV series.  The first, and most famous, was a faded red '52 Ford Pickup.  The second was a '47 Mercury M-47 Pickup.   The Mercury is on display at Historic Auto Attractions in Roscoe, Illinois (shown above).  If you're interested in doing your own custom version, you can find a 1:24 scale '52 Ford Pickup on eBay (pictured below). 

Thanks for sharing Craig.  Click on the above link to view more of Craig's awesome work. 

Great find Oliver!  As for the animated Batmobiles, they occasionally show up at toy shows or flea markets, but your best bet is eBay.  Unfortunately, the New Adventures of Batman Batmobile doesn't show up that frequently on eBay, but be patient, you'll find it at a reasonable cost. 

Well John, I consider myself an expert on TV and movie die-cast cars, but not the HISTORY of die-cast in general.  For that, I turned to the Hot Wheels forum over at the Hobby Talk Bulletin Board. Here is the response I got to your Hot Wheels question from CTWLSMIKE:

Wow, one could probably write a pretty thick book on this subject. But I'll try to summarize. Original redlines from '67-73 were on a package somewhat wider and slightly taller than the current cards. In the mid 70s the cards were switched to the size they are today, those issued in what's commonly referred to as the "mainline" cars. There have been many derivations of these cards with series such as Hot Ones, Speed Fleets, Workhorses, Real Riders, Speed Demons, and on and on and on.

The cards were switched to those commonly referred to as Blue Cards in the late 80s when they started numbering them with the #1 Old Number 5. There were many numbers skipped, but the numbering system stayed like this with the highest number being #1121 in 1999. After that the mainline blue cards were numbered within a year's issue (i.e. 2000-001 through 2000-2XX for however many cars there were).

Of course, along the way there were other series of cars that had different sized cards, like the Crack-ups and Flip-Outs. And if that weren't enough, they did reissue some original castings on similar cards to original redlines for their 25th anniversary. These cars are cool substitutes to their original counterparts but without the cost. They are identified by a "vintage collection" stamp on the card and base of the car.