#world class

WORLD CLASS by LUXURY ELITE STIMBOARD 𓍢ִ໋☕️✧˚ ༘ ⋆

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I'm glad to report that at last I have the final part of my Matchbox 1989 World Class series 1 set, the 1984 Mercedes-Benz 500 SEC AMG (C126). 

This rather crunchy but still hard to find car is another of the castings that Matchbox reworked to remove their opening doors for this series, and like the others this one seems to have been modified to not need an interior at the same time.  It's also the only metal-based one of series 1 to not have a body-coloured base, and to have black-painted lights rather than white (I hate black painted lights!  Couldn't tolerate that).

It's interesting to compare this to the recent Hot Wheels version of the 1989 Mercedes-Benz 560 SEC AMG, which is from the second series of this C126 model and has the big, dramatic box flares that the older version of the car lacked.  The Hot Wheels also sits lower, giving it a more racy look, and enjoys a slightly better contoured body with more lifelike proportionality, making the Matchbox seem too stubby and square by comparison.  It's a common complaint for older castings - just as with the Viper RT/10, the newer casting of the same car is more proportionate and impressive than the old castings, but the old castings were not dreadful and have detail and flair new ones lack even now, exhibit 1 being the bewitching chrome windows.  Amazing what nearly 40 years can do for casting technology, huh?

I also have this red 1-75 series version with the interior, opening doors and clear windows, which has a lower stance since it doesn't have the large World Class wheels, so it looks a touch better on that front, but more intriguingly, a side view shows a potentially revealing difference. 

The adware-infested Matchbox Wiki notes there are two versions of this, the second release; the car debuted as a 1-75 car in white in 1984, with the same tampo design, but the red one seems to have been reworked to give it squared-off corners on the rear side windows (why, I can't tell; the real car doesn't have these squared-off corners, so maybe it's not strong enough to withstand being stood on?) , which allowed me to narrow that car down to a 1986-production casting.  But although several more opening-door versions were made, all of those with the square-corner windows, the World Class version, released in 1989, still has the 1984-5 sharp-cornered windows. That suggests to me that they had the old tooling lying there gathering dust and decided to recycle it for a sealed-door version.  Later a flashing-lights version with black windows was also produced, also with sharp window corners. It makes me wonder whether the two other World Class cars with sealed doors are reworked from retired versions of dies. 

If you're into diecasts you're familiar with the idea of a manufacturer's product line having a hierarchy of quality, and if you've been into this a while you'll be aware that it's a relatively new idea, and premiums haven't always been around.  I didn't realise until researching for this post that Real Riders go back to 1983, when Larry Wood and Bob Rosas created a series intended for adult collectors with rubber tyres. It was certainly a relative of present-day premiums, though pretty different. But what if I told you that Lesney Matchbox was doing premiums a bit closer to modern ones way back in 1989, in the form of the World Class series?

The current state of the quality hierarchy, at least in the Mattel fiefdom, is like this:

Set against this, Matchbox's World Class cars are somewhat tricky to position. Just the name alone conveys that these have a singular focus as a part of their concept, and as products, these are supposed to be an enhanced, luxury experience. The model selection (yes, back on that again) bears that out. It's interesting to look at this  in comparison to the Hot Wheels Real Riders series of 1983, which simply featured popular vehicles of many kinds, from Hot Rods to snowploughs, with little in the way of a theme. I wouldn't quite call them premium in the same way premiums nowadays are premium, there was less thought put into presentation, and metal bases were the norm on mainline cars and not seen as special.

By contrast, World Class Series 1 from 1989 was a line focused on widely coveted and idolised sports cars.  They featured 3 Porsches, 2 Ferraris, a Corvette, a Mercedes and a Lamborghini - all of which are still nowadays very exotic, iconic and stylish cars (with the possible exception of the Corvette C4 convertible, a beautiful car that I think is unfairly derided).  The AMG above remains elusive, the cheapest I can see being a touch above £24 -I wish the period price sticker was what they still went for! I really struggle to find fault with the line-up of the first series in terms of being attractive models, which is why I've decided, somewhat uncharacteristically for me, to try and get a complete set of all of the first series.  Naturally, being 37 years old most of them - that are affordable - are pretty worn and chipped, and only one of the ones I presently own are pristine.  I honestly wouldn't change that, I really appreciate the idea that someone like me enjoyed these cars, and I have decided to look at the damage as a chance to practice my rust detailing. Maybe these are from the Sultan of Brunei's peerless collection of ruined supercars...

All of them were castings that also appeared in the 1-75 range, Lesney's 75-car version of what we nowadays think of as the main line, but with more real-worldy deco schemes than the 1-75 versions.  In some cases they are modified versions that actually delete the opening doors.  Their bases vary, but in 1989 metal bases were often used for basic cars, with plastic bases a feature that was becoming more frequently used but was not yet the norm, so they are not really distinct in that respect - if it had a metal base in 1-75, it probably does in World Class.  Perhaps more unusual is that the bases were painted, usually in body colours.  Many 1-75 cars had unpainted or grey metal bases.

One of the more distinctive features of this series, at least at first, is the mirrored windows.  The windows are entirely opaque, and cars lack an interior piece in some cases such as the 928 and 944, but some cars still have an interior, either for features like the engine cover vent inserts on both of the Ferraris, or perhaps to properly support window pieces, as on the Lamborghini - the 928 and 944 are both cars with opening door deletes so they presumably also were altered to fit the window pieces without interiors.  Maybe it would have cost Matchbox more to retool the window piece so an interior wasn't needed than to just include an unseen one.   In general the effect is remarkably classy and I'd love to see it make a comeback, perhaps in a semi-transparent form. 

Mirrored windows also featured in modified form, with stylised black shadows, in the short-lived and now hard to find track-focused Lightnings series, as did many of the same castings.  Lightnings could credibly be called the Matchbox forerunner to the HW Speed Machines series, track-focused premiums with special wheels, but that's an idea to focus on in future. In the case of the C4 Corvette, the only convertible in the first series, the interior has painted seats - that wasn't me this time. The frame of the windscreen is also painted from the factory, unlike the 1-75 series 'main line' version of the car.

The wheels and tyres of World Class cars are of course another notable feature.  Visually they rival Hot Wheels Real Riders as we know them today, with several different wheel designs, tyres with treads and even licenced Goodyear Eagle tyre lettering which still somewhat survives even on my more battered examples - none of mine, however battered, have split tyres either, despite being nearly 40 years old. They are not without issues, though, most of them being wider than the standard wheels for which the castings were originally designed and as a result poking out beyond the arches of the cars in a way modern fitment nazis would not tolerate, but they are certainly a major selling point for these cars.  Most of the poke can be ameliorated by careful adjustment of position, and since they are more for display than rolling around play (they also don't roll anything like as smoothly as Hot Wheels Real Riders) the issue is largely moot in my view.

Series 2 in 1990 added 8 more cars, including a broadened focus now including luxury cars (Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, Lincoln Town Car, Cadillac Allante, Ford Thunderbird Turbo Coupe) alongside more contemporary exotic sports cars (Ferrari F40, BMW M1) and classic sports exotica (Corvette Grand Sport, Jaguar XK120) and introducing whitewall tyres rather than Goodyear Eagles for some, uniquely in series 2.  The Corvette Grand Sport is notable for being one of very few in this series to be released with a racing livery, and uniquely three of these have whitewall tyres rather than lettered Goodyear tyres.

The 1991 third series was the first re-release of any of the previous castings, with the Countach and Testarossa from the first series returning in new colours. This series also introduced a Japanese car into the otherwise very occidental line, a Nissan 300ZX Z32, but it remained the only one from anywhere east of Italy until an RX7 FD was added in 1995.  Presumably the luxury car angle was a slower seller, as the series refocused back onto performance cars from this point and largely avoided luxury models.

World Class continued from 1992 onwards as a six-car-per-year series, ultimately across 31 different castings for six series total in as many years until 1995, when it was replaced by a series called Premiere Collection World Class.  This 25,000 piece limited series kept the rubber wheels, and introduced chromed wheels rather than silver-grey along with collector boxes and multiple consecutive six-car-series issues per year, but was also distinct in that it scrapped the mirrored window pieces, giving all cars clear untinted glass and interiors.  Coinciding with the sale of the Matchbox brand to the American firm Tyco in 1992, it also made a considerable pivot to the western edge of the Atlantic, with a higher proportion of models either being American cars or being cars sold in the US market, with European models becoming relative rarities.  Premiere eventually dropped the World Class name entirely.

This Dodge Viper was one of those Premiere World Class cars, from Premiere World Class series 4 in 1996. I was out of my childhood diecast collecting by that point and don't recall these, but I'm not convinced these Premiere series cars were ever very popular in the UK, nor widely available, they are less plentiful nowadays and the selection was always less relevant to European tastes.

Back in the day I had a few of these (944, 308, AMG, C3, Viper , all from pre-Premiere series 1, 3 and 5), they were fairly infrequent finds and pricey relative to the ordinary matchbox cars, but I always liked them and wanted to get more.  But there I unknowingly bumped up against an early iteration of the eldritch power that is active behind all today's diecast manias: FOMO.  Unlike 1-75 series cars at the time, which were restocked through the whole run of each model which might last multiple years, it seems that each World Class series was for one year only - stock hung about a while as they were more expensive than standard 1-75 models, but they were uncommon and scarce, and if you missed them, they were gone.

Arguably, I also encountered another prototypical element of the modern diecast world, in the form of chases.  I looked for years before I found an orange T-top C3 Corvette like the one I had way back, my very favourite Corvette, that defined how I visualised the C3 and made that Corvette generation my favourite.  The World Class version was always scarce, and most that I found online, including the one on the wiki and the ones on sale, were blue; nice enough, but where was my orange one?  Only when I hunted through the gallery on the car's particular page did I find a pic of the orange one described as an 'alternate colour', but clearly more rare than the blue one.  It took me ages to find one, and luckily it's in the best condition of all the Word Class cars I have.  Did I accidentally have a proto-chase as a kid?

I would argue that perhaps Mattel looked back at the World Class series as a starting point for developing the Premiums they began to sell in the 2010s, especially the Car Culture series.   A lot of the ideas that World Class tried first became mainstays features of premium Hot Wheels series:

small, achievably collectable selection with a tight thematic focus;

castings from the main series given higher quality and more real-world-esque deco and detailing;

heightened package presentation, with numbered releases and emphasis on collectability;

limited releases.

Compare this to something like Hot Wheels Boulevard or the 5-car premium and silver series sets today and this 1989 innovation is easy to see as a kind of a harbinger of what was to come. 

Bad enough that Rump is a world class liar.

Here's what all their Republikkkan commentators won't tell you: C. Kirk's killer grew up a White conservative!

Not any of their lies are going to change that fact.

Like all of the other political assaulters & murderers - it's dissatisfied Reps, who finally understand that Rump is fucking them too, who are the violent ones.

You cultists want to know who to blame?

Look to your own Party...

You'll find plenty of American enemies there.

But, watch out!

Rump wants to send soldiers to Red states as well...

Who's the corrupt Deep State now?